In Defense of Food

“In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan is one of the best books I’ve read on diet. Written in a conversational tone, it’s an easy read and seems like quite sensible advice. 

His main message is summed up by a banner on the cover: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. 

By “food” he means stuff that our grandparents would recognize as food, as opposed to “food products” that have swamped our diet in the last half century, invented by corporations, with long lists of ingredients that we don’t know.  

Much of our diet, he writes, is between-meals snacking, a lot of it consumed in cars while driving, consisting of food products, driving up our calorie intake. These snacks are mainly based on cheap, government-subsidized grains. 

Pollan explains the serious limitations of diet research to date and doesn’t subscribe to any of the popular diet theories. But he says all of the nutrition experts he has talked to, regardless of their theories – low-fat, low-carb, whatever – agree on one thing: we need to eat more plants. Even meat, he says, would be better for us if the animals have been fed plants instead of grain. And they should not be given antibiotics, which is breeding resistant germs. 

He says we need to focus on the benefits of eating whole foods instead of individual nutrients in foods, and that culture – how and when we eat – may be as important as what we eat. We need to spend more time on it and eat with other people.