As a health writer, I’ve read hundreds of nutrition studies and countless books on diet and eating. And none of these has contained such useful advice as the cover of Michael Pollan’s latest book, “In Defense of Food.”
Wrapped around a head of lettuce are seven words that tell you pretty much everything you need to know about healthful eating. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Author Michael Pollan (Alia Malley)This seemingly-simple message is surprisingly complex, because there is food, and then there are what Mr. Pollan describes as “edible food-like substances.” Mr. Pollan, who writes for The New York Times Magazine, developed something of a cult following for his best-selling book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which traced the food chain back to its original source. But while “Omnivore” left many scared to eat, “In Defense of Food” helps the reader bravely navigate the food landscape, explaining what food is, what it isn’t and how to tell the difference.
Mr. Pollan agreed to take some time this week to answer a few questions from the Well blog.
In this book, you talk about “nutritionism,” the tendency of scientists and nutrition experts to view food as just a sum of its nutrient parts. What’s wrong with that thinking?
Two things go wrong with nutritionism. Whatever tentative scientific information is developed, it gets very quickly distorted by the food marketers and manufacturers. They will take partial information about antioxidants, and they are suddenly telling you if you eat almonds you are going to live forever. There is a distortion of what are hypotheses of science. We’re guilty of this too. We take sketchy science, and we write headlines.
One of the things that surprised me is how poor the data is that is underlying many of these big dietary trials. If you try to fill out a food frequency questionnaire, you realize very quickly this is not good data. I was as honest as I could be and tried to remember what I’d eaten, and it claimed I was only eating 1,200 calories a day. Clearly, I was forgetting at least 1,000 calories. We know people underreport by about 30 percent. We don’t know the first thing about nutrition, which is, “What are people actually eating?” It’s hard to build good science on top of that.
Did you expect the phrase, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” to create such a stir?
I was kind of surprised. After the original article in The Times magazine used those words, I started hearing it then. I realized they had a certain power. That’s why I encouraged the publisher to put them on the cover and give it all away there.
But it’s not as simple as it sounds, is it?
It’s not, because of all these edible food-like substances in the stores that are masquerading as food. It’s simple advice as long as you know what food is, but I spend 14 pages trying to define what food is. It’s gotten complicated because of food science and the kind of engineering that’s gone into processing food.
Speaking of engineering, food from cloned animals appears headed for approval in Europe and the United States. Does cloned food qualify as real food?
I think the bigger concern with cloned animals is not personal health. It’s what will it take to keep a herd of genetically identical chickens, horses or pigs alive? Sex and variation is what keeps us from getting wiped out by microbes. If everything is genetically identical, one disease can come along and wipe out the entire group. You will need so many antibiotics and so much sanitation to keep a herd of these creatures going. The bigger concern should be antibiotic resistance.
The nutrition community is fascinated by the French paradox — the fact that the French eat seemingly fattening food but don’t get fat. In your book you describe an American paradox. What is it?
Americans are a people so obsessed with nutrition yet whose dietary health is so poor. That strikes me as a paradox. We worry more about nutritional health, and we see food in terms of health. Yet we’re the world champs in terms of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and the cancers linked to diet. I think it’s odd. It suggests that worrying about your dietary health is not necessarily good for your dietary health.
So how should we think about food and health?
I think health should be a byproduct of eating well, for reasons that have nothing to do with health, such as cooking meals, eating together and eating real food. You’re going to be healthy, but that’s not the goal. The goal should just be eating well for pleasure, for community, and all the other reasons people eat. What I’m trying to do is to bring a man-from-Mars view to the American way of thinking about food. This is so second nature to us — food is either advancing your health or ruining your health. That’s a very limited way to think about food, and it’s a very limited way to think about health. The health of our bodies is tied to the health of the community and the health of the earth. Health is indivisible. That’s my covert message.
A reader commented recently that this sounded like a diet book. Is it?
There is no Michael Pollan diet. It’s an algorithm to help you make decisions rather than telling you narrowly: “Eat butter. Don’t eat margarine.” Although you could probably deduce that from what I’m saying. I don’t feel like it’s our job to tell people what to eat. I think our job is to help people think about it. I’m trying to take down the cult of expert eating. The danger is that I then offer myself as an expert. I’m trying to channel the wisdom of culture about eating. My idea here is that science so far hasn’t figured out nutrition well enough to be the arbiter of our food choices. When science has done that — take the public health campaign around fat, that has been the biggest test case — it didn’t work out very well. If science can’t guide us yet, who can? The answer is not me. The answer is culture, history and tradition. That’s what my rules are all about. The book is trying to show why this nutritionism approach to food doesn’t work very well, besides the fact that it ruins our pleasure in eating.
What do you eat?
I eat lots of food. What do you mean?
Does your food ever come out of a package?
Really seldom. If you look in my pantry, you won’t find that much processed stuff. Maybe some canned soups and tuna fish. I don’t have a lot of low-fat products. I much prefer to eat less of a full-fat product. You wont’ find skim milk. We’re lucky. I live in Berkeley with a farmers’ market four blocks away, and it’s open 50 weeks a year. I have the luxury of being able to buy very fresh, good food. I have a weakness for bread. A good white baguette — I have a weakness for that.
After reading your book, I want to plant and grow something. Do you get this a lot?
My first book was about gardening, and I like gardening. It’s a really important part of the solution. In so many places, including urban areas, there is a yard, there is a lawn, a little patch of land where you could grow food. My garden is only 10 by 20 feet. It’s a postage stamp. I grew so much food there last summer. What food is more local than the food you grow yourself, not to mention the fact that you get all this exercise while you’re gardening.
How does one stop eating edible food-like substances and switch to eating real food? Isn’t it difficult to change?
We have more choices now than we’ve ever had. There is organic food at Wal-Mart. The big challenge is that you do have to cook. A lot of us are intimidated by cooking today. We watch cooking shows on TV but we cook very little. We’re turning cooking into a spectator sport. This process of outsourcing our food preparation to large corporations, which is what we’ve been doing the last 50 years, is a big part of our problem. We’re seduced by convenience. You’re going to have to put a little more time and effort into preparing your food. I’m trying to get across how pleasurable that can be. It needn’t be a chore. It can be incredibly rewarding to move food closer to the center of your life.
Healthy living doesn't happen at the doctor's office. The road to better health is paved with the small decisions we make every day. It's about the choices we make when we buy groceries, drive our cars and hang out with our kids. Join columnist Tara Parker-Pope as she sifts through medical research and expert opinions for practical advice to help readers take control of their health and live well every day. You can reach Ms. Parker-Pope at 
The easiest and most pleasurable way to eat well is to cook. Recipes for Health offers recipes with an eye towards empowering you to cook healthy meals every day. 
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BRAVO! What great advice. I have never had a weight problem, and people always ask me what I “do” - well, mostly what Mr. Pollan advocates, with the addition of my mother’s philosophy - “everything in moderation”.
We bemoan the lack of time we have to prepare real, fresh foods, but when you think about the price we pay with our health for convenience foods, it’s just not worth it. To me, anyway…..
— SharonWow. What great insights from Michael Pollan. Take another look at his response to the question about the American paradox, where he points out that we are obsessed with nutrition yet we’re fat. Then look at the next question where he talks about how health is a byproduct of eating well. This is precisely what the French do, perhaps a leading reason for the “French paradox.” I recall being amazed when I was a teacher in the French public school system to see the wonderful, inexpensive real foods being served to school children. The same was true at the university level in the cafeterias. The French take time to eat and to savor what they eat, and they eat well, but in small doses. A small bite of real food is immensely more satisfying than a ton of processed non-real food. Unfortunately, we teach our children at a young age to eat crap and to eat it quickly. Just look at the 25 minutes or so allotted for lunch at summer camps and elementary schools. My four-year-old son was humiliated because he was always the last to finish eating. He wasn’t eating processed “Lunchables” like so many of the other kids - he was trying to eat his real food. It is a battle to raise kids on a healthy diet in this country. And Tara, you bring such wonderful insights to your readers – this interview with Michael Pollan being just the latest example. Thanks so much!
— Lynn from Organicmania.comI love Michael Pollan’s writing and his beliefs. I’ve been eating organic for about 15 years, ever since my mother was diagnosed with bone cancer and, when she asked her oncologist how she could get something like that, was told, “You live in a chemical society.” I don’t want to pin a huge responsibility on one writer, but what Mr. Pollan writes and says makes so much sense, on so many levels, I can only hope he continues to reach a wider and wider audience. The Omnivore’s Dilemma didn’t make me scared to eat — it made me want to cook.
— francoisIn one of my magazines I came across a quote from a chef that I just adore and which I use to inspire myself when I’m at a loss for what to make: “Cooking for those you love is one of life’s great joys.” Cooking, love, life, joy– it’s all there.
I absolutely loved “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, and he said the same words in that book. I haven’t read the new one, and am not sure I will. The previous book was just packed with information- I learned a lot about grass farming, nutritional advantages of organic foods (yes, there IS a difference), factory farms, corn and corn syrup, governmental actions and their often negative effects on farming and the food industry in the U.S….. and on and on. But I am a bit dismayed that this book, which by its title and tag line (”Eat food….”) comes off as more of an advice book is getting so much more pub. Michael Pollan is a brilliant man and a very good writer and a pleasure to listen to… but do we really need him (or any other author- I am not at all picking on or criticizing him) to tell us how to eat? I am somewhat disappointed to think that it never occurred to the seemingly intelligent and astute type of readers who would be drawn to his writing, to eat “butter, not margarine” and avoid processed foods and faux “food”. I mean, I learned that from my parents, and I was born in the 1950s. Are we, as a country, so easily led?
— AnnieIn my opinion the easiest way to choose the right food is to eat what early men ate:
— Sergey Kalitenko, MDmeat, fish, fruits, vegetables, legumens, eggs, cooked properly to avoid infection.
I think we should try to avoid processed food because our body is not created to digest it.
Right on! My rule of thumb is to eat a high-quality protein (nuts and whole-grain, meat, fish, beans and grain), vegetable (green, orange or yellow) and fruit at every meal. OK, I substitute a glass of carrot juice at breakfast, but it’s normal eating. Basically, it’s the 4-food groups I was taught, but I always combine the grains with beans or nuts to make a protein, or I skip them.
— jimMr. Pollan’s views, with which I am in substantial agreement, need to be taken in moderation. Those of us who do not eat certain foods because of ethical or health issues have recourse to engineered foods containing multiple, and safe, ingredients. We use these foods in moderation, as well. If you don’t understand an ingredient name, do the research before you dismiss it. Let’s not edge over into populist know-nothingism, even in a good cause.
— Barry BlitsteinThis is the best news I’ve heard in years. Everyday I feel guilty over the time and money I spend on feeding my family home-cooked meals. It’s so 1950’s housewife-y. Instead I should be working out, emailing the office, dragging the kids to another soccer game, or at least paying down my credit card debt. And get this, it’s my job to cook! I’m a food and wine consultant! I even host a blog for home cooks! (http://sogood.tv). That’s it, I’m not drinking the kool aid anymore. Ladies (and gentlemen), get back in the kitchen with your heads held high! The whole planet will thank you.
— Heather JohnstonMr. Pollan’s remark about genetically cloned animals is extremely important. As he says, the problem is not so much with the final quality of the food itself — which is probably going to be (mostly) fine. Instead, the problem clearly has to do with the way in which the animals are kept, and what costs are associated with keeping them alive.
Unfortunately, the agencies that make the decisions in this country seem to be only concerned with the end result: is it safe to eat or not? Focusing solely on this final outcome ignores a host of issues that are crucial to our health, animal health, and the health of the planet as a whole.
— paul millerMy three year knows the difference between “real” food and junk food. Anything processed is junk. McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King and all fast food is junk food. We eat real food just like Dr Kalitenko has suggested. It is so easy to fall for eating junk food but it also just as easy to eat real foods. Snacks don’t need to be junk food, we eat carrots and celery for snacks, not cookies and ice cream. Real foods will not keep your child bouncing off the ceilings like junk food does. Eat real foods, it’s easy!
— Kevin GriggsThat’s Michael”Don’t Forget to Buy My Book” Pollan, pushing his shopping cart through the aisles of PR.
— artyI will buy the book.
“…worrying about your dietary health is not necessarily good for your dietary health.”
It has been perplexing to me to see how many larger folks drink diet soda and lite beer…while others with normal weight pay little attention.
Like others, people have asked me how I maintain my weight so consistently. Eat fresh food! What you want and when you want and just not so much. Mothers did no favors with their admonitions to “clean your plate”.
- Patrick
— PatrickGreat, simple advice that is easy to follow. It’s a wonder that the American paradox that Mr. Pollan describes is true considering the alternative is so attainable. When I eat, grocery shop, and tend to my vegetable garden I try to channel the folks that came before me 100, 1000, 2000 years ago. They didn’t need processed foods, so why should i? Why ruin the beautiful, natural thing that is food? Everytime i harvest a pepper, or snip some herbs out of my backyard, I am more inspired and awed by nature, and realize that there is absolutely no reason to have it any other way.
— LGOK, so I don’t really like gardening. Every year, half of our tomatoes are eaten by the squirrels, the other half is fouling away. The beans, well, same story. But cooking?
— ThomasI can not possibly understand how people don’t like to cook. We probably have some 30+ cookbooks at home, simply looking at them is fun. Then saying: Hey let’s make this tonight. it doesn’t need to be fancy, doesn’t need to take long, but it should be fresh. It’s fun. And, I believe, it naturally leads to eating together. After all, after the effort you want to be praised by your kids and spouse, don’t you? Oh, and don’t forget: Enjoy a glass of beer of wine with your dinner, it won’t kill you, but you may have more fun.
Has anyone here read “The China Study” by T. Colin Campbell, PhD? I am amazed that this brilliant writer, Michael Pollen, can just dismiss the work of this brilliant scientist. T. Colin Campbell has published over 350 articles from over 35 years of research. And there are plenty of other scientists and physicians who confirm his findings.
— Michael Culmer, MDThis famous tagline “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” can be shortened to “Eat Plants.” The joy of eating does not have to include eating animal products. There is now overwhelming evidence that the less animal products, of all kinds, that we eat, the healthier we will be. Humans simply cannot process meats, dairy, and eggs, without becoming ill. It’s just that simple. There are so many foods available to us, that this is far from a restriction. The joy of eating is increased immeasurably by not eating foods that are made by torturing other sentient beings, and that are associated with cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and endless other diseases.
Eat Plants. As much as you want.
I love Mr Pollen. I have been an organic vegetable farmer for 35 yrs and I am now seeing a huge increase of awarness and sales because people want to eat better and local. I can now pay my American employies a better wage and am much more encourged to continue farming until I drop dead. By the way,I still weigh what I weighed when I graduated H.S. 36 yrs ago, due to eating just good real food. And most people guess my age to be 10 yrs younger then it really is,a nice side benifit from healthy eating! My advice,stay away from all fast food and any brand of soda or anything with corn syrup. But you knew that already….Vermont Farmer….
— Howard PrussackOnce you get into the habit of cooking everyday it makes such a difference in the quality of the things you eat. Cooking with fresh fruits and vegetables makes a dramatic difference in the quality of the dishes that you can prepare. It’s not difficult or time consuming and the benefits are immediately apparent. Even my kids prefer eating real food, I rarely have problems getting them to eat home cooked meals. This is one of those things where a little effort gives a huge payback.
— Daniel RodriguezPerhaps this is where it starts - this notion of not over-relying on science, but on “culture, history, and tradition” - the accumulated wisdom of human history. The embrace of complexity, of ambiguity. The realization that the journey matters much more than the destination. In the words of Kim Stanley Robinson (or perhaps Milarepa?) “An excess of reason is a form of insanity.”
Now we just need an economic system which embraces these values (and which takes externalities into account) - and if this is beyond us, at least an economic policy which does so.
— Andrew DeWeese“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” didn’t leave me afraid to eat, not one bit. It left me, ultimately, vastly more satisfied with my diet.
It reinforced my belief that the habits I was working on embracing were the right choices. I was already a fairly avid Farmer’s Market shopper, and have long maintained my own version of ‘eat food’ by saying “I don’t eat any food that’s pretending to be other food.” This included the predictable butter and eggs and whole milk instead of their ‘low-fat’ counterparts, but also left me reluctant to consider things like fruit rolls or fruit-yogurt bars, which provide a technical serving of fruit, as an actual fruit equivalent.
Don’t get me wrong, I love tofu. Toss a handful of tofu chunks in my stir-fry, give me a bowl of delicately flavored miso soup with melt-in-your-mouth tofu cubes floating in it, and I’m happy. But take that tofu and hide it in fake meat, and I get less entranced with it.
I still eat some processed foods for convenience, but I choose them more carefully and eat them more sparingly.
I’m really looking forward to picking up the new book, because “Omnivore” solidified some things in my thinking that have really caused shifts in my behaviour. I’ve tried some foods I never would have eaten before. I was already almost wholly free-range, organic, hormone-free, and community-farm oriented in my fresh food purchases, so the book made me look at what else I could do. In response, I’m trying to eat seasonally. Normally, winter would be the time for frozen or packaged veggies. This year it’s been the time for turnips and winter greens, and I’ve discovered some really tasty new foods I used to walk by at the market. I have acquired attachments for my mixer to make my own pasta and my own sausage, and am quite looking forward to learning to use them.
There are a lot of us out here who’ve watched the fads go by, the oat bran and the low carb and the grapefruit diet and what have you, and said to ourselves, “No, that’s not right either.” Michael Pollan’s work has gone through food pragmatists like wildfire, because it explains to us the reasoning behind our intuitive rejection of the ‘nutrient culture’, that we’ve never been able to voice. When I was 15 and looked at the tub of margarine and thought, “I can’t eat that,” I couldn’t say why I was rejecting it. Pollan has given voice to the conscience of my appetite.
I have an aunt who’s embraced every diet fad in the last 20 years. She’s fed me mashed cauliflower when she was on some caveman diet, went through a ‘plain pasta and grilled chicken breast’ phase that nearly caused her husband to riot, and is now on some combination of modified South Beach and a diet she saw on Oprah. She read “Omnivore” and complained to me that it didn’t tell her what to eat. “Carbs, meat, vegetables, fat, what? Am I supposed to go hunt a boar or raise chickens? What is his *plan* for this Omnivore Diet?”
*sigh*
— RowanThe style of eating Mr. Pollan advocates is great…if you have enough money to pay for fresh produce and organic products.
— LeighIf you get your ideas about cooking from watching cooking shows, of course you’re going to think it’s a daunting task. Eating a lot of takeout doesn’t help there, either–yes, making kung pao chicken IS a lot of work. You have to either have a lot of time on your hands or accept that you will be eating simpler dishes, and/or cooking in quantity and eating a lot of leftovers. I don’t have a problem with that–I’m single and employed full-time and generally eat home-cooked food for lunch and dinner, and breakfast on the weekends–but a lot of people seem to.
— JLNo truer comment said that Americans are so obsessed with health and diet, yet we are the most unhealthy nation on the planet. I was raised by a mother who cooked dinner every night, not for health reasons, but for the simple fact that we couldn’t afford to eat out. Now as the adult, I cook my husband dinner every night, if not breakfast and lunch too when I have the time. Just knowing what goes in your mouth makes a huge difference…I control the amount of oil, the fats, and all the ingredients. Who the heck knows what the restaurants are putting in there. Just take a look at Chili’s Chicken Caesar Salad, you think you’re going healthy but you’re getting a whopping 1,200 plus calories and something like 68 grams of fat…yowzers!
We recently remodeled our kitchen and spent a week and 1/2 eating out…by that last day, my body felt so toxic, I scrambled to make a batch of homemade stuffed red peppers with organic ground beef and fresh basil from my garden…I could feel the nutrients seeping back into every cell in my body. ..sigh, heaven!
— Tanya WarburtonA sentence that I learned many years ago has been one of my guiding rules: “If it’s not food, your body treats it as a poison.” So read the labels and think about the amount of non-food (poison) that you are ingesting. The same goes for all those prescription drugs. Clean your diet, clean your body.
— chrisI think the basic advice is great. “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants” is how it was presented at the National Wellness Conference. Here is a simple test of “real food” - if your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, then maybe you should avoid it.
The second thing I want to say is that humans are omnivores. We are designed to eat all forms of food from animals through plants. But the world of 2008 is vastly different from 1808, just 200 years ago (or even maybe 1908) and the difference between now and 1808, food-wise, is much greater than 1808 and 0008. We are biologically engineered for something other than modern civilization. So why does this matter?
People today obsess over obesity and weight in general. It would be off topic for me to go into that in detail here but we as a people are obsessing over the wrong thing. Its not weight that kills you, its a sedentary lifestyle. When you combine modern processed foods with a lack of inactivity you get a combination of ill health and weight gain. 200 years ago it wasn’t so easy to get easy access to ice cream and a snack food like potato chips wasn’t even possible. Basically, we are poor biological match for civilization where most of us can sit around on our duffs and eat high salt, high sugar, high fat foods. What’s our body to do? It was engineered to survive famines by putting on weight in times of plenty.
Finally, for those people who eat what they want and don’t gain weight, that’s largely a function of metabolism, and that, in turn, is more genetic than lifestyle. But its still not healthy. Thin no more equates to good health than fat equates to ill health, something the diet industry doesn’t want you to know but is nevertheless truth.
— Tom RoweI am currently reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and am finding it really interesting –I’m learning about “organic” agribusiness–a lot of things I didn’t know, about milk, for instance. I may go back to buying raw milk. We buy organic salad greens in the winter from the supermarket and health food stores, but I was thinking last night of how, in the east, one could eat more locally, in the winter. I already eat local root vegetables and squashes–some from my own garden, and some from the local farmstand, and I thought that maybe grated celery root would be one part-substitute for raw salad greens (flown from California), and grated carrot and daikon radish, but I’m going to read again “The Four-Season Harvest” by Eliot Coleman–who grows all year in greenhouses in Maine–using varieties of greens like arugula and clayonia (kind of a spinach)that you can continue to harvest in the winter months. In reading the article above, I agree that a wonderful thing to do is to have your own organic vegetable and herb garden, which I have cultivated for the last eighteen years, and which is an amazing experience–both spiritual and physical–a true learning experience. I’m lucky that I live in a fairly rural community and although the farms are mostly corn and soy, there are a lot of non-farmer neighbors who have big, big gardens, and we share produce as well as tips, and sometimes bragging rights. On a recent trip to the supermarket (my husband usually does the shopping there), I was amazed at the aisles and aisles of processed products–which I have seen before, of course, but this time, I saw so much more marketing–”value-added” products–teeny, tiny packages of junk–100 calories this and that–even beautifully designed, “Natural” or “Green” designed labels–but junk, nonetheless, a marketer’s game.
— Basha Durand