Brian Johnson breaks down how industrialization rewired our food system: whole foods became refined, quality gave way to quantity, and food culture turned into food science. Four crops now supply two-thirds of our calories, and nearly 60% of what we eat is ultra-processed. Michael Pollan's advice still holds: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Questions this video answers
August 12, 2016.
Five key transformations.
Corn, soy (and soybean oil), wheat, and rice.
58%.
About 20% of the diet.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on industrialized food. It's inspired by In Defensive Food by Michael Pollan, one of the world's leading thinkers on nutrition. Time magazine calls him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in defense of food against what? Against what he calls nutritionism, which we talk about more in the note. Basic idea that you can identify the value of food by looking at it nutrient by nutrient by nutrient. Hmm, not so effective. And it's influenced in part by the industrialization of our food. There are five key transformations that have occurred among many in the industrialization process of processing our food. Here's a quick look at them. We'll do a quick overview, then drive in to some more detail. Whole foods to refined foods is the first shift. The second is complexity to simplicity. And that's not a good thing in this case. The third thing is quality to quantity, again, not a positive shift. Fourth thing leaves to seeds. And then finally food culture to food science. So, quick overview of each of those. Whole foods to refined foods. So industrial revolution comes around. And before the Industrial revolution, we basically ate whole foods. Yes, there was some processing, but you couldn't refine them, right? So, for example, flours were stone ground, right? And then the Industrial revolution comes around, and in like something like 1870, all of a sudden you can put an iron roller on wheat, for example, to create a different type of flour. When it's stone ground, you could separate the bran from the grain, but you couldn't separate the germ. Now, the germ has a lot of important nutrients in it, but. But it also made the flour kind of yellow and it spoiled quickly. It would get rancid fast, which was actually a very good thing because it still had nutritional value. But with the Industrial Revolution, when you can refine food, all of a sudden you could get rid of the germ. You could separate the germ and then what do you have? You have super pretty white flour that could stay on your shelf for months. You could ship it on ships going across the world and it preserved. Rodents wouldn't eat it. Insects wouldn't eat it, wouldn't go bad. Why? Because it had no nutritional value. So sounded good, but it wasn't a positive addition to our diet. It's a core part of the Western diet. In fact, we talk about the note. You can trace traditional cultures getting Western diseases largely by following the route of flour, sugar. Those were the two things that could be shipped most easily. And those are the two things that contributed the most to western diseases showing up in traditional cultures. And then after the flour and the sugar, we also learned how to make oil out of seeds we never had, for example, soybean oil till like 100 years ago. Now it's 20% of our diet, which we're going to talk about next. We move from complexity to simplicity. Complexity. We used to eat a ton of different foods. The soil used to be very rich. Now we have simplicity. Did you know that four crops account for 66% of our caloric intake? Corn, soy, and soybean oil, wheat and rice now account for 66% of our total calories. That's crazy. And guess what? 58% of our total calories are refined, ultra processed. And we wonder why we have the health issues we do. Not surprising. Quality to quantity. When you have the industrial revolution, what happens? All of a sudden you want to mass produce stuff, right? Factory farm, fruits, vegetables, animals, et cetera. Well, what happens when you do that is the quality goes down. For example, Michael Pollan tells us you could get a certain amount of iron in a 1940 apple with higher quality, and it would take you three of those apples today to get the same amount of iron that you could get in a 1940 apple. Quality versus quantity. The solution to that, of course, is we focus more on quality. Right? We eat a little less of certain foods or all food, really. Right. But we eat higher quality, lower quantity. And then the fourth is, we used to eat a ton of leaves, now we eat a ton of seeds. Guess what? All four of these crops that account for 66% of our total calories are seeds. Grains are seeds. And again, they're super nutrient dense, which has perks. Right. But that's not how we evolved to live. We should be eating a lot more seeds, I'm sorry, leaves than seeds. And guess what? Our animals are also eating these grains, which they did not evolve to eat. And this disrupts our omega 3 and omega 6 ratio in unhealthy ways, which we've been talking about a lot. Then the final shift here is from food culture to food science. We used to look at our culture as our guide for what we should eat. And he jokingly says that was pretty much Mom. Mom knew what we should eat. Generation after generation after generation passed down. This is the first time that we don't eat what our moms ate growing up. And they don't eat what their moms ate growing up. That's very unusual. We don't think think about it. We take it for granted. But now we look at what food scientists tell us we should eat, Michael Pollan says. How's that working for us? Answer is it's not working particularly well. It's a quick look at how industrializing our food has dramatically shifted our relationship to it. Whole foods to refined, complex to simple. We went from quality to quantity, leaves to seeds, food culture to food science. We want to reverse that stuff. It's actually not that hard. Do you remember Michael Pollan's seven words on how to do it? Eat food, not too much and mostly plants. We don't need to move into a cave or back into the bush to reverse Western chronic diseases. We just need a bit of a little smarter get on that. Have another awesome day. See ya. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus Common sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our Optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.
