In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Paperback – April 28, 2009

I have a medical and science background...so traced references cited....everything checks out. Recently diagnosed with osteoarthritis at age 63 and weight 284 pounds. Read this book the first week of January.....went shopping for real foods the second week of January. Find it satisfying to eat no more than 4 oz of red meat 2-3 times a week....salmon, mackeral, sardines 2-3 times a week....and a couple of days with no meat...just veggie omega 3 sources. Have re-read the book....highlighted...added notes on all pages...and bought 2 more copies for my 30 and 21 year olds...both who grew up in the age of "nutritionism" with all its false information. Following Pollan's common sense advice....paying the extra for organic basic veggies and olive oil. Decided to eliminate all wheat and corn until I loose the weight I've set as a goal.
Five weeks eating 3 meals a day...and by week two much of the chronic 24 hour a day pain was gone and I began walking the elliptical and the woods. Five weeks and 30 pounds lighter....with more energy than I've had in 20 years. Buy this book, learn it, live it, tell your loved ones.

One of the best reads ever for me--better than "Ominovores Delima", or "Good Calories, Bad Calories". This is a small and concentrated book, but reads and enters the mind like oiled silk. Truly made me stop and ponder and rethink so much of our culture and our relationship with food--and this from an individual on a low carb high fat diet, who cooks twice daily. I can only think how much more it could do for those with more mainstream and processed diets...!

Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food, is thought provoking. He describes why we should be eating real food as opposed to highly processed food. He also comes to the conclusions of how we should eat real food. I thought it was easy to read, and I agreed mostly with his ideas. I prefer mainly vegetarian meals, but that didn't keep me from enjoying the book. He seems to think that it is advisable to cut down on the amount of meat
in our meals, and also increase the number of meatless meals in a month. I have tried it and it has helped lower my blood pressure. Yes!

Bought the hardcopy after listening to local library's audio version twice. I'm more of a visual learner plus I wanted to be able to refer back to specific areas more easily. Ironically, given Pollan's thoughts on Nutritionism, this book and The Omnivore's Dilemma were partly the inspiration for me to begin a Masters program in Nutrition. I'm working hard to stay away from the -ISM thinking as I proceed.

The American public has long been a captive audience of food industry corporations. They push onto our grocery store shelves inexpensive food dressed up to dazzle and seduce, all the while telling us it is good for us. The main name of the game is profit. And the clever foods corporations figured out cheaper and faster ways to produce a number of "building block material" they could use to craft all kinds of food products. Most of processed food is comprised of bleached flour, corn syrup, sodium, and hydrogenated oils. The techniques to create them have been heavily optimized so that it is cheap to create enormous quantities. This "stuff" is then used to create all kinds of things like cereals, breads, cookies, chips, snacks, and a myriad of prepared foods. On their own, the food would be mostly lacking in nutrition. So, the food companies dump in all kinds of vitamins and minerals (confirmed by scientists to be essential to our good health) to then lay claim to these things being more nutritious than old fashioned "real" food. The marketing folks tasked to help with selling these products create all kinds of attractive packaging and advertisements to lure us to the purchase. But these products are far from healthy. The inserted vitamins and minerals are not sufficiently absorbed by the human body. And the constituents of the foods consumed create other problems that outweigh any possible nutrition that might be received.

The main problem is that these companies become incredibly rich while America becomes fat and undernourished. And the side effects of this are insidiously slow to realize... it takes many years before the symptoms occur, like the massive chronic illness called diabetes. But, the pharmaceutical industry is more than happy for this to happen, for now THEY get wealthy by creating a continuous supply of the drugs needed to counteract the illnesses spawned by the poor American diet.

Michael Pollan's book goes into useful detail about how all of this happened... how America's diet became hijacked by the massive foods business and sent us on a horrible path to ill health. In the second half of the book, he gets into the basics of how we can rescue ourselves from our bad eating habits. How we can be smart to select "real food" that is really good for us.

You will find that if you follow Pollan's guidelines, you won't need to be constantly chasing after the latest diet craze. You will be healthy and fit, as long as you eat the right foods in concert with regular exercise and sufficient sleep. Don't look for an overnight change. It will be gradual. But you will notice it and hopefully live much longer (and healthier) than you would have if you had continued your previous dieting habits.

Thanks to Michael Pollan for his books that are helping to wake up America. I imagine the foods industries will try to confuse us into thinking they've fixed it all and we've nothing to worry about... but at this point, I wouldn't trust them any longer. Stay away from highly processed foods and they can't bother you. Stick with what nature intended. Don't fear all things processed... a little bit of processing is OK, as long as the ingredients are basic. But try to eat natural foods as much as possible.

Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. How simple is that?

This book takes a look at how "authorities" in food nutrition have steered us down the wrong path (well, any path!) in order to make a profit.

We can take charge and eat what our grandmother's put on our parents plates and I have to agree with this. My mom still buys whole milk and we would think, Oh, the fat content, my gawd, don't you buy 1% milk? That's what we do now .. we buy 1% milk that has been so processed it barely resembles what came out of the cow.

What strikes me as amazing is that the author isn't saying anything ground breaking, it's just simple, straight forward, basic ideas about food and how the industry is basically fooling us to buy into the next great nutritionism.

I enjoyed reading this book so much that I originally purchased the e-copy, but then bought the paperback so I have a hard copy.