[Foodplanning] Feature: Pollan, on What It Might Mean To "Eat Healthy"

[Ashwani Vasishth]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Unhappy Meals
Illustration by Leo Jung

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: January 28, 2007

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the 
supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing 
question of what we humans should eat in order to 
be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the 
game right here at the beginning of a long essay, 
and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate 
matters in the interest of keeping things going 
for a few thousand more words. I'll try to resist 
but will go ahead and add a couple more details 
to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat 
won't kill you, though it's better approached as 
a side dish than as a main. And you're much 
better off eating whole fresh foods than 
processed food products. That's what I mean by 
the recommendation to eat "food." Once, food was 
all you could eat, but today there are lots of 
other edible foodlike substances in the 
supermarket. These novel products of food science 
often come in packages festooned with health 
claims, which brings me to a related rule of 
thumb: if you're concerned about your health, you 
should probably avoid food products that make 
health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a 
food product is a good indication that it's not 
really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more 
complicated, aren't they? Sorry. But that's how 
it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom 
of the whole vexing question of food and health. 
Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion 
moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you 
thought you knew about the links between diet and 
health gets blown away in the gust of the latest 
study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, 
long believed to protect against breast cancer, 
may do no such thing - this from the monumental, 
federally financed Women's Health Initiative, 
which has also found no link between a low-fat 
diet and rates of coronary disease. The year 
before we learned that dietary fiber might not, 
as we had been confidently told, help prevent 
colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious 
studies on omega-3 fats published at the same 
time presented us with strikingly different 
conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine 
stated that "it is uncertain how much these 
omega-3s contribute to improving health" (and 
they might do the opposite if you get them from 
mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study 
declared that simply by eating a couple of 
servings of fish each week (or by downing enough 
fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from 
a heart attack by more than a third - a 
stunningly hopeful piece of news. It's no wonder 
that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the 
oat bran of 2007, as food scientists 
micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and 
blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial 
foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and 
cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, 
sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the 
rule?)

By now you're probably registering the cognitive 
dissonance of the supermarket shopper or 
science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia 
for the simplicity and solidity of the first few 
sentences of this essay. Which I'm still prepared 
to defend against the shifting winds of 
nutritional science and food-industry marketing. 
But before I do that, it might be useful to 
figure out how we arrived at our present state of 
nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about 
what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a 
great deal about the institutional imperatives of 
the food industry, nutritional science and - ahem 
- journalism, three parties that stand to gain 
much from widespread confusion surrounding what 
is, after all, the most elemental question an 
omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat 
without expert help - something they have been 
doing with notable success since coming down out 
of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if 
you're a food company, distinctly risky if you're 
a nutritionist and just plain boring if you're a 
newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that 
matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, 
"Eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so, like a 
large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion 
has gathered around the simplest questions of 
nutrition - much to the advantage of everybody 
involved. Except perhaps the ostensible 
beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and 
advice: us, and our health and happiness as 
eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing 
from the American supermarket, gradually to be 
replaced by "nutrients," which are not the same 
thing. Where once the familiar names of 
recognizable comestibles - things like eggs or 
breakfast cereal or cookies - claimed pride of 
place on the brightly colored packages crowding 
the aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and 
"cholesterol" and "saturated fat" rose to 
large-type prominence. More important than mere 
foods, the presence or absence of these invisible 
substances was now generally believed to confer 
health benefits on their eaters. Foods by 
comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and 
decidedly unscientific things - who could say 
what was in them, really? But nutrients - those 
chemical compounds and minerals in foods that 
nutritionists have deemed important to health - 
gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; 
eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, 
and you would live longer and avoid chronic 
diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a 
concept, since the early 19th century, when the 
English doctor and chemist William Prout 
identified what came to be called the 
"macronutrients": protein, fat and carbohydrates. 
It was thought that that was pretty much all 
there was going on in food, until doctors noticed 
that an adequate supply of the big three did not 
necessarily keep people nourished. At the end of 
the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by 
the fact that Chinese laborers in the Malay 
states were dying of a disease called beriberi, 
which didn't seem to afflict Tamils or native 
Malays. The mystery was solved when someone 
pointed out that the Chinese ate "polished," or 
white, rice, while the others ate rice that 
hadn't been mechanically milled. A few years 
later, Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered 
the "essential nutrient" in rice husks that 
protected against beriberi and called it a 
"vitamine," the first micronutrient. Vitamins 
brought a kind of glamour to the science of 
nutrition, and though certain sectors of the 
population began to eat by its expert lights, it 
really wasn't until late in the 20th century that 
nutrients managed to push food aside in the 
popular imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food 
to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a 
little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 
1977 seems to have helped propel American food 
culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding 
to an alarming increase in chronic diseases 
linked to diet - including heart disease, cancer 
and diabetes - a Senate Select Committee on 
Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held 
hearings on the problem and prepared what by all 
rights should have been an uncontroversial 
document called "Dietary Goals for the United 
States." The committee learned that while rates 
of coronary heart disease had soared in America 
since World War II, other cultures that consumed 
traditional diets based largely on plants had 
strikingly low rates of chronic disease. 
Epidemiologists also had observed that in America 
during the war years, when meat and dairy 
products were strictly rationed, the rate of 
heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the 
committee drafted a straightforward set of 
dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut 
down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks 
a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and 
dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and 
Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle 
ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was 
forced to beat a retreat. The committee's 
recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain 
talk about food - the committee had advised 
Americans to actually "reduce consumption of 
meat" - was replaced by artful compromise: 
"Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce 
saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a 
world of difference just the same. First, the 
stark message to "eat less" of a particular food 
has been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again 
in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. 
Second, notice how distinctions between entities 
as different as fish and beef and chicken have 
collapsed; those three venerable foods, each 
representing an entirely different taxonomic 
class, are now lumped together as delivery 
systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the 
new language exonerates the foods themselves; now 
the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless - 
and politically unconnected - substance that may 
or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue 
McGovern from his blunder; the very next 
election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped 
rusticate the three-term senator, sending an 
unmistakable warning to anyone who would 
challenge the American diet, and in particular 
the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the 
middle of its plate. Henceforth, government 
dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about 
whole foods, each of which has its trade 
association on Capitol Hill, and would instead 
arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and 
speaking of nutrients, entities that few 
Americans really understood but that lack 
powerful lobbies in Washington. This was 
precisely the tack taken by the National Academy 
of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on 
diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by 
nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food 
group, it codified the official new dietary 
language. Industry and media followed suit, and 
terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, 
monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, 
polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon 
colonized much of the cultural space previously 
occupied by the tangible substance formerly known 
as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

THE RISE OF NUTRITIONISM

The first thing to understand about nutritionism 
- I first encountered the term in the work of an 
Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy 
Scrinis - is that it is not quite the same as 
nutrition. As the "ism" suggests, it is not a 
scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies 
are ways of organizing large swaths of life and 
experience under a set of shared but unexamined 
assumptions. This quality makes an ideology 
particularly hard to see, at least while it's 
exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning 
ideology is a little like the weather, all 
pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we 
can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared 
but unexamined assumption is that the key to 
understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From 
this basic premise flow several others. Since 
nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible 
and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to 
the scientists (and to the journalists through 
whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden 
reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which 
you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of 
expert help.

But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings 
us to another unexamined assumption: that the 
whole point of eating is to maintain and promote 
bodily health. Hippocrates's famous injunction to 
"let food be thy medicine" is ritually invoked to 
support this notion. I'll leave the premise alone 
for now, except to point out that it is not 
shared by all cultures and that the experience of 
these other cultures suggests that, 
paradoxically, viewing food as being about things 
other than bodily health - like pleasure, say, or 
socializing - makes people no less healthy; 
indeed, there's some reason to believe that it 
may make them more healthy. This is what we 
usually have in mind when we speak of the "French 
paradox" - the fact that a population that eats 
all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many 
ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is 
at least a question as to whether nutritionism is 
actually any good for you.

Another potentially serious weakness of 
nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble 
discerning qualitative distinctions between 
foods. So fish, beef and chicken through the 
nutritionists' lens become mere delivery systems 
for varying quantities of fats and proteins and 
whatever other nutrients are on their scope. 
Similarly, any qualitative distinctions between 
processed foods and whole foods disappear when 
your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they 
contain (or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of 
processed food, and it helps explain why they 
have been so happy to get with the nutritionism 
program. In the years following McGovern's 
capitulation and the 1982 National Academy 
report, the food industry set about 
re-engineering thousands of popular food products 
to contain more of the nutrients that science and 
government had deemed the good ones and less of 
the bad, and by the late '80s a golden era of 
food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat 
Bran - also known as 1988 - served as a kind of 
coming-out party for the food scientists, who 
succeeded in getting the material into nearly 
every processed food sold in America. Oat bran's 
moment on the dietary stage didn't last long, but 
the pattern had been established, and every few 
years since then a new oat bran has taken its 
turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes 
omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more 
trouble competing under the rules of 
nutritionism, if only because something like a 
banana or an avocado can't easily change its 
nutritional stripes (though rest assured the 
genetic engineers are hard at work on the 
problem). So far, at least, you can't put oat 
bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning 
nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be 
either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) 
or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be 
embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food 
rises and falls with every change in the 
nutritional weather, while the processed foods 
are simply reformulated. That's why when the 
Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and 
pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back 
the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor 
unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left 
out in the cold.

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health 
claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato 
or carrot, with the perverse result that the most 
healthful foods in the supermarket sit there 
quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke 
victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs 
and Lucky Charms are screaming about their 
newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it 
good for us? You might think that a national 
fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable 
improvements in the public health. But for that 
to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as 
well as the policy recommendations (and the 
journalism) based on that science, would have to 
be sound. This has seldom been the case.

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 
"Dietary Goals" - McGovern's masterpiece of 
politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of 
the panel's recommendation that we cut down on 
saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 
1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans 
did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a 
quarter-century to do what they had been told. 
Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was 
promptly reformulated to reflect the official 
advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat 
Snackwell's and all the low-fat pasta and 
high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could 
consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. 
Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat 
diet - indeed, many date the current obesity and 
diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when 
Americans began binging on carbohydrates, 
ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these 
pages ("What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" by 
Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it's a little 
more complicated than the official version 
suggests. In that version, which inspired the 
most recent Atkins craze, we were told that 
America got fat when, responding to bad 
scientific advice, it shifted its diet from fats 
to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the 
two nutrients is in order: fat doesn't make you 
fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news 
is a mystery: as long as people have been raising 
animals for food, they have fattened them on 
carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this 
revisionist picture. First, while it is true that 
Americans post-1977 did begin binging on carbs, 
and that fat as a percentage of total calories in 
the American diet declined, we never did in fact 
cut down on our consumption of fat. Meat 
consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a 
bunch more carbs onto our plates, obscuring 
perhaps, but not replacing, the expanding chunk 
of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the 
ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the 
blame as the carbohydrates themselves do - that 
and human nature. By framing dietary advice in 
terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying 
the recommendation that we should eat less of any 
particular food, it was easy for the take-home 
message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines 
to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat 
foods. And that is what we did. We're always 
happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of 
something (with the possible exception of oat 
bran), and one of the things nutritionism 
reliably gives us is some such dispensation: 
low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It's 
hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as 
it did if McGovern's original food-based 
recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and 
dairy products. For how do you get from that 
stark counsel to the idea that another case of 
Snackwell's is just what the doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false 
consciousness in the mind of the eater, the 
ideology can just as easily mislead the 
scientist. Most nutritional science involves 
studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that 
even nutritionists who do it will tell you is 
deeply flawed. "The problem with 
nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points 
out Marion Nestle, the New York University 
nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out 
of the context of food, the food out of the 
context of diet and the diet out of the context 
of lifestyle."

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they 
do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built 
into the way science is done: scientists need 
individual variables they can isolate. Yet even 
the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing 
to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical 
compounds, many of which exist in complex and 
dynamic relation to one another, and all of which 
together are in the process of changing from one 
state to another. So if you're a nutritional 
scientist, you do the only thing you can do, 
given the tools at your disposal: break the thing 
down into its component parts and study those one 
by one, even if that means ignoring complex 
interactions and contexts, as well as the fact 
that the whole may be more than, or just 
different from, the sum of its parts. This is 
what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful 
tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when 
applied to something as complex as, on the one 
side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It 
encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that 
transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that 
physiological result. Yet people differ in 
important ways. Some populations can metabolize 
sugars better than others; depending on your 
evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able 
to digest the lactose in milk. The specific 
ecology of your intestines helps determine how 
efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the 
same input of 100 calories may yield more or less 
energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes 
and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is 
nothing very machinelike about the human eater, 
and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, 
and foods can behave very differently than the 
nutrients they contain. Researchers have long 
believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of 
different populations, that a diet high in fruits 
and vegetables confers some protection against 
cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in 
those plant foods are responsible for that 
effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants 
in fresh produce - compounds like beta carotene, 
lycopene, vitamin E, etc. - are the X factor. It 
makes good sense: these molecules (which plants 
produce to protect themselves from the highly 
reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) 
vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which 
can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least 
that's how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet 
as soon as you remove these useful molecules from 
the context of the whole foods they're found in, 
as we've done in creating antioxidant 
supplements, they don't work at all. Indeed, in 
the case of beta carotene ingested as a 
supplement, scientists have discovered that it 
actually increases the risk of certain cancers. 
Big oops.

What's going on here? We don't know. It could be 
the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber 
(or some other component) in a carrot protects 
the antioxidant molecules from destruction by 
stomach acids early in the digestive process. Or 
it could be that we isolated the wrong 
antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of 
carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we 
focused on the wrong one. Or maybe beta carotene 
works as an antioxidant only in concert with some 
other plant chemical or process; under other 
circumstances, it may behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of 
any common food plant is to realize just how much 
complexity lurks within it. Here's a list of just 
the antioxidants that have been identified in 
garden-variety thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, 
ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, 
camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, 
chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, 
gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, 
isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic 
acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, 
methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, 
oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, 
p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic 
acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, 
ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you're ingesting when you eat food 
flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are 
broken down by your digestion, but others are 
going on to do undetermined things to your body: 
turning some gene's expression on or off, 
perhaps, or heading off a free radical before it 
disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It 
would be great to know how this all works, but in 
the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge 
that it probably doesn't do any harm (since 
people have been eating it forever) and that it 
may actually do some good (since people have been 
eating it forever) and that even if it does 
nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It's also important to remind ourselves that what 
reductive science can manage to perceive well 
enough to isolate and study is subject to change, 
and that we have a tendency to assume that what 
we can see is all there is to see. When William 
Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, 
scientists figured they now understood food and 
what the body needs from it; when the vitamins 
were isolated a few decades later, scientists 
thought, O.K., now we really understand food and 
what the body needs to be healthy; today it's the 
polyphenols and carotenoids that seem 
all-important. But who knows what the hell else 
is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it 
doesn't matter. That's the great thing about 
eating food as compared with nutrients: you don't 
need to fathom a carrot's complexity to reap its 
benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the 
dangers in taking a nutrient out of the context 
of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists make a 
second, related error when they study the food 
out of the context of the diet. We don't eat just 
one thing, and when we are eating any one thing, 
we're not eating another. We also eat foods in 
combinations and in orders that can affect how 
they're absorbed. Drink coffee with your steak, 
and your body won't be able to fully absorb the 
iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the 
corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in 
the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable. 
Some of those compounds in that sprig of thyme 
may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it 
to, helping to break down one compound or 
possibly stimulate production of an enzyme to 
detoxify another. We have barely begun to 
understand the relationships among foods in a 
cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest 
relationships, like the zero-sum relationship: 
that if you eat a lot of meat you're probably not 
eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may 
explain why populations that eat diets high in 
meat have higher rates of coronary heart disease 
and cancer than those that don't. Yet 
nutritionism encourages us to look elsewhere for 
the explanation: deep within the meat itself, to 
the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long 
assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are 
baffled when large-population studies, like the 
Women's Health Initiative, fail to find that 
reducing fat intake significantly reduces the 
incidence of heart disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by 
the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is 
entirely possible to reduce your intake of 
saturated fat without significantly reducing your 
consumption of animal protein: just drink the 
low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken 
breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit 
nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein 
itself, as some researchers now hypothesize. (The 
Cornell nutritionist T. Colin Campbell argues as 
much in his recent book, "The China Study.") Or, 
as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett 
suggests, it could be the steroid hormones 
typically present in the milk and meat; these 
hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk 
but are often augmented in industrial production) 
are known to promote certain cancers.

But people worried about their health needn't 
wait for scientists to settle this question 
before deciding that it might be wise to eat more 
plants and less meat. This is of course precisely 
what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out 
of the context of the lifestyle. The 
Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one 
of the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of 
what we know about it is based on studies of 
people living on the island of Crete in the 
1950s, who in many respects lived lives very 
different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of 
olive oil and little meat. But they also did more 
physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a 
lot of wild greens - weeds. And, perhaps most 
important, they consumed far fewer total calories 
than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about 
the health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based 
on studies of Seventh Day Adventists, who muddy 
the nutritional picture by drinking absolutely no 
alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but 
unavoidable factors are called, aptly, 
"confounders." One last example: People who take 
supplements are healthier than the population at 
large, but their health probably has nothing 
whatsoever to do with the supplements they take - 
which recent studies have suggested are 
worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, 
more-affluent people who, almost by definition, 
take a greater-than-normal interest in personal 
health - confounding factors that probably 
account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil 
comparative studies of different populations, the 
supposedly more rigorous "prospective" studies of 
large American populations suffer from their own 
arguably even more disabling flaws. In these 
studies - of which the Women's Health Initiative 
is the best known - a large population is divided 
into two groups. The intervention group changes 
its diet in some prescribed manner, while the 
control group does not. The two groups are then 
tracked over many years to learn whether the 
intervention affects relative rates of chronic 
disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of 
extensive, long-term clinical trial is supposed 
to be the gold standard. It certainly sounds 
sound. In the case of the Women's Health 
Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes 
of Health, the eating habits and health outcomes 
of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the 
beginning of the study) were tracked for eight 
years. One group of the women were told to reduce 
their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total 
calories. The results were announced early last 
year, producing front-page headlines of which the 
one in this newspaper was typical: "Low-Fat Diet 
Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds." And the 
cloud of nutritional confusion over the country 
darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study's 
methods makes you wonder why anyone would take 
such a finding seriously, let alone order a 
Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as 
many newspaper readers no doubt promptly went out 
and did. Even the beginner student of 
nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: 
the focus was on "fat," rather than on any 
particular food, like meat or dairy. So women 
could comply simply by switching to lower-fat 
animal products. Also, no distinctions were made 
between types of fat: women getting their 
allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish 
were lumped together with woman getting their fat 
from low-fat cheese or chicken breasts or 
margarine. Why? Because when the study was 
designed 16 years ago, the whole notion of "good 
fats" was not yet on the scientific scope. 
Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and 
other studies like it, is that we have no idea 
what these women were really eating because, like 
most people when asked about their diet, they 
lied about it. How do we know this? Deduction. 
Consider: When the study began, the average 
participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed 
to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take 
an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on 
so little food. And it would take an even 
freakier metabolism to drop only one or two 
pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 
1,500 calories a day - as the women on the 
"low-fat" regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, 
ladies, but I just don't buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who 
conduct this sort of research conduct it in the 
knowledge that people lie about their food intake 
all the time. They even have scientific figures 
for the magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like 
the Women's Health Initiative rely on 
"food-frequency questionnaires," and studies 
suggest that people on average eat between a 
fifth and a third more than they claim to on the 
questionnaires. How do the researchers know that? 
By comparing what people report on questionnaires 
with interviews about their dietary intake over 
the previous 24 hours, thought to be somewhat 
more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the lie 
could be much greater, judging by the huge 
disparity between the total number of food 
calories produced every day for each American 
(3,900 calories) and the average number of those 
calories Americans own up to chomping: 2,000. 
(Waste accounts for some of the disparity, but 
nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about 
how much people actually eat is that the real 
number lies somewhere between those two figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency 
questionnaire used by the Women's Health 
Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just 
how shaky the data on which such trials rely 
really are. The survey, which took about 45 
minutes to complete, started off with some 
relatively easy questions: "Did you eat chicken 
or turkey during the last three months?" Having 
answered yes, I was then asked, "When you ate 
chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the 
skin?" But the survey soon became harder, as when 
it asked me to think back over the past three 
months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash 
or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they 
fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, 
"shortening" (in which category they inexplicably 
lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and 
lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I 
honestly didn't remember, and in the case of any 
okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist 
could not get out of me what sort of fat it was 
fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes 
specified haven't been seen in America since the 
Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of 
steak is considered "medium," was I really going 
to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an 
unrecallable number of occasions during the past 
three months was probably the equivalent of two 
or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, 
no less than four) of these portions? I think 
not. In fact, most of the "medium serving sizes" 
to which I was asked to compare my own 
consumption made me feel piggish enough to want 
to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, 
I wasn't under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest 
questions of diet and health are being decided in 
America today.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and 
widely reported studies of diet and health leave 
more or less undisturbed the main features of the 
Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, 
lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything - 
except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. In 
keeping with the nutritionism paradigm and the 
limits of reductionist science, the researchers 
fiddle with single nutrients as best they can, 
but the populations they recruit and study are 
typical American eaters doing what typical 
American eaters do: trying to eat a little less 
of this nutrient, a little more of that, 
depending on the latest thinking. (One problem 
with the control groups in these studies is that 
they too are exposed to nutritional fads in the 
culture, so over time their eating habits come to 
more closely resemble the habits of the 
intervention group.) It should not surprise us 
that the findings of such research would be so 
equivocal and confusing.

But what about the elephant in the room - the 
Western diet? It might be useful, in the midst of 
our deepening confusion about nutrition, to 
review what we do know about diet and health. 
What we know is that people who eat the way we do 
in America today suffer much higher rates of 
cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than 
people eating more traditional diets. (Four of 
the 10 leading killers in America are linked to 
diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving to 
America, people from nations with low rates of 
these "diseases of affluence" will quickly 
acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes the 
Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its 
most deleterious effects by isolating the bad 
nutrients in it - things like fat, sugar, salt - 
and encouraging the public and the food industry 
to limit them. But after several decades of 
nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and 
heart disease in the U.S. have declined only 
slightly (mortality from heart disease is down 
since the '50s, but this is mainly because of 
improved treatment), and rates of obesity and 
diabetes have soared.

No one likes to admit that his or her best 
efforts at understanding and solving a problem 
have actually made the problem worse, but that's 
exactly what has happened in the case of 
nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best 
of intentions, using the best tools at their 
disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way 
that has diminished our pleasure in eating it 
while doing little or nothing to improve our 
health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, 
less reductive view of what food is, one that is 
at once more ecological and cultural. What would 
happen, for example, if we were to start thinking 
about food as less of a thing and more of a 
relationship?

In nature, that is of course precisely what 
eating has always been: relationships among 
species in what we call food chains, or webs, 
that reach all the way down to the soil. Species 
co-evolve with the other species they eat, and 
very often a relationship of interdependence 
develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my 
genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation 
transforms something like an apple or a squash 
into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry 
animal. Over time and through trial and error, 
the plant becomes tastier (and often more 
conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal's 
needs and desires, while the animal gradually 
acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) 
are needed to make optimal use of the plant. 
Similarly, cow's milk did not start out as a 
nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them 
sick until humans who lived around cows evolved 
the ability to digest lactose as adults. This 
development proved much to the advantage of both 
the milk drinkers and the cows.

"Health" is, among other things, the byproduct of 
being involved in these sorts of relationships in 
a food chain - involved in a great many of them, 
in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. 
Further, when the health of one link of the food 
chain is disturbed, it can affect all the 
creatures in it. When 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. Or, as the 
English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 
1945 in "The Soil and Health" (a founding text of 
organic agriculture), we would do well to regard 
"the whole problem of health in soil, plant, 
animal and man as one great subject." Our 
personal health is inextricably bound up with the 
health of the entire food web.

In many cases, long familiarity between foods and 
their eaters leads to elaborate systems of 
communications up and down the food chain, so 
that a creature's senses come to recognize foods 
as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our 
bodies learn what to do with these foods after 
they pass the test of the senses, producing in 
anticipation the chemicals necessary to break 
them down. Health depends on knowing how to read 
these biological signals: this smells spoiled; 
this looks ripe; that's one good-looking cow. 
This is easier to do when a creature has long 
experience of a food, and much harder when a food 
has been designed expressly to deceive its senses 
- with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic 
sweeteners.

Note that these ecological relationships are 
between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients. 
Even though the foods in question eventually get 
broken down in our bodies into simple nutrients, 
as corn is reduced to simple sugars, the 
qualities of the whole food are not unimportant - 
they govern such things as the speed at which the 
sugars will be released and absorbed, which we're 
coming to see as critical to insulin metabolism. 
Put another way, our bodies have a longstanding 
and sustainable relationship to corn that we do 
not have to high-fructose corn syrup. Such a 
relationship with corn syrup might develop 
someday (as people evolve superhuman insulin 
systems to cope with regular floods of fructose 
and glucose), but for now the relationship leads 
to ill health because our bodies don't know how 
to handle these biological novelties. In much the 
same way, human bodies that can cope with chewing 
coca leaves - a longstanding relationship between 
native people and the coca plant in South America 
- cannot cope with cocaine or crack, even though 
the same "active ingredients" are present in all 
three. Reductionism as a way of understanding 
food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, 
but reductionism in practice can lead to problems.

Looking at eating through this ecological lens 
opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the 
Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not 
just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 
20th century but also in our food relationships, 
all the way from the soil to the meal. The 
ideology of nutritionism is itself part of that 
change. To get a firmer grip on the nature of 
those changes is to begin to know how we might 
make our relationships to food healthier. These 
changes have been numerous and far-reaching, but 
consider as a start these four large-scale ones:

From Whole Foods to Refined. The case of corn 
points up one of the key features of the modern 
diet: a shift toward increasingly refined foods, 
especially carbohydrates. Call it applied 
reductionism. Humans have been refining grains 
since at least the Industrial Revolution, 
favoring white flour (and white rice) even at the 
price of lost nutrients. Refining grains extends 
their shelf life (precisely because it renders 
them less nutritious to pests) and makes them 
easier to digest, by removing the fiber that 
ordinarily slows the release of their sugars. 
Much industrial food production involves an 
extension and intensification of this practice, 
as food processors find ways to deliver glucose - 
the brain's preferred fuel - ever more swiftly 
and efficiently. Sometimes this is precisely the 
point, as when corn is refined into corn syrup; 
other times it is an unfortunate byproduct of 
food processing, as when freezing food destroys 
the fiber that would slow sugar absorption.

So fast food is fast in this other sense too: it 
is to a considerable extent predigested, in 
effect, and therefore more readily absorbed by 
the body. But while the widespread acceleration 
of the Western diet offers us the instant 
gratification of sugar, in many people (and 
especially those newly exposed to it) the 
"speediness" of this food overwhelms the insulin 
response and leads to Type II diabetes. As one 
nutrition expert put it to me, we're in the 
middle of "a national experiment in mainlining 
glucose." To encounter such a diet for the first 
time, as when people accustomed to a more 
traditional diet come to America, or when fast 
food comes to their countries, delivers a shock 
to the system. Public-health experts call it "the 
nutrition transition," and it can be deadly.

From Complexity to Simplicity. If there is one 
word that covers nearly all the changes 
industrialization has made to the food chain, it 
would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers 
simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn 
appears to simplify the chemistry of the food 
grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption 
of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, 
the nutritional quality of produce in America 
has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined 
significantly. Some researchers blame the quality 
of the soil for the decline; others cite the 
tendency of modern plant breeding to select for 
industrial qualities like yield rather than 
nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend 
toward simplification of our food continues on up 
the chain. Processing foods depletes them of many 
nutrients, a few of which are then added back in 
through "fortification": folic acid in refined 
flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. 
But food scientists can add back only the 
nutrients food scientists recognize as important. 
What are they overlooking?

Simplification has occurred at the level of 
species diversity, too. The astounding variety of 
foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures 
the fact that the actual number of species in the 
modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of 
economics, the food industry prefers to tease its 
myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of 
plant species, corn and soybeans chief among 
them. Today, a mere four crops account for 
two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you 
consider that humankind has historically consumed 
some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of 
these have been in widespread use, this 
represents a radical simplification of the food 
web. Why should this matter? Because humans are 
omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 
different chemical compounds and elements to be 
healthy. It's hard to believe that we can get 
everything we need from a diet consisting largely 
of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

From Leaves to Seeds. It's no coincidence that 
most of the plants we have come to rely on are 
grains; these crops are exceptionally efficient 
at transforming sunlight into macronutrients - 
carbs, fats and proteins. These macronutrients in 
turn can be profitably transformed into animal 
protein (by feeding them to animals) and 
processed foods of every description. Also, the 
fact that grains are durable seeds that can be 
stored for long periods means they can function 
as commodities as well as food, making these 
plants particularly well suited to the needs of 
industrial capitalism.

The needs of the human eater are another matter. 
An oversupply of macronutrients, as we now have, 
itself represents a serious threat to our health, 
as evidenced by soaring rates of obesity and 
diabetes. But the undersupply of micronutrients 
may constitute a threat just as serious. Put in 
the simplest terms, we're eating a lot more seeds 
and a lot fewer leaves, a tectonic dietary shift 
the full implications of which we are just 
beginning to glimpse. If I may borrow the 
nutritionist's reductionist vocabulary for a 
moment, there are a host of critical 
micronutrients that are harder to get from a diet 
of refined seeds than from a diet of leaves. 
There are the antioxidants and all the other 
newly discovered phytochemicals (remember that 
sprig of thyme?); there is the fiber, and then 
there are the healthy omega-3 fats found in leafy 
green plants, which may turn out to be most 
important benefit of all.

Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with 
fish, but fish get them from green plants 
(specifically algae), which is where they all 
originate. Plant leaves produce these essential 
fatty acids ("essential" because our bodies can't 
produce them on their own) as part of 
photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another 
essential fatty acid: omega-6. Without delving 
too deeply into the biochemistry, the two fats 
perform very different functions, in the plant as 
well as the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play 
an important role in neurological development and 
processing, the permeability of cell walls, the 
metabolism of glucose and the calming of 
inflammation. Omega-6s are involved in fat 
storage (which is what they do for the plant), 
the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the 
inflammation response. (Think of omega-3s as 
fleet and flexible, omega-6s as sturdy and slow.) 
Since the two lipids compete with each other for 
the attention of important enzymes, the ratio 
between omega-3s and omega-6s may matter more 
than the absolute quantity of either fat. Thus 
too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as 
too little omega-3.

And that might well be a problem for people 
eating a Western diet. As we've shifted from 
leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to 
omega-3s in our bodies has shifted, too. At the 
same time, modern food-production practices have 
further diminished the omega-3s in our diet. 
Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil 
more readily, so we have selected for plants that 
produce fewer of them; further, when we partly 
hydrogenate oils to render them more stable, 
omega-3s are eliminated. Industrial meat, raised 
on seeds rather than leaves, has fewer omega-3s 
and more omega-6s than preindustrial meat used to 
have. And official dietary advice since the 1970s 
has promoted the consumption of polyunsaturated 
vegetable oils, most of which are high in 
omega-6s (corn and soy, especially). Thus, 
without realizing what we were doing, we 
significantly altered the ratio of these two 
essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the 
result that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in 
the typical American today stands at more than 10 
to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed 
oils at the turn of the last century, it was 
closer to 1 to 1.

The role of these lipids is not completely 
understood, but many researchers say that these 
historically low levels of omega-3 (or, 
conversely, high levels of omega-6) bear 
responsibility for many of the chronic diseases 
associated with the Western diet, especially 
heart disease and diabetes. (Some researchers 
implicate omega-3 deficiency in rising rates of 
depression and learning disabilities as well.) To 
remedy this deficiency, nutritionism classically 
argues for taking omega-3 supplements or 
fortifying food products, but because of the 
complex, competitive relationship between omega-3 
and omega-6, adding more omega-3s to the diet may 
not do much good unless you also reduce your 
intake of omega-6.

From Food Culture to Food Science. The last 
important change wrought by the Western diet is 
not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the 
industrialization of our food that we call the 
Western diet is systematically destroying 
traditional food cultures. Before the modern food 
era - and before nutritionism - people relied for 
guidance about what to eat on their national or 
ethnic or regional cultures. We think of culture 
as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate 
our relationship to other people, but of course 
culture (at least before the rise of science) has 
also played a critical role in helping mediate 
people's relationship to nature. Eating being a 
big part of that relationship, cultures have had 
a great deal to say about what and how and why 
and when and how much we should eat. Of course 
when it comes to food, culture is really just a 
fancy word for Mom, the figure who typically 
passes on the food ways of the group - food ways 
that, although they were never "designed" to 
optimize health (we have many reasons to eat the 
way we do), would not have endured if they did 
not keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western 
diet, with its 17,000 new food products 
introduced every year, and the marketing muscle 
used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the 
force of tradition and left us where we now find 
ourselves: relying on science and journalism and 
marketing to help us decide questions about what 
to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us 
better deal with the problems of the Western 
diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by 
the industry to sell more food and to undermine 
the authority of traditional ways of eating. You 
would not have read this far into this article if 
your food culture were intact and healthy; you 
would simply eat the way your parents and 
grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to 
eat. The question is, Are we better off with 
these new authorities than we were with the 
traditional authorities they supplanted? The 
answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in 
history, we should simply accept that fast food 
is our food culture. Over time, people will get 
used to eating this way and our health will 
improve. But for natural selection to help 
populations adapt to the Western diet, we'd have 
to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. 
That's not what we're doing. Rather, we're 
turning to the health-care industry to help us 
"adapt." Medicine is learning how to keep alive 
the people whom the Western diet is making sick. 
It's gotten good at extending the lives of people 
with heart disease, and now it's working on 
obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself 
marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems 
it creates into lucrative business opportunities: 
diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin 
pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may 
be good business for the health-care industry, 
surely the cost to society - estimated at more 
than $200 billion a year in diet-related 
health-care costs - is unsustainable.

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM

To medicalize the diet problem is of course 
perfectly consistent with nutritionism. So what 
might a more ecological or cultural approach to 
the problem recommend? How might we plot our 
escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the 
deleterious effects of the modern diet? In theory 
nothing could be simpler - stop thinking and 
eating that way - but this is somewhat harder to 
do in practice, given the food environment we now 
inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to 
guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is 
possible, to which end I can now revisit - and 
elaborate on, but just a little - the simple 
principles of healthy eating I proposed at the 
beginning of this essay, several thousand words 
ago. So try these few (flagrantly unscientific) 
rules of thumb, collected in the course of my 
nutritional odyssey, and see if they don't at 
least point us in the right direction.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of 
confusion, this is much easier said than done. So 
try this: Don't eat anything your 
great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as 
food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as 
confused as the rest of us, which is why we have 
to go back a couple of generations, to a time 
before the advent of modern food products.) There 
are a great many foodlike items in the 
supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as 
food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy 
creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come 
bearing health claims. They're apt to be heavily 
processed, and the claims are often dubious at 
best. Don't forget that margarine, one of the 
first industrial foods to claim that it was more 
healthful than the traditional food it replaced, 
turned out to give people heart attacks. When 
Kellogg's can boast about its Healthy Heart 
Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims 
have become hopelessly compromised. (The American 
Heart Association charges food makers for their 
endorsement.) Don't take the silence of the yams 
as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say 
about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing 
ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) 
unpronounceable c) more than five in number - or 
that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of 
these characteristics are necessarily harmful in 
and of themselves, but all of them are reliable 
markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. 
You won't find any high-fructose corn syrup at 
the farmer's market; you also won't find food 
harvested long ago and far away. What you will 
find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of 
nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food 
your great-great-grandmother would have 
recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system 
has for a century devoted its energies and 
policies to increasing quantity and reducing 
price, not to improving quality. There's no 
escaping the fact that better food - measured by 
taste or nutritional quality (which often 
correspond) - costs more, because it has been 
grown or raised less intensively and with more 
care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in 
America, which is shameful, but most of us can: 
Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent 
of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 
1947, and less than the citizens of any other 
nation. And those of us who can afford to eat 
well should. Paying more for food well grown in 
good soils - whether certified organic or not - 
will contribute not only to your health (by 
reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the 
health of others who might not themselves be able 
to afford that sort of food: the people who grow 
it and the people who live downstream, and 
downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

"Eat less" is the most unwelcome advice of all, 
but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot 
less than we currently do is compelling. "Calorie 
restriction" has repeatedly been shown to slow 
aging in animals, and many researchers (including 
Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) 
believe it offers the single strongest link 
between diet and cancer prevention. Food 
abundance is a problem, but culture has helped 
here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. 
Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, 
the Okinawans practiced a principle they called 
"Hara Hachi Bu": eat until you are 80 percent 
full. To make the "eat less" message a bit more 
palatable, consider that quality may have a 
bearing on quantity: I don't know about you, but 
the better the quality of the food I eat, the 
less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes 
are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. 
Scientists may disagree on what's so good about 
plants - the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? - but 
they do agree that they're probably really good 
for you and certainly can't hurt. Also, by eating 
a plant-based diet, you'll be consuming far fewer 
calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are 
typically less "energy dense" than the other 
things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier 
than carnivores, but near vegetarians 
("flexitarians") are as healthy as vegetarians. 
Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he 
advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a 
food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or 
the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors 
aside, people who eat according to the rules of a 
traditional food culture are generally healthier 
than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it 
weren't a healthy diet, the people who follow it 
wouldn't still be around. True, food cultures are 
embedded in societies and economies and 
ecologies, and some of them travel better than 
others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In 
borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to 
how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. 
In the case of the French paradox, it may not be 
the dietary nutrients that keep the French 
healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so 
much as the dietary habits: small portions, no 
seconds or snacking, communal meals - and the 
serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about 
diet can't possibly be good for you.) Let culture 
be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take 
part in the intricate and endlessly interesting 
processes of providing for our sustenance is the 
surest way to escape the culture of fast food and 
the values implicit in it: that food should be 
cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not 
communion. The culture of the kitchen, as 
embodied in those enduring traditions we call 
cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and 
health than you are apt to find in any nutrition 
journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow 
yourself contributes to your health long before 
you sit down to eat it. So you might want to 
think about putting down this article now and 
picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, 
not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the 
diversity of species you eat, the more likely you 
are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of 
course is an argument from nutritionism, but 
there is a better one, one that takes a broader 
view of "health." Biodiversity in the diet means 
less monoculture in the fields. What does that 
have to do with your health? Everything. The vast 
monocultures that now feed us require tremendous 
amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to 
keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields 
will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, 
healthier plants and animals and, in turn, 
healthier people. It's all connected, which is 
another way of saying that your health isn't 
bordered by your body and that what's good for 
the soil is probably good for you, too.


Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the 
Knight professor of journalism at the University 
of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, 
"The Omnivore's Dilemma," was chosen by the 
editors of The New York Times Book Review as one 
of the 10 best books of 2006.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

***   NOTICE:  In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. 
Section 107, this material is distributed, 
without profit, for research and educational 
purposes only.   ***
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