PNTV: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (#329)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. In Defense of Food Subtitle An Eater's Manifesto. Great book. We recently featured Food Rules, another book by Michael Pollan, which is essentially a distillation of the most practical wisdom and food rules from this book. Michael Pollan is, according to Time magazine, one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2010, or something like that, they made that ranking. He's one of the world's leading thinkers on nutrition. He's also a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, which is awesome. And one of the reasons why I like him so much is that he provides a more journalistic kind of objective view into nutrition, a field that, as we all know, has a lot of very strong dogmatic ideological belief systems in it. And I really appreciate his more broad objective perspective. Super helpful. So I read this book as Preparation for optimal nutrition 101, which I'm going to be filming in a couple weeks. Excited to share that soon. And we got a philosopher's note, as always. Bunch of ideas, five of them here. Nutritionism. We need to ask ourselves, okay, so the book is called In Defensive Food. What are we defending food against? Pollan tells us we are defending it against nutritionism. Nutritionism is a word coined by a researcher who says that it's basically an ideology where you think that the best way to understand food is to look at it nutrient by nutrient by nutrient, which makes sense to a degree. And our culture is so immersed in it that we don't even think about it. It's an ideology. It's an ism, right? Nutritionism, it's just part of how we see the world. But it wasn't always this way. It wasn't until very recently that we started talking about carbohydrates and phytonutrients and fiber and amino acids and essential fatty acids and all these other nutritional nutrient qualities of food. Kind of the invisible stuff that scientists need to look at to tell us what it means, Right? Before, we used to talk about food in very simple terms as food. Hey, there's a berry. There's a yam. That's chard. Didn't take a lot of complex science to look at that and say, that's food. Nutritionism tries to understand food by looking at it in a reductionistic way. Nutrient by nutrient by nutrient. Now, of course, there's some value in that, but as a culture, we've been swept up in it and One of the. And so we need to defend food against this. One of the best examples of how we get in trouble when we take a nutritionism approach is baby formula. When you start thinking nutrient by nutrient by nutrient, and you're able to identify some of the nutrients in human breast milk, you can say, oh, we need this and this and this. Well, we can do that. Food scientists are smart enough to make that. We'll just throw something together. Baby formula. Here you go. It's even better than what nature made. Only problem was they missed a few important things. Okay, they figured that out. They missed a few more important things. And now with the most nutritionally complete baby formula substitute, babies fed on formula are not as healthy as babies fed from natural breast milk, period. Nutritionism is what gets us into that type of trouble, where we have the hubris to think that we're going to be able to figure it all out. Yes, you can identify this nutrient and that nutrient, but what about all the stuff you're missing and what about all the other information that's relayed when we consume food? This is why the book is called In Defense of Food. The other thing that gets a lot of other things we can talk about there. I'll leave it at that. Second big idea is related to this, which is one big failed experiment. When you start looking at nutrients and you start saying, hmm, I notice that this appears to be related to that. Whether it's saturated fat appears to be related to cholesterol, which appears to be related to heart disease, for example, you start making leaps and you start using that. At the time, in our country, unsolid data to run big experiments of what would happen if we reduce the amount of dietary fat, had been consuming it for hundreds of years in this country and thousands and millions of years before we had this important nutrient in our diet. But, hey, what would happen if we removed it? And literally. Michael Pollan shares some fascinating stuff on the kind of historical and political evolution of how we got to the point where we entered the low fat era, which, by the way, low fat is the fad, not high fat. People talk about this idea that having a healthy amount of fat in our diet is a fad. It's not. The fad was low fat. It was the first time in history where a government tried to. Our government tried to completely changed the entire nutritional intake of the entire population. Right, with a low fat experiment. And one of the researchers said the data wasn't rock solid to support this. But he said, what could be the problem with reducing dietary Fats. Why not, quote unquote at the press conference or whatever when they released this, why not reduce dietary fat? Well, why not? Because you can't figure out nutritionism, you can't figure out the hubris of baby formula. What goes on when you start tweaking with things at that high of a level. Another why not is that 60% of your brain is fat. To reduce dietary fat consumption without taking that into account is a dangerous thing. We're not going to go into this. We talk about it a lot more in other notes. Always hungry. A ton of science on that. Eat fat, get thin. More science there. The happiness diet. More science on this. All of this recent research echoes the fact that this is a failed experiment. And again, it was driven by this nutrient by nutrient by nutrient approach rather than the holistic. Let's look at it and think about it, common sense wise. And again, I didn't mention Michael Pollan's seven word thesis or kind of recommendation on food which he starts his book with. Do you remember what it is from a Learning 101 perspective? Can you recall it? We talked about it a lot in Food Rules. What was it? Eat food. Not too much, mostly plants. We get in trouble when we start eating non food stuff. Third big idea here is the Aborigine in all of us. He talks about some really cool research done in Australia. Traditional cultures, as we talked about in Food Rules. You can be on a high fat diet like the Inuit. You can be on a high protein diet like the Masai. You can be on a high carb diet like South American Indians. Those traditional diets, they can be super different, but they won't lead to chronic diseases. The disease that leads the diet that leads to chronic diseases is the Western diet, right? So Aborigines, for example in Australia who start adopting the Western diet, flour, sugar, etc. Start getting Western diseases, never had them come to Western diet and lifestyle and they start getting them. So researchers said, I wonder what would happen if we took these Aborigines and and brought them back into the bush and had them hunt and forage for their food, right? They had adopted these lifestyle practices and diet, but they still knew how to hunt and forage for food. So anyway, they all had diabetes and insulin resistance and all these other common Western issues. This researcher took them out into the bush seven weeks later, boom. Reversed basically all of those Western disease issues and markers, right? The type 2 diabetes, etc. In seven weeks. So the point here is that those Western disease influenced chronic issues are easy to Reverse. In modern society, we don't have to go to the bush. Michael Pollan tells us you don't have to go escape civilization. You just need to eat food. Not too much, mostly plants. Which leads us to our fourth big idea. Industrialized food. And he talks about five, five different things, fundamental transformations that occurred. We take it for granted, but 100 years ago, we were eating very, very different food than we are today. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that we learned to do a lot of things to food that we simply could not do before the Industrial Revolution. I'm going to create a micro class where I walk through five of the things that we learned, the basic ideas that happened over the last hundred years, and why the Western diet is so bad. Quick look at them are. We moved from whole foods to refined foods. When you can industrialize food, you go from whole food to refined food. We went from complexity to simplicity. Right? Four different food groups or four different crops, I should say, account for 66% of our caloric intake. Corn, soy, wheat and rice. Four crops account for 66% of our caloric intake. That's insane. Complexity, a ton of variety, simplicity, not good. Then we move from quality of food to quantity of food. Makes the point that you can eat. You have to eat three apples today, for example, to meet the equivalent level of iron that was in an Apple from 1941. Apple, 1940. Certain amount of iron today with depleted soils and all the other things we've done, you got to eat three apples to get that same level. We've gone from quality to quantity. We want to shift that. Fourth thing is we went from eating a ton of leaves to a ton of seeds. Those four crops I mentioned, all seeds. We want to reverse that. We got to eat a lot more leaves. Short story here is salads are your friend. And then we went from a food culture influencing us what our moms tell us we should eat to food scientists telling us what we should eat. That's not a good switch. So there were huge shifts with the Industrial Revolution as applied to our food processing and development. Fifth big idea. So this one's fascinating. One of the rules is don't eat anything with a health claim on it that it's good for you. Did you know that the American Heart association has gave its seal of approval to Lucky Charms and to Cocoa Puffs and to Trix cereals. Those companies that produce them paid the American Heart association to get a stamp saying that Lucky Charms are health food. Heart healthy. Right? And Trix and Cocoa Puffs, that's insane to think that those are being put forward as health foods. And the reason why they are is because we've bought into this nutritionism. We thought that fat was bad for us. So foods that have low fat and high grains. Right. No matter how much sugar they have. Yeah. Let's put a heart healthy stamp on it. Eat these. These are great for your health. That's crazy. Talks about all kinds of other products that have gotten a health stamp from the fda. Frito Lay can say that some corn chips are healthy because they supposedly replace certain calories. It's literally insane. System is just backwards. We've got to step back, defend whole food and vote with every bite we have. Keep that in mind. Lucky Charms as a health food. This is ridiculous. Five major transformations. We're going to talk about that some more and check out the note for more the Aborigine in all of us, we've all consumed more of the western diet than is advisable. But you can reverse that simply without having to move back to the bush. The failed experiment that is the low fat diet. Not a good idea. And again, the primary culprit here is the refined flours, the refined sugars not helping the process of optimizing and actualizing. Then we have nutritionism, which is what we need to defend food against. It's not nutrient by nutrient by nutrient divorced from every other aspect of our food intake. We've got to take a wider perspective. Remember, baby formula is a great example of the hubris of food scientists thinking they can do something better than nature. Another one is hydrogenated margarine. This is like revolutionarily awesome in the 20th century until we realized actually that creates more heart disease than the original thing, butter. So let's step back. Eat food. Not too much, mostly plants. Hope you enjoyed. I look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See you. 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 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 asterisks 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 as something we call philosophy, where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. 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