Nutritional science has led us astray and it's time to reclaim our diet, Michael Pollan tells Sylvia Thompson
Humans used to know how to eat well, but the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through the generations have become confused, complicated and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists and journalists.
This is the central message of journalist/philosopher Michael Pollan's new book, In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating(Penguin Books).
The American best-selling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma(in which he explores developments in industrial, organic and alternative food) speaks for hundreds and thousands of people in the Western world when he says that we are in the midst of a public health crisis around food.
"The epidemic of chronic diseases - obesity, diabetes, heart disease and several types of cancer - that trace to the modern diet may be more advanced in the US, but today, the American way of eating is spreading around the world and with it, the devastating complex of Western diseases," writes Pollan, who is professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
Unhappy Meals, an article he wrote for the New York Timesmagazine last year, was the genesis of this book.
In his book, Pollan convincingly argues that wherever traditional diets and ways of eating have succumbed to the modern diet of processed foods, increases in diabetes and cardiovascular diseases follow.
And he cites how the United Nations recently announced that the number of people in the world suffering from the problems of "overnutrition" has for the first time exceeded the number suffering from undernutrition.
So how have we allowed this to happen? According to Pollan, much of the blame lies with our reliance on scientists and food marketers "and often an unhealthy alliance of the two" and to a lesser extent the government, "with its ever-shifting dietary guidelines, food labelling rules and perplexing pyramids" to tell us what to eat.
"Most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children, or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children. This is, historically speaking, an unusual state of affairs."
In his book, Pollan dissects the changing advice offered by nutritional scientists and argues that nutritional science has led us astray by narrowing our relationship with food to the nutrients they do or do not contain.
"The history of modern nutritionism [ the theory that foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts] has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins and then fats; fats against carbs," he writes.
According to Pollan, such swings are bound to promote food fads and phobias and large abrupt swings of the nutritional pendulum.
Pollan also searches beneath the scientific advice, pointing to powerful lobby groups within the food industry whose ability to influence nutritional guidelines remains an issue to this day. "Only the power of the sugar lobby in Washington can explain the fact that the official US recommendation for the maximum permissible level of free sugars in the diet is an eye-popping 25 per cent of daily calories - as compared to the World Health Organisation's recommendation that no more than 10 per cent of daily calories should come from added sugars," he explains.
So, instead of following the conflicting and often confusing advice of nutritional scientists, Pollan instead suggests some simple rules for an "eater's manifesto".
His first and possibly easiest to remember rule is don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise. That means no to the numerous yogurt-like products, no to cereal bars and no to the cheese-like food stuffs that outnumber real cheese.
"Don't eat anything that isn't incapable of rotting is another personal policy you might consider adopting," he adds.
He suggests we avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, and that include high-fructose corn syrup.
Pollan also suggests that we should avoid all foods with a health claim because these are processed foods with added nutrients rather than whole foods. "It's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section," he writes.
He advocates a diet high in plants. "In all my interviews with nutrition experts, the benefits of a plant-based diet provided the only point of universal consensus," he says.
And he recommends that we avoid supermarkets when possible - or at least next time you're there, check out how many real foods (fruit, vegetables, unprocessed meat, regular whole fat milk, yoghurt and cheese) make it into your trolley.
A supporter of the Slow Food Movement, which links consumers with producers, Pollan has - in his previous book - encouraged people to think about the environmental consequences of the foods they eat.
And he speaks enthusiastically about the lively social and political movement around food that has taken root in the US and elsewhere.
"There is a revival of local agriculture and farmers' markets, a renaissance of regional cooking and food traditions, a grassroots campaign to get junk food out of the schools and hospitals and a nationwide movement to reform agricultural policies," he says.
Aware that Slow Food gatherings can sometimes be elitist and purchasers of produce at farmers' markets are those who can afford to spend more on food, he adds: "We need to extend the access to fresh wholesome food and it will take policy changes to make fresh produce appealing to food-stamp recipients who buy cheap processed foods."
Ultimately, he believes that by placing more emphasis on the ecological and cultural views of food and eating, we can start to broaden out the debate again. "That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea. No people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than Americans and no people suffer as many diet-related health problems," he writes.
And, he says, even some nutritional scientists are beginning to wake up to the wisdom of this. He quotes Marion Nestle, a New York university nutritionist as saying: "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."
Also, of course, says Pollan, people don't eat nutrients, they eat food: "It's ironic that people need a book to tell them to eat food but the food chain [ the distance from farmers/growers to consumers] is so long now that people have to be reminded what they already know."
In Defence of Food - the Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating is published by Penguin (€25.85)