Michael Pollan's prescription to President Barack Obama — and you: ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants’

Michael Pollan visited the UBC Farm recently.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER — He’s not as famous as his brother-in-law, actor Michael J. Fox, but Michael Pollan has a captivated audience that can change a nation. One, in particular, is Barack Obama.

Last October, Pollan wrote an open letter to Obama in The New York Times Magazine, citing how the presidential candidate could put the nation’s food system on the right track if he became president. In short order, an Obama aide phoned requesting a summary, but Pollan declined, basically saying if the story could have been shorter, it would have been. Undeterred, Obama quoted Pollan’s article at length in an interview with a reporter from Time magazine.

At the consumer level, Pollan is changing the way people eat, first with Omnivore’s Dilemma, which stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for 91 weeks. In his latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he coined a phrase, summarizing the book’s message: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” (Perhaps Obama should have asked for a seven-word summary.) Anyway, the phrase has legs and is working its way onto T-shirts, coffee mugs and the bottom of e-mail signatures. Some Pollan fans have created a web petition, appealing to Obama to appoint Pollan as secretary of agriculture (www.thepetitionsite.com).

Pollan’s shorthand summary of the book is like a semaphore for eating whole, local, mostly vegetarian foods in lesser amounts (like the French, eat less, but more sensually). But the background history, politics, culture and science woven into the book are what makes you sit up. “Food” in his mind does not include “food-like substitutes,” the 17,000 new ones that appear on grocery shelves every year.

I had a chance to sit down with Pollan when he was in Vancouver on a speaking engagement recently. (About 700 people showed up at the University of B.C. Farm.)

“I spent two years looking at the whole question of what we really know about diet and health,” said Pollan, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., where he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Usually, the deeper you drill into questions like that, the more complicated and ambiguous things become and it’s not as simple as you thought. With this question, the opposite was true. The further I went, the simpler it got. After two years of research, I had seven words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

That’s his prescription for health and well-being.

When Pollan talks about food, he means the kind our grandparents and great-grandparents used to eat.

“The modern way of eating leads to chronic diseases. As soon as you get away from the Western diet, you are going to be healthier.

It’s the elephant in the room that the food industry would rather not pay attention to,” he says.

In his book, he raises the irony of North American orthoexics, referring to an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

“The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food,” he says in the book.

“The rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the super-abundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn and soy.

These changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything — except vegetables, fruits and whole grains.”

Humans, he says, have adapted to a multitude of diets around the world. The Western diet, however, is not one of them and we have higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity than people on culturally traditional diets. By the 1960s, he says, it was all but impossible to sustain our grandparents’ way of eating. Synthetics had entered the food chain, as had meats raised on grains (not pastures) and pharmaceuticals.

The thing is, the big profits are made in cheap, easy, processed food. “It’s easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or carrot.”

However, those health claims often crumble like vanilla wafers. “The low-fat campaign,” he says, was an abject failure after 30 years of linking dietary fat with heart disease and cancer and weight gain.

“It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences,” he says in his book. He points out that the human brain is about 60 per cent fat and every neuron is sheathed in a protective layer of fat.

Ironically, Americans got fat on low-fat diets because they turned to carbs to avoid fat.

There’s evidence that carbs interfere with insulin metabolism in ways that increase hunger and promote overeating and, thus, fat storage in the body.

Grandma food, the simple, unadulterated food made of vegetables, fruits and grains, can’t be broken down into reductionist science, he says.

These whole foods are a wilderness of chemical compounds and interactions that science doesn’t understand, just like the workings of our digestive system which has as many neurons as our spinal column.

“But,” he says, “you don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity to reap its benefits.”

Pollan is optimistic. “There’s a revolution going on and I’m very encouraged. The fastest growing segment [in the food sector] are farmers’ markets and organics. It’s important on the health level because there are no processed foods at farmers’ markets. Anything that gets people to cook more tends towards a healthier diet.”

And that, he says, is happening despite $32 billion a year spent marketing processed foods in the U.S.

BY MIA STAINSBY, VANCOUVER SUNJUNE 23, 2009

Sorry for the bad fit - full story - vancouversun.com

Click here to listen to the interview with food author Michael Pollan

Related Resources:

• In Defense of Food
• The Omnivore's Dilemma

Genetically Engineered Foods… and what they can do to your immune system

Before talking about genetically engineered foods, we first need to know a little about DNA. DNA is nature’s way of creating the individuality of a living organism; it is a complex molecular structure that acts as a code to tell our cells and bodies what to do. DNA molecules make up genes and genes are the blueprints of life, life as lived and life as passed on to future generations. Genes make an astounding variety of proteins, proteins that are central to the body’s operating systems like neurotransmitters, enzymes, antibodies, and hormones.

As part of normal living, genes mutate. A mutation is any change in the coding of the gene. These occur naturally, often as a result of accidental omission or reversal of any of the thousands of molecules that make up the complex string of molecules that we call a gene. One species evolves from another as a result of mutations, which increase adaptability to the local environment. However, through the introduction of man-made chemicals, radiation, prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and cooked foods, man has doubled the natural mutation rate with unknown consequences for the future of the human race. These changes are thought to be playing a major role in our epidemic of cancer and other chronic diseases.

Because DNA is so important to life itself, playing deliberate games with DNA requires extra careful scrutiny and caution. This is why all of us should be alarmed at what is happening in our food industry with genetically engineered foods. These foods are already on the market! They include corn, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, soybeans, and cotton. In addition, other foods like apples, rice, wheat, broccoli, cucumbers, carrots, melons, and grapes are in the process of being engineered. Because the FDA does not require these foods to be marked, consumers are unaware of what they are buying. Right now, the only way to be sure you are buying natural foods is to buy organic foods.

The reason we must be concerned about these developments is because genetically engineered foods have the potential for seriously damaging us as individuals as well as the entire ecosystem of the planet. With a potential like that, we need to be careful! We are introducing changes with unknown consequences, and unlike chemical contaminations, gene contaminations cannot be contained or cleaned up. Once they have been released into the environment, if they prove to be dangerous, we can’t simply recall them. Meanwhile, they could be setting off a chain reaction throughout our entire ecosystem. Every living thing could be exposed to completely unanticipated and uncontrollable side effects.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about. Fields of genetically engineered crops are capable of cross pollinating neighboring fields and thereby creating new and potentially harmful species. Right now, the safest thing to do is eat organically grown foods, but if insects, birds, and wind carry seeds and pollen to the organic fields and cross pollinate them, we lose even that haven of safety. A genetically engineered bacterium produced toxic metabolites that rendered soil infertile. Corn crops that were planted in this soil grew only a few inches tall and fell over dead. What would happen if this bacterium got out of the lab? In 1989, 37 people died, 1500 were permanently disabled, and 5000 became extremely ill by taking a genetically engineered version of the amino acid tryptophan. The tryptophan was contaminated by a “novel amino acid” that was toxic. The problem is there was no way to test for this. Existing safety tests only test for known contaminants, not for new and “novel” ones.

Genetic engineering is no minor development. This is not crossbreeding potatoes with potatoes or corn with corn. This is inserting insect genes into potatoes, human genes into pigs, and fish genes into tomatoes. This has never been done before! This is creating species that have never existed with potential for lots of unanticipated side effects and unknown long-term consequences. Genetically engineered foods could contain allergens, toxins, and be of reduced nutritional value, and the unexpected results might not show up until years after the food is introduced, but then it’s too late. The fact is that putting those genes into a living organism is an extremely imprecise process, so you are never sure of what you are doing. All kinds of unintended things can happen.

What to do? For now, the best thing to do is eat a diet of organically grown foods. Insist on laws to label genetically engineered foods. The public has a right to know what they are eating. Safety tests should be at least as rigorous as those for new food additives. Right now we are on an honor system. The biotech companies do their own testing and are not required to inform the FDA if they suspect a problem. An organization called The American Campaign to Ban Genetically Engineered Foods has begun a nationwide campaign to collect one million signatures from people opposed to biotech foods.

Source:  Sanoviv Medical Institute Blog

Posted:  True Health Is True Wealth

Most of What You Eat is Not Real Food

The Speigel Online (The Mirror - German Magazine) conducted an interview with legendary chef Alice Waters about the "eat local" movement, which has become a force to be reckoned with in the United States in recent years. 

Waters was one of the pioneers of that movement -- she transformed her state's cooking in the 1970s into world-renowned "California cuisine" with her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. She promoted the use of in-season produce from local farms, and advocated planting vegetable gardens in schools.

More than three decades later, Waters is still promoting sustainable agriculture. She is now vice president of the international Slow Food movement, which promotes regionally grown goods and local culinary traditions.

In the interview, Waters expressed her opinion that most of the food currently being consumed is not real food. Real food, she argues, is grown by people who take care of the land, and who refrain from using herbicides and pesticides. Real food is food that's grown for taste, and it's grown in a way that pays people a good wage for their work rather than being grown at somebody else's expense.

To read the whole interview, and see what Waters has to say about seasonal food, the spread of the eat-local movement, and the food policies of President Obama, click the link below.

  Spiegel Online February 13, 2009