Breakthrough Writer: In Defense of Food Lessons

Lesson #1 for In Defense of Food: The Scourge of the Western Diet Is Nutritionism and Essay Options

One. Reading Questions:

1. Contrary to the complicated edicts of nutritionism, what simple edict of eating should we follow? 1: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This has become a famous mantra. The problem is what constitutes “food.” Not so simple in this age of nutritionism. This evil force wants to make food complicated and then "help" us.

2. Why should you avoid products that make health claims? 2. For 3 reasons: The claims are most likely false. The cost of any such food product is inflated. The product is more of a product than it is food.

3. On page 3, Pollan says there was an eating cultural shift that was to our detriment. What was this shift? Two big shifts: Mother was no longer the cook. She lost her authority to the scientists who have intruded upon our eating with nutritionism. The second shift, related to nutritionism, is the Big Lie of nutrition, which is that a low-fat diet is essential to a healthy heart and overall good health. Americans actually gained weight while incorporating this lie because in the absence of fat, they bulked up on sugar, processed starch, and carbohydrates, which convert into fat and triglycerides, which cause obesity and heart disease. Also see page 7. The low-fat trend was unhealthy.

4. What is driving such relentless change in our eating? See page 4. The 32-billion-dollar food marketing business constantly must mix things up, have new things, just like Apple has to launch a new iPhone or iMac every year or so. You must peddle new stuff, make the old stuff seem obsolete, so you create the need for new food science, most of which is bogus. These processed foods based on phony food science have a higher profit margin than real food like a potato or a banana.

5. How flawed has science been in influencing our diet? See pages 4-5. New studies keep coming out that contradict the previous studies. Fiber is better, but then it’s not. Low-fat is better, but then it’s not. All of these contradictions, confusions, and anxieties are linked to Nutritionism.

6. What is the Dark Age of Nutritionism? It’s a sick cocktail of the greedy food industry, fake nutrition science, and lousy, mainstream journalism. Let’s call this cocktail the Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity. Nutrients won out over foods. See page 26.

7. What is Pollan’s central aim? 7 To reclaim our health and happiness as eaters. And to do this we must extirpate ourselves from Nutritionism, which is both unwittingly and deliberately confusing and focus on real food again.

8. Pollan writes that a lot of food we eat is not food at all. Explain. We eat Pringles instead of potatoes. We eat banana chips instead of bananas. We eat processed soybean oil instead of butter.

9. How have we become a culture that “eats” to a culture that “feeds”? 7. We’ve lost the joy of eating real food. In real food’s place, we eat processed food that is measured by some phony barometer of nutritional value, which is soon to be contradicted by the nutritionists. We eat and celebrate real food. We feed on nutritional components. Some people’s diet is a series of nutritional components, but as we shall see these isolated components do not interact with the body for optimum health.

10. How is eating “scientifically” a sham that degrades the human spirit and body? 8 We’ve become a nation of orthorexics, obsessed with the myth of food purity and extra strength nutrition through supplements and processed foods. Such obsessions, always worrying about nutrition, the author speculates (and I agree) retard our happiness and make us slaves to the Industrial Food Complex. One worry we should have is the Western Diet, full of cheap processed carbs and sugars, which kills.

11. Contrast the French paradox with the American paradox. 9. The French enjoy moderate portions of fat-rich food and don’t get fat. They don’t obsess over what they eat. In contrast, Americans obsess over their nutrition and binge and purge and eat in all sorts of extreme ways, including crash diets, and they are fatter and unhappier than the French.

Part Two. The Characteristics of Nutritionism

1. We switch from eating food to eating nutrients. This kills the joy of eating and we become feeders, not eaters.

2. Nutritionism promoted the lipid hypothesis in 1977 and it made us follow the wrong path. The theory is that a diet high in saturated animal fat leads to heart disease. It became the unquestioned dogma (belief system) embraced by the American Heart Association. The theory is only partly right. This high animal-fat diet is dangerous when it’s part of the Western processed diet lacking in vegetables. But as Weston Price discovered, cultures who eat animals are very healthy, but their diet is Paleo or hunter oriented.

3. Nutritionism is not a science. It is an ideology that joylessly places nutrients ahead of food. It is, Pollan argues, a flawed and dangerous ideology.

4. Nutritionism offers a way of life through unexamined assumptions. (Reminds me of Mother Culture in the novel Ishmael). The ideology is to break food down into is parts or nutrients. The “priesthood” who can interpret these nutrients are the scientists and nutritionists. Nutritionism fanatically reduces eating to “promoting health” to the exclusion of pleasure and culture. In the context of the French paradox, nutritionism isn’t even good for you.

5. The Good/Bad Theory of Nutritionism: For every good nutrient is a bad one. As a result macronutrients are always at war. Protein vs. carbs, for example. Or refined carbs vs. fiber. Another huge flaw: Nutritionists focus too much on nutrients while forgetting how to judge the foods themselves. Baby formula and margarine are putrid examples of the failure of nutritionism.

6. Nutritionism is the official ideology of the Food and Drug Administration and the American Heart Association. Pathetic.

7. Nutritionism is beholden to the various food industries. For example, politicians cannot focus on telling people to eat less meat, just less nutrients. Therefore, nutritionism if focused on nutrients, not food. See page 24.

8. Nutritionism embraced chemicals, not food. So the language of Nutritionism is chemical-based: polyunsaturated, beta-carotene, antioxidants, probiotics, etc. This emphasized processed food and food companies could “fortify” these chemicals into the processed food and charge us more money and make higher profits even though these processed foods make us LESS healthy because our bodies don’t interact with fortified processed foods and isolated chemicals. We interact healthily with whole food, real foods.

9. Nutritionists, blinded by their ideology, make the woeful and egregious mistake of reducing food into nutrients rather than looking at foods as a whole entity.

10. The joyless puritanical Nutritionists ignore and disdain the role of pleasure in eating. We digest and assimilate food better when we ENJOY it. Hello.

11. One salient example of the arrogance and failure of Nutritionism: their production of “baby formula,” which is an inferior substitute for breast milk. See page 32.

12. One of the most enduring, inferior products of Nutritionism: Margarine.

13. Why did Americans grow fatter during the Era of Fake Low-Fat or Fake Nonfat Products? We overate our “whole-grain” Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms and other crap. 35-40.

14. What was the Coming Out Party for nutritionists? Oat bran, 1988. See 37. Now new studies show that all those oat bran claims were exaggerated and outright false.

15. How were animals affected by nutritionism? See 37: leaner, often unhealthier versions.

16. How did the Atkins diet affect carb foods in terms of processing? 38

17. Why have pomegranates, avocadoes, and bananas, to name a few foods, been spared processing and tinkering by the nutritionists? 38, 39. You can’t stick a health claim on a piece of fruit like you can a tub of margarine or a box of cereal.

Part Three. Some Real Food You Should Include in Your Diet, Sometimes Called “Super Foods” (not a complete list):

1. Salmon

2. Blueberries

3. Almonds

4. Walnuts

5. Lentils

6. Beans

7. Tomatoes

8. Oranges

9. Oats (steel cut)

10. Broccoli

11. Spinach

12. Dark greens

13. Pomegranate

14. Hot peppers

15. Yams

Essay 1 for 190 points

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan: Critiquing the Pathologies of Nutritionism

In a 1,000 word essay, develop a thesis that critiques nutritionism, exposing its fallacies and mythologies and revealing the way nutritionism deludes and cripples the average consumer. Use no fewer than 2 sources.

Thesis is analytical or argumentative in emphasis and often has mapping components, the causes, effects, distinguishing characteristics (in analysis) or reasons (in argumentation) that map out your essay's body paragraphs.

Example of argumentative thesis showing reasons: You should not eat fructose or high-fructose corn syrup because it can not be metabolized in the liver, it spikes your insulin, it creates metabolic syndrome, it stimulates obesity, and it causes diabetes.

Example of an analytical thesis showing causes: The dramatic rise in obesity since the 1970s can be attributed to cheap, ubiquitous corn syrup, low-fat diets which encourage high sugar consumption, the replacement of real food with processed food, and sedentary lifestyles.

Example of an analytical thesis showing causes: Americans eat less real food and more processed food because of learned helplessness which makes us get "punk fed" by the convenience food industry, addiction to high content of sugar, fat, and salt, ignorance of the difference between real and processed food, and brainwashing to the tenets of Nutritionism.

Example of analytical thesis showing effects: The typical American high-sugar, high-fructose diet results in metabolic syndrome, diabetes, increased appetite, and erratic energy levels.

Example of analytical thesis showing distinguishing characteristics: The Chronic Fast Food Eater is someone who is addicted to fat, salt, and sugar; someone who is over-reliant on convenience; someone who suffers from learned helplessness and therefore cannot make his own healthy meals; and someone who is egregiously ignorant of the crucial differences between real food and processed food byproducts.

Thesis Structure Examples for Essay 1

Nutritionism is a _________comprised of ___________, _________,____________, and _____________.

Nutritionism is a

fraud

an industrial sham

contrived web of lies

insidious marketing invention

dishonest business model

evil lie

pretentious business fraud

Putting all the parts together into a thesis showing distinguishing characteristics:

Nutritionism is a pretentious business fraud comprised of the promotion of nutrients and chemicals over whole foods; the promotion of the false gospel of the low-fat diet; the promotion itself as a science when in reality it is a pseudo-science and an ideology based on false assumptions; the promotion of elevating itself with specialized, scientific-sounding language that only the Nutritionist Priesthood can understand; and the promotion of itself as a champion of the people when in reality Nutritionists champion the food industry's interests.

Introducing Your Essay: Get Your Reader's Attention

You could profile someone you know (yourself?) who is a slave to Nutritionism or fast food or food byproducts and describe the person's problems that result from their ignorance.

You could show the influence Michael Pollan's idea of Nutritionism has had on our culture.

You could show the origins of the term Nutritionism.

You could begin by showing how Pollan uses examples of Nutritionism during his lectures.

You could begin with a general discussion of learned helplessness and its connection to being unable to change and transition to a specific discussion about how people are helpless to the cruel god of Nutritionism.

You could begin, as this article does, by showing the conflict between Nutritionism and common sense.

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Not All Sugar Is Alike: Why Fructose Is Poison

Robert Lustig's lecture is very convincing about the uniquely pernicious properties of fructose. Here is a thumbnail of his argument in article form. Lustig's ideas are also represented in Greg Critser's Fat Land.

The Truth About Sugar: "The Bitter Truth"

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Essay Options for Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food

One. Based on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food

In your first 1.5 pages, define “Nutritionism” and evaluate its dangers and fallacies. Then in another 1.5 pages, define and evaluate the dangers and fallacies of the Western Diet. In another page, define the idea of “food literacy.” Then in two pages, critique your eating habits in the context of Michael Pollan’s “manifesto” and what it means to be “food literate.” In your final page, describe a meal you make for yourself that you can defend based on the criteria prescribed in Pollan’s “Eater’s Manifesto.”

You will need a Works Cited page that cites Pollan, my blog, any recipes you may have to consult for your “defended meal,” and any other source material. Remember: Give your essay a catchy, salient, memorable title.

Two. Open-Ended Option for In Defense of Food:

Analyze the dangers of "Nutritionism" in the context of Pollan's book. Same research methods apply.

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In Defense of Food Lesson #4: Western Diet and Freeing Ourselves from It

Top 20 Grammar Errors to Review

Top 10 Grammar Errors to Review

From the above lists, I can agree mostly with

comma splices

Nutritionism focuses on isolated nutrients rather than food, however isolated nutrients are not assimilated into the human body.

run-ons

Nutritionism is a mental disease it has spread with the help of a lazy media, a complicit US government, and an elite scientific community.

fragments

Michael Pollan wrote In Defense of Food partly in order to save food from the jaws of Nutritionism. And to show the connection between joyful eating and improved health.

pronoun agreement

If a person follows the rules of Nutritionism, they will eventually suffer a litany of health problems.

pronoun shifts

When one considers the myriad ways Nutritionism has had deleterious effects on the public's health, you begin to get angry and wonder why we've put up with this Giant Lie for so long.

Part One. Reviewing the 4 Major Fallacies of Nutritionism:

1. Food is a delivery system for nutrients. Eating vegetables makes us healthier, but isolating their nutrients does not because we don’t absorb the isolated nutrients, such as beta-carotene. A lot of anti-oxidants, taken in supplement form, cause MORE cancer. We still don’t understand human digestion: How it breaks down complex chemicals into simpler nutrients. There’s a fundamental mystery and nutritionists who claim to understand it are deluded or lying or both. Pollan wants to continue science, but the reductive science thus far is young and unreliable and we cannot rest any dogmas or “certainties” on it.

2. If you can’t see or taste or smell a nutrient, then you need experts to tell you what to eat. We need scientists to tell us how to eat. Nutrition is an invisible deity so the “priesthood,” the scientists tell us how to eat. These “priests” were wrong about the low-fat diet. This has been the prevailing ideology since World War II. Since then, we’ve become fatter. Fat can’t be demonized. Seventy percent of our brain cells are fat. There are different kinds of fat. But in our low-fat craze, we gorged on low-fat, high-sugar, high-carbohydrates foods and got fat. The average American is 12 pounds heavier than the average American from 1980. Pollan blames the low-fat campaign. Pollan wants an apology from the health community. Another bad fat: The way we make vegetable oil for margarine creates trans fats, which are lethal. Pollan says over 100,000 heart-disease-related deaths are related to trans fat. Butter is healthier for you than margarine. Nutritionism undermines our instincts. Pollan’s mother instinctively knew this margarine stick was unhealthy long before the data came out to show this to be the case.

3. Nutrition divides the world into good and evil. There is a satanic nutrient we’re trying to drive away from the food supply. Today it’s the trans fat. Ten years ago it was the saturated fat. One hundred years ago, the evil nutrient was protein. Kellogg created breakfast cereal in place of protein. So there was a marketing angle. The good nutrient today is the Omega 3 fatty acid. Protein is coming back. Carbohydrates are coming out. Fiber has been “blessed” for the last 30 years.

4. The weirdest thing about American dietary habits is that the whole point of eating is health, not pleasure or community or culture. This is a uniquely American idea. Other cultures eat for family, pleasure, community, socializing, ritual. Every food culture eats to express identity. But America reduces eating to “health” and “nutrition.” We have a single-minded obsession with health. We reduce the rich experience of eating to something so obsessive makes us UNHEALTHIER. This, according to Pollan, is the “American Paradox.” We are Orthorexics. We have an unhealthy obsession with eating. Pollan says he’d accept this nutritionism if it worked, but all the evidence shows that it does not. Nutritionism has had power over us since the 1970s. But the “science” is bad. It doesn’t work.

Part Two. Culture Teaches How to Eat, Not Nutritionism

1. If we look at hunter-gatherer cultures, they give us food wisdom. We stay away from the “death cap,” toadstools, which are different from mushrooms. This is culture giving foods a name. Language teaches us.

2. Cultures instinctively knew to combine rice and beans or corn and beans to make protein complete for proper assimilation.

3. Tradition in food is the wisdom of the tribe.

4. Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

5. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Pringles. Gogurt portable yogurt tubes. It has 20 chemicals listed as ingredients on the tube. Honey Nut cereal bar glazed over with synthetic milk so you don’t have to pour milk over it.

6. Shop the parameter of the grocery store where the food has been least tampered with. Fresh produce, meat and dairy products. All the processed stuff is in the middle. Real food rots eventually so it’s near the walls and the loading docks and the cold boxes. But the processed stuff in the middle lasts forever. A Twinkie stays cuddly soft for 500 years. Mold won’t even attack a Twinkie. Mold knows what’s good for it.

7. Don’t eat foods with more than 5 ingredients.

8. High-fructose corn syrup is a marker of a highly processed food.

9. Shop at the farmer’s market and get real food.

10. It’s just not the content of our diet, but the manner or form of our eating. You eat less by eating, not feeding. You eat less when you have a life. Many cultures, like the French, encourage small portions. There’s a French taboo on snacking and eating in the car. In Okinawa they say hara hachi bu: eat until you’re 80% full.

11. Americans are the fastest eaters on the planet and it takes 20 minutes for the brain cells in the gut to tell the brain you’re full.

12. Eating socially slows us down but if we’re lonely solitary Americans we “feed” like animals.

13. Don’t buy food at the gas station. Gas stations are processed corn stations, ethanol for your car and corn products inside the store.

14. Take control from the corporations. Don’t let The Man prepare your food. He does a lousy job.

15. We need to rediscover cooking. You can’t microwave farmer’s market food. Pollan says you don’t have to cook like a TV chef. It pays to learn how to cook dishes that you really like. Most Americans spend at least 2 hours a day on the Internet but we should “give back” some of this time to cooking. Meals are too important for “outsourcing.”

Part Three. The Top Ten Things I Learned from Studying the Vegetarian Debate and the Western Diet

I’ve read a lot of books about the food industry and nutrition, partly for personal reasons and partly for teaching about the subject in my critical thinking class. I’ve read Michael Pollan, Nina Planck, Gary Taubes, Lierre Keith, Matthew Scully, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Peter Singer, and others. Here are the top ten things I learned:

1. Tribal societies that could be described as hunter-gatherer and ate meat were healthier and had more lean muscle mass that herbivorous tribal societies who ate a largely vegetarian diet. They were fatter and more disease-prone.

2. While there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet, most people don’t respond well to a diet that consists largely of refined carbs.

3. While many vegetarians and vegans promote their diet as optimum health, for some their diet is a disaster, resulting in overeating, depression, and malnutrition. There are exceptions of course. Some vegetarians and vegans do flourish on their diet, but they appear to be the exception. Also the majority of vegetarians, 75%, quit within 9 years.

4. The practices of factory farming, treating livestock like commodities, is a moral abomination that results in unspeakable cruelty.

5. The moral abomination of factory farming is in conflict human nutritional needs: The research from Weston A. Price, Gary Taubes, Michael Pollan, Nina Planck, Lierre Keith, and others shows a “Caveman Diet,” based on meats, vegetables, and occasional fruits and starches, promotes optimum health. Again, some people can thrive on vegan diets, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule.

6. Most of us cannot metabolize refined carbs in a healthy way. These carbs spike our insulin and act like a drug, making us more and more hungry, resulting in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. As I said to my brother-in-law last night as the Christmas dinner as he scooped his mound of scalloped potatoes with an oversized honey roll: “Right now, your brain is marinating in insulin and insulin is a drug.” He looked at me with a crazed smile, laughed in agreement, and continued to shovel his honey roll into his mound of starch.

7. A vegetarian diet can make me fat. I found myself loading up on peanut butter and bagel sandwiches, rice and beans, hummus and pita bread, pasta, cheese pizza and other fattening foods.

8. A modified vegetarian diet, absent the foods mentioned above, could result in weight loss if I eliminated refined carbs and added sardines, tuna, eggs, and yogurt to my vegetarian meals. But vegetarian or not, I cannot eat pie, bagels, pasta, bread, and pizza and expect to get my weight down. This is rather obvious and should have not required some dramatic 2009 pronouncement to face this fact. But in 2009 I learned the ninth important thing about me and food:

9. I’m a slow learner and often times don’t want to face the obvious as I prefer to be conveniently ignorant.

10. Unlatching your greedy mouth Mamma Carb, brought to you by the Food Industry, is going to be difficult for social reasons (you’re ostracized when you don’t eat what your tribe eats), economic reasons (it’s expensive to eat local, sustainable, organic, healthy foods), and emotional reasons (you feel helpless and crippled in your dependence on Mamma Carb).

Thesis Review for Your Essay (using parallel construction)

Nutritionism is a societal plague evidenced by __________________, _______________, __________________, and _______________.

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Michael Pollan Lectures on In Defense of Food

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In Defense of Food Lesson #3: Good Calories, Bad Calories and How the Western Diet Destroys Us

Introduction:

Why is it difficult to transition from being a mindless eater (Americanus Gluttonous) to a healthy eater?

1. Because crazy eating has over time become "normal." Of course crazy eating is not normal. It is egregious and when we acclimate to the egregious, we become crazy like the 1,200 pound man on Oprah.

Crazy eating includes dumping buckets of sugar and salt on all food; eating super-sized portions of food more appropriate for a hog or an elephant than human consumption; not chewing, rather inhaling food in the car, while watching TV, while surfing the Internet, etc.

2. Rejecting the "crazy eating" described above will result in ostracism from your peers.

3. Lack of time and fatigue compel you to rely on "fast food" to sate your appetites.

4. It's cheaper to eat a lot of processed food made with corn syrup and fructose. Most processed foods are made with corn in some form or other.

5. Restaurants cater more to Americanus Gluttonous than they do to healthy eaters with few exceptions in Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Seattle, San Francisco, and other tres chic locales.

6. You have negative associations with "health eating," which you associate with eating twigs, bark, rice cakes, pabulum, and other bland food matter so depressing that to contemplate "healthy foods" saps the life out of you.

7. You can't cook and are therefore at the mercy of restaurants or someone who cooks calorie-dense (as opposed to nutrient-dense) foods.

8. You don't know the difference between calorie-dense and nutrient-dense foods. When you don't the difference, you invariably eat the former, not the latter.

9. You don't know how to cook or where to begin to learn about nutrition, not because you cannot, but because you are mired in the abyss and paralysis of learned helplessness.

10. You have no intellectual curiosity in trying new things so you cling desperately to the ways of Americanus Gluttonous. Having no curiosity is a sign of low intelligence, a danger factor for both obesity and divorce.

Part One. Not All Calories Are Alike

1. Jean Mayer said, “Attributing obesity to ‘overeating’ is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’” In other words, to examine the causes of obesity, we have to look at more than sheer volume; we have to look at WHAT KIND OF FOODS we eat since some foods are trigger foods, inflaming our appetites, and some foods spike our pancreas and blood sugar levels more than other foods, causing a harmful chain reaction.

2. A starchy (carbohydrates, especially refined ones) diet increases hunger; it puts sugars in the liver and weight-gain. Calories from starches are metabolized differently than calories from fatty animal protein, which create satiety, a sense of fullness.

3. According to Taubes, the 5 foods to avoid are bread or anything else made with flour, cereals, potatoes, foods containing sugar and all sweets. Others talk about the FIVE EVIL WHITE FOODS: SUGAR, FLOUR, POTATOES, RICE, PASTA

4. According to Taubes, the 5 foods you can eat are meats, fish, and birds; all green vegetables; eggs, cheese, and fruit with the exception of bananas and grapes. Of course, Taubes’ findings contradict Nutritionism, which says limit animal fats. Taubes’ finding contradict the Food Guide Pyramid, which puts fats and oils in the “be eaten sparingly” category. Taubes struggled with his own weight until he followed these outlined dietary principles.

5. Some people metabolize carbs better than others. Most of us become hungrier and fatter from a diet that has carbs, especially refined carbs, in it. These carbs are often called “trigger foods.” Pasta, bagels, muffins, garlic bread, etc., can make us hungrier and hungrier, putting us in a feeding frenzy.

6. About six scientists in the 1950s fell in love with the Lipid (Fat) Hypothesis and selectively used their research to support their hypothesis. Other scientists with dubious motivations, followed the hypothesis and a critical mass developed. Michael Pollan makes the same point.

7. The nutritional and medical community hated Dr. Atkins, who rejected the Fat Hypothesis and recommended a low-carb diet. They were threatened by his study, which contradicted their food pyramid.

8. Carbs create an enzyme reaction that spikes insulin and insulin is what puts fat in your tissue. Carbohydrates, not fat, put fat in your tissue.

9. Insulin, which is a hormone, is the primary regulator of fat in the human body and carbs trigger insulin.

10. Nutritionism focused only on cholesterol as a danger and in essence simplified science for mass consumption of information. But lipids, including free fatty acids and triglycerides, are also dangerous and contribute to heart disease. Both cholesterol and triglycerides circulate in particles called lipoproteins. Excessive fat in the blood caused by carbohydrates.

Part Two. Carb Glut in the Western Diet (from Part II of In Defense of Food)

1. Metabolic syndrome from the Western diet is evident in people from the bush who move to the city. They move back to the bush and their health problems go away. Metabolic syndrome includes elevated levels of triglycerides, slowed-down metabolism, diabetes 2, and other risk factors for heart disease.

2. The men ate fish, other meats, yams, figs, and honey and their Metabolic syndrome went away. I'm curious about the yams, figs, and honey since these are "no-no's" according to Taubes.

3. Since two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, Pollan contends, we might want to look at ways we can identity and reject the Western diet.

4. Study after study shows that populations that don’t eat the Western diet are free of disease, including cancer and heart disease.

5. Weston A. Price found that populations free of the Western diet suffered no tooth decay, among other diseases. There was no single ideal diet. Simply put all the diets WERE NOT Western. They ate no processed foods.

6. One big difference in native populations: Meat eaters healthier than agriculturists, those who ate grain. See page 98. This has a huge anti-vegetarian implications.

7. Grass-fed cows are far more nutritious than corn-fed. Even the butter of grass-fed cow is more nutritious.

8. Pollan makes the point that health is our relationship with nature, not our ingestion of specific nutrients prescribed by nutritionists or the minions of nutritionism. See page 102-103.

9. One of the biggest shifts from the Paleo to the Western diet: Processed foods, especially carbs made from corn and flour: See page 106.

10. Refined carbs lost their original nutrients, but in the 1930s scientists learned how to fortify worthless carbs with vitamins. These fortified vitamins are worthless because they don't get assimilated into the body. See page 109.

11. Another huge shift: The percentage of calories that come from sugars. Pollan links this increased sugar consumption with type 2 diabetes.

12. Agriculture creates monoculture (one strain of broccoli, for example), which reduces diversity of nutrients. See page 116.

13. 75% of the vegetable oils in our diet come from soy.

14. Few foods constitute the calories we eat: 554 calories come from corn; 257 from soy; 768 from wheat; 91 from rice. Not a lot of room in our gut for other foods. These 4 crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. Our ancestors in contrast ate over 3,000 edible species. See page 117. This lack of food diversity seriously compromises the nutrition of any omnivore and that includes humans.

Part Three. Some Rules to Save Ourselves from the Western Diet

Excerpt from Michael Pollan's Book Food Rules in Huffington Post

Using Parallel Structure for Mapping Components of Your Thesis Statement

Faulty and Corrected Parallelism Link

Parallelism in Different Parts of Speech

The theater eaters were hoggish, avaricious, relentless, and made lots of disgusting smacking sounds.

A diet that consists of locally grown vegetables, organic animal proteins, organic dairy, and fish that swim wildly in the open seas promotes strong health.

The diners at HomeTown Buffet smacked their lips and were sweating.

The HomeTown Buffet diners were pleased about the unlimited salad bar and that everyone got five extra slices of chocolate cake.

Corrected: The HomeTown Buffet diners were pleased that they had access to the unlimited salad bar and that they could have five extra slices of chocolate cake.

When it comes to losing weight, it's better to change one's lifestyle than dieting in a manic and compulsive panic.

Corrected: When it comes to losing weight, it's better to change one's lifestyle than to rely on manic, compulsive crash dieting.

Apply Parallel Structure to Your Thesis

In a 1,000 word essay, develop a thesis that critiques nutritionism, exposing its fallacies and mythologies and revealing the way nutritionism deludes and cripples the average consumer. Use no fewer than 2 sources.

Sample Thesis with Parallel Structure Errors

Nutritionism is a pretentious business fraud comprised of the promoting nutrients and chemicals over whole foods; promoting the false gospel of the low-fat diet; promoting nutritionism as a science when in reality it is a pseudo-science and an ideology based on false assumptions; promoting nutritionism with specialized, scientific-sounding language that only the Nutritionist Priesthood can understand; and promoting nutritionism as a champion of the people when in reality Nutritionists champion the food industry's interests.

In a 1,000 essay, analyze the causes behind the link between poverty and obesity. Use In Defense of Food and at least 2 other sources. Be sure to have a thesis that maps out the causes of obesity for poor people.

Southern culture predicated on fried foods

"Fill an empty stomach" mentality

affordable calories are processed foods, not real foods

"feeling poor," which is depression, makes you fat

Depression affects fat hormones

Fatness gives brain fat signals, which creates a vicious cycle

Poor have no nutrition education

Poor have little or no access to fitness centers

Poor live in a obesogenic environment

Fat discrimination leads to learned helplessness (giving up and depression, leading to more obesity and thus a vicious cycle ensues)

Research Links

What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

Diet Wars

Video Selection from the Diet Wars

Weston A. Price Foundation

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In Defense of Food Lesson #2: The Dangers of Nutritionism and the American Tendency Toward Overeating

Alternative Essay Topic

In a 1,000-word essay, analyze the causes behind the link between poverty and obesity. Use In Defense of Food and at least 2 other sources. Be sure to have a thesis that maps out the causes of obesity for poor people.

Introductory Lexicon:

1. lipid hypothesis: The idea that foods rich in cholesterol spike cholesterol in the blood resulting in plaque build-up in the arteries, which in turn "clog the heart" and result in heart attacks.

This idea is NOT scientific. As Donald G. McNeil writes in the New York Times, his plus 300 cholesterol only scored an 11 (400 is the danger mark) in a plague test done on a coronary angiogram. Further, some lipid fats are necessary for absorbing protein and for ultimate brain activity. Your brain craves lipid or saturated fats for a good reason.

2. dogma: The "teachings" of the scientific authority, which goes unquestioned by the underlings, the younger scientists, those who know that if they question the dogma, no matter how wrong it is, their careers will be squashed like bugs.

3. groupthink: you compromise your critical, individual thinking skills to conform to the group's prevailing views and opinions so that you fit in with the group rather than seek the truth.

4. save-your-butt and make-money science: Never assume R&D (research and development) searches for truth and the improvement of society. Decisions are based on two things, self-promotion and funding. Take an example of bacterial research. No money in antibiotics because you only take the drug for a week or so. In contrast, cholesterol drugs are taken until you die. Which drug gets funded more? Which drug is more urgently needed? So don't be naive and say you're going into medical R&D to help the world. In reality, you're a slave to forces you can't control.

5. trans fats: processed vegetable fats that your body can NEVER get rid of. Equally as bad, trans fats took the place of animal fats, which are needed for brain function and protein assimilation.

6. nutritional reductionism: good definition from American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:

The approach of looking at individual nutrients rather than the food as a whole, and the entire lifestyle. Reductionism stimulates the 500 billion-dollar supplement industry.

7. Placebo Effect and the need for control studies in the face of nutitritionism claims: If you tell people they will enjoy improved health from taking supplement or food X, they will feel better because of the placebo effect.

8. Consumer gullibility based on failure to discern causation from correlation. You take a supplement and "feel better" after catching a cold, but you would have felt better anyway. That's correlation, not causation.

9. The Western Diet: an abundance of addicting refined carbohydrates and sugars that convert into triglycerides, which convert into fat and clog the arteries.

10. The rise of corn syrup. As Americans ate less lipids, they ate cheaper forms of sugar, corn syrup, which can not be broken down in the liver without harming the body.

Part One. The Dangers of Nutritionism

1. What has happened to Americans’ health as nutritionism has grown and grown? See page 40.

2. What is the driving force behind nutritionism? See page 40. The lipid hypothesis. We ate less animal fats and more vegetable-based trans fats, which are even worse. New data shows that the argument for a low-fat diet has been wrong. Eating less fat, people eat more carbs, which makes them even more fat. Fat fills us up. Carbs don’t. Carbs make you more hungry. The appetites become inflamed on a low-fat, high-carb, high-sugar diet. See page 59: Refined carbs interfere with insulin metabolism in ways that stimulate hunger, promote overeating, and fat storage in the body. This results in obesity and diabetes.

3. Gary Taubes is quoted from Good Calories, Bad Calories in which he shows there is no science behind the lipid hypothesis, which is nothing more than an ideology, the "beliefs" of a few powerful scientists.

4. Without scientific evidence and with consensus upholding bogus nutrition recommendations, we can blame groupthink, the phenomenon in which the group compromises critical thinking and in fact is frightened to voice opposition because conformity to the group is the first priority. Nutritionism rests upon groupthink. Consensus based on conformity, not scientific rigor. People “saving their butts” by conforming to the system rather than voicing intelligence and critical thinking. Not just nutritionism, but educational standards in the public school system are created the same way. Business people, lobbyists, and administrators, not educators, lay down the “standards” that are not based on sound research or experience but based on groupthink.

5. As Americans followed the bogus low-fat recommendations after World War II, heart attacks went up. Animal fat intake went down from 84 pounds to 71 pounds per capita and this resulted in increased heart attacks. More trans fats were consumed. All of this was recommended by nutritionism.

6. Nutritionism made a huge error in making a simple link between fat intake and increased cholesterol. Causation is not so simple. Against nutritionism, real science shows that fat is needed to absorb essential vitamins.

7. In Chapter 6, Pollan chronicles how as Americans obeyed the rules of Nutritionism they got fatter and fatter. While eating less fat, they ate more sugar, corn syrup and low-fat Snackwell’s cookies. In 1977, fat was 42% of total calories. In 1995 fat was down to 34% of total calories. But the TOTAL CONSUMPTION OF FAT DID NOT DECREASE. WE JUST ATE MORE OF EVERYTHING. By following the dogma of “eat more low-fat” foods,” Americans just ate more of everything else and got fatter.

8. One of the evils of Nutritionism, we read at the end of Chapter 5, is that disgusting processed foods can be injected with nutrients (polyunsaturated fats, “whole-grain”) and be marketed as healthy food. Rubbish.

9. One of the key characteristics of Nutritionism, we read in Chapter 9 (Bad Science) is that it embraces scientific reductionism, breaking down food into nutrient components rather than looking at the food as a whole and how that whole interacts with the human body. This reductionism is partly a result of groupthink. For example, reductionism says ingest lots of the anti-oxidant beta-carotene, but the body doesn’t assimilate beta-carotene when it’s isolated in a pill or injected into some processed food. We need to eat it from the original plant to assimilate it. See page 64.

10. Too much of Nutritionism is based on the Placebo Effect. One third of Americans are “responders.” They respond to any new program because they think they’ll improve. But this change isn’t based on science. See page 69.

11. One of the Great Lies of Nutritionism, we read on page 71, is that lifestyle choices determine our health. Wrong. Social class does. The poor get fatter and die younger for many reasons.

Why the Rich Get Thinner, the Poor Get Fatter

Poor Kids Get Fatter

Why Are Poor People Fat?

Does Poverty Make People Obese?

Southern culture predicated on fried foods

"Fill an empty stomach" mentality

affordable calories are processed foods, not real foods

"feeling poor," which is depression, makes you fat

Depression affects fat hormones

Fatness gives brain fat signals, which creates a vicious cycle

Poor have no nutrition education

Poor have little or no access to fitness centers

Poor live in a obesogenic environment

Fat discrimination leads to learned helplessness (giving up and depression, leading to more obesity and thus a vicious cycle ensues)

Part Two. The Causes Behind Americans’ Tendency Toward Overeating

1. The sheer abundance of food makes Americans eat in a perfunctory, mindless way. Eating slop. Not really eating but feeding. The difference between being human and animal.

2. Our religious, puritanical history makes us suspicious of eating pleasure. We are more comfortable equating eating with nutrition. We escape our repression and become gluttons.

3. Low-fat, high-carb, high-sugar foods marketed as healthy allowed us to eat like pigs and feel okay about it.

4. We have a history of being gullible to food faddism all the way back to quacks John Harvey Kellogg, Horace Fletcher the Masticator and other charlatans. See page 56.

Qualities of an Eater and a Feeder

The eater is engaging in

1. social interaction

2. bonding

3. the making of culture

4. slow appreciation of fresh ingredients

5. savoring food means actually thoroughly chewing your food

A feeder

1. eats in a rush, perhaps in the car.

2. does not chew, but inhales food, resulting in dyspepsia.

3. eats in darkness or even a closet in a state of shame.

4. consumes food mindlessly like an animal.

5. consumes food alone to be anti-social like a partitioned restaurant with TVs in every booth.

Posted at 09:48 AM in In Defense of Food Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lesson #1 for In Defense of Food: The Scourge of the Western Diet Is Nutritionism

One. Reading Questions:

1. Contrary to the complicated edicts of nutritionism, what simple edict of eating should we follow? 1: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This has become a famous mantra. The problem is what constitutes “food.” Not so simple in this age of nutritionism.