In the book “IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER’S MANIFESTO”, Michael Pollan emphasizes his point at the beginning (page 1): “eat food. Not too much. Most plants.” Also, he declares that claims and tests of nutritionism are not reliable.
Admittedly, today the food we eat today is almost all processed, and sometimes its ingredients do contain many stuffs. But does current food indeed impair our health? Or is the decline of health condition only due to people’s fast-tempo life and unhealthy living habits?
On page 89, Pollan defined the Western diet as “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.” However, what he describes seems to be merely the fast food. If we eat at home, we will have not only meat but also salad and fruits; because our moms have enough time to prepare a great meal but not fast food (whose mom will cook fast food at home?). And in the school’s dining hall, there are lots of vegetables (here is even a vegetable court) and fruits, fresh and clean. And almost each student will have one scoop of vegetables and take one fruit (often banana or apple) for each meal.
Also, Pollan says food contains too many ingredients (often more than 5) nowadays. Nonetheless, miscellaneous ingredients cannot mean that the food is over-processed. An Italian main course usually has various ingredients which are easily beyond five. For those delicate cuisines, diverse ingredients are significant to make the dish gratifying. And when you read labels carefully, though the ingredients on them seem to be complicated, you will find among the ingredients there are lots of seasonings which make the food tasty.
Moreover Pollan protests the processed food, which he thinks makes us weak. As he mentions on page 93, “the life expectancy of a sixty-five-year-old in 1900 was only about six years less than that of a sixty-five-year-old living today. When you adjust for age, rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes are considerably higher today than they were in 1900.” It seems to be processed food’s fault, whereas in modern society people can easily gain overnutrition due to the heterogeneous foods they can choose from. Besides, those diseases are largely due to heredity physical inactivity, smoking, etc. And how can human beings resist the polluted air, water, and soil? On the contrary, low-fat and low-cholesterol food protects us from those chronic diseases because they control the excess nutrient.
People’s obesity, which is a main cause for diseases like hypertension, dyslipidemia, and hypercholesterolemia, largely origins from physical inactivity and unhealthy living habits such as staying up late and smoking. All the things mentioned above can lead to the unbalance of energy intake and energy expenditure.
If Pollan’s law did work, we should grow our own garden and buy local. But how can people cultivate their own plants in such a high pace modern life? Also, how can he insure the local food meet “his requirement”? If his suggestions are unrealistic, what’s the meaning of his argument?
To say the least, if Pollan is definitely right, why does our school (and most other schools) have one class named HPS (Health Performance Science) which includes nutritionism and shows the success of it?
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