by guest blogger Rich Baringer,

One of the major points that Michael Pollan makes in his book, In Defense of Food, is something that really resonates with me. It’s the idea that everything is connected–the earth, our food, people, animals, our health. With the growth of processed foods, these relationships are removed from our eating–we’re just ingesting instead of living in that natural circle that we were meant to be a part of. And nowhere does this show itself more than in our health.

Pollan writes:

Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain…If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk from them.

As I said, we were built to have these relationships with our food and the soil. We, and other animals, are wired to recognize both the good and bad in the foods that we are considering. These relationships have been fostered for generations–since we were out hunting and gathering. We know when a fruit or vegetable is ready to eat–we know the color or the scent or the taste. The plant is telling us that it is ready to spread it’s seeds by being ripe. Put seeds inside a juicy peach or apple and some animal will eat it and spread the seeds. It just so happens that this is also the time when the most nutrition can be gotten from a plant.

But in the Western diet, our senses are being fooled by artificial sweeteners or colors. The processing of foods also causes us confusion.

Pollan tells the story of refined flour. How the development of rollers, which took the place of stone grinders, removed the nutritious parts of the wheat from the flour. The now-white flour looked great, but didn’t give any kind of nutrition, as opposed to stone-ground. Pollan says:

Wherever these refining technologies came into widespread use, devastating epidemics of pellagra and beriberi soon followed. Both are diseases caused by deficiencies in the B vitamins that the germ had contributed to the diet.

So what came next? The fortifying of flour with these missing vitamins in the 1930s. And in 1996, the government saw that our diets were low in folic acid, so millers were ordered to add it to flour. And on and on it goes. “Real” food becomes “Frankenstein” food–a bunch of components put together. This is great, except it ignores the idea that “A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.” Nutrients occurring naturally in, say, an apple, work in tandem and do more good than each of the nutrients taken separately.

Next time, we’ll talk about corn and soy–things we eat way too much of.

Read In Defense of Food, part 2 here.
Read In Defense of Food, part 1 here.

Rich Baringer is a personal chef and owner of Dinner’s Done. He lives in Blooming Glen with his wife, Mary Beth, and son, Jake. He is a strong supporter of local food and sources locally for his clients. And his food is really good. Check out his website for more about him.

by guest blogger Rich Baringer,

I’ll continue with more of my “book report” on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.

One of Pollan’s main points is that nutritionism rules how and what we eat these days. We’re more worried about the antioxidants and low-fat labels on foods than on what the food really is. He makes the point that these nutrients that are added to so many foods, often don’t really do their job as they do in nature. They need the relationship with other chemicals and nutrients in the food to create the benefits that they were intended to have.

And often, these “nutritional” way of eating–low-fat, for example–sometimes lead to other problems. Pollan writes:

Like most of us, they [researchers] assumed that a bad outcome like heart disease must have a bad cause, like saturated fat or cholesterol, so they focused their investigative energies on how these bad nutrients might cause disease rather than on how the absence of something else, like plant foods or fish, might figure in the etiology of the disease. Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.

Of course, other factors come into play with regard to these diseases–social class for example. Poor people don’t often have the ability to exercise or eat fresh vegetables or fish. Many only have access or the money to buy processed foods–causing a problem of obesity even in those who are most in need of food. This, then leads to diabetes and heart disease in many cases.

This segues into Pollan’s next major discussion. Those of us who eat a Western Diet are the ones who end up with these diseases.

He tells of an study in Australia in 1982 where a group of 10 middle-aged, overweight and diabetic Aborigines that were living in Western Australia agreed to be a part of an experiment. They moved from their “civilized” homes to the homes of their ancestors–back to the bush. In a nutshell, after 7 weeks, all had lost weight, had lower blood pressure, lower triglycerides and increased omega-3 fatty acids. In short, they became much healthier in an amazingly short amount of time.

Pollan writes:

What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets. We also know that when people come to the West and adopt our way of eating, these diseases soon follow, and often, as in the case of the Aborigines and other native populations, in a particularly virulent form… [W]hen one Western disease arrived on the scene, so did most of the others, and often in the same order: obesity followed by type 2 diabetes followed by hypertension and stroke followed by heart disease.

Welcome to our world.

So why does this happen? Basically, it’s the processing of most of our foods. During processing, food is made to last longer so it can be shipped and sit on store shelves. But to do this, nutrients–the things that bugs and other pests are seeking out–are removed.

The interesting thing is that studies show that there is not one ideal diet to follow. There are cultures that eat virtually all meats and dairy. There are those that eat a majority of seafood and little dairy. Some have lived on a mostly vegetarian diet while others eat very little green vegetation. Yet all these cultures and traditions result in people much healthier than we are. The common thread that runs through all of these diets–the consumption of fresh foods, whether animal or plants, that are high in nutritional value.

Again, Pollan:

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

Next time, thinking differently about our food.

Read In Defense of Food, part 1 here.
Read In Defense of Food, part 3 here.

Rich Baringer is a personal chef and owner of Dinner’s Done. He lives in Blooming Glen with his wife, Mary Beth, and son, Jake. He is a strong supporter of local food and sources locally for his clients. And his food is really good. Check out his website for more about him.

by guest blogger Rich Baringer,

I first heard of Michael Pollan while organizing a screening of the film Fresh a few years ago. There were a lot of great points made by a lot of interesting people in that film, but his stood out to me and made me think about not only how important eating “real” food is, but how it impacts so many parts of our lives–the environment, the economy, health care, etc.

I recently read his 2008 book, In Defense of Food and it was eye-opening. If you are at all interested in how food can affect our lives and health, then this is a must read.

In my mind as I read the book, I was going to write a blog entry about it. But there are so many interesting and worthwhile topics that he discussed in the book, it’s hard to just choose a couple. So, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll revert back to my junior-high-book-report-writing days and try to summarize what Pollan’s book is all about. It’ll take more than one blog entry, but hopefully, it’ll whet your appetite (pun intended) to read the book.

I admit that after reading the book, I look at everything that I eat in a different light. His ideas are thought-provoking and make a lot of sense. The last parts of the book are his tips and suggestions for how to eat. Some of them are things that I already do–and maybe should do more of. Some, admittedly, are just not practical–for me, at least. I want a Coke or a Tastykake once in a while. But just getting people to think about these things will help to change the food culture in this country, which is at the root of our eating problems.

Part of what Pollan tries to do in the beginning of the book is to define what “food” is. Food is not necessarily anything we eat. In his definition, we eat a lot more than “food”. He writes:

But I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it–in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone–is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.

Eating is so much more than just ingesting food. It’s about pleasure, communion, family, culture. I recently wrote about how important eating as a family can be to the development of a family–especially the children. (Click here for that post.)

But despite how we in this country are eating–filling ourselves with non-nutritious foods on the run–we seem to want to eat healthily. Pollan talks extensively about how we have become “a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.” An interesting thought, huh?

Think about it. We are inundated by ads for weight loss, nutritional supplements, vitamins, fish oil, on and on and on. Walk through a supermarket and look at all the items with some sort of nutritional claim–whole grain, fortified with vitamins and minerals, low-fat, low-sodium, added antioxidants, etc.

This is “nutritionism.” The idea that eating is simply taking in nutrients–with little or no regard for anything else. And our country’s obsession with this idea has helped it to grow.

Pollan tells about a 1938 Act that required the word “imitation” on any food that was in any way changed from the traditional or common form of the food. Milk with added vitamins and the like. If anything was changed, it was “imitation.” But in 1973, the FDA repealed this rule while passing new food labeling laws. Now, as long as the food was not deemed “nutritionally inferior” to the “real” version, it was not “imitation.”

With that, the regulatory door was thrown open to all manner of faked low-fat products: Fats in things like sour cream and yogurt could now be replaced with hydrogenated oils or guar gum or carrageenan, bacon bits could be replaced with soy protein, the cream in “whipped cream” and “coffee creamer” could be replaced with corn starch…

Not imitation in the government’s eyes, but imitation nonetheless. And in most cases, less healthy, despite what is told to us by the producers of these items. It was the beginning of the confusion of food labels that is meant to draw us in with all those promises.

Read In Defense of Food, part 2 here.Read In Defense of Food, part 3 here.

Rich Baringer is a personal chef and owner of Dinner’s Done. He lives in Blooming Glen with his wife, Mary Beth, and son, Jake. He is a strong supporter of local food and sources locally for his clients. And his food is really good. Check out his website for more about him.