DrG's Medisense Feature Article
120204-Review-Michael_Pollan_Books
How to Eat: A
Review of Three of Michael Pollan’s Books
March 2012
Print Version
In
Omnivore’s
Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,
Michael Pollan sets out to make three meals, varying the food
sources. In doing so, he researches the origin of the
meals’ food to the extreme. His first meal, called
Fast Food, could be called the Corn meal. He divulges more
information about corn, its agriculture and uses, than you could
possibly want or need to know. In fact the low point of the
book is his discussion of the sex life of corn, near the beginning,
where he almost lost me as a reader. He
didn’t trust his entertaining writing style to hold the
reader and had to resort to gratuitous sexual imagery.
Thankfully, the fluff evolves to credible reading.
We learn that the calorie source for most U.S. beef is corn, force fed
to cows packed into CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) to
balloon them into the half-ton behemoths that make burgers an American
food staple. He buys a cow, steer #534, still at pasture, and
follows the doomed beast to the CAFO feedlot and meat packing
plant. He doesn’t end up eating steer #534, since
that would not be consistent with the ‘industrial’
food concept, but his ownership makes for better reading.
He extensively analyzes high-fructose corn syrup’s (HFCS)
origins and its infiltration of manufactured food and
beverages. We can thank German and Japanese
scientists for the technology that converts 100% glucose corn sugar
into HFCS. How could they have known that fructose would be
much worse than glucose for people genetically prone to metabolic
syndrome?
The Fast Food, corn based, “industrial” meal was
prepared by McDonald’s and consumed by his family in a moving
car. How fitting. He attempts, only partially
successfully, to analyze how much of each family member’s
meal derives from corn.
The next section, which he calls “pastoral” food,
might also be termed organic, local or ‘slow
food.’ Organic may originate in Argentina or your
neighbor’s backyard garden. He ends up with two
meals, one of organic foods from far-away places (purchased from Whole
Foods Market), and the other locally grown at a Virginia
farm. He eloquently maps out a strong argument for the
“local food” movement. Pollan argues that
local food has better taste, delivers superior nutritional quality and
reduces transportation cost, pollution and fuel consumption.
The first two are debatable. The third might impact global
warming and Middle East policy.
His last meal, which he calls “Perfect,” was not,
but was the most entertaining – made of food he grew, hunted
and gathered. He served to his admiring guests fava bean
toasts, wild boar paté, egg fettuccine with morel mushrooms
in butter, bread made with wild East Bay yeast, wild Sonoma pig leg and
loin, garden lettuce salad and cherry galette. We follow him
to each of these places, where he learns to hunt and gather.
The charm of Pollan’s books lies in his writing
style. He is a journalist by trade, backyard gardener by
upbringing and lacto-ovo-vegetarian by inclination, without any special
nutrition training. He gets away with writing
nutrition-oriented best sellers by engaging in extensive research of
agriculture, food biology and food manufacturing.
Entertaining prose, coupled with real information, make for good
reading and incidental education, if you can excuse the relatively
biased research focus (see below) and occasional error.
I’ll skip to Pollan’s third food book,
Food Rules, An Eaters
Manual, before I slash and
burn his second. Food Rules mixes one part cutesy
rules to live by, one part blistering concise commentary and one part
middle-finger to voluminous, gimmicky, diet books.
It’s the book I’ve always wanted to write, but knew
I wasn’t a good enough writer.
Just-plain-common-sense usually bombs at the bookstore…
unless you are Michael Pollan.
After reading the table of contents:
Part I - What should I eat? (Eat food);
Part II - What kind of food should I
eat? (Mostly plants)
Part III - How should I eat? (Not too
much),
you almost don’t need to read the book. If you
stopped there, however, you’d miss the humor and a few
details, most of which he has explained ad nauseum in
previous books. With this book you can cut to the chase.
Each section presents about 20 rules, none of which last longer than
two partial pages. Rules like Number 19: “If it
came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant,
don’t” and Number 20 “It’s not
food if it arrived through the window of your car” include no
discussion, and move right on to the next page. Those, and
ones like Number 7 “Avoid food products containing
ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce” and Number
36 “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the
color of the milk” have tongue-in-cheek points, but
don’t beat you over the head.
The rules’ catchy flavor takes the preachiness out of the
book’s overall message, which may be
“Don’t Eat Like a Typical
American.” He’s not a food-Nazi
though. Pollan acknowledges that humans are omnivores, and
suggests that we try new foods, enjoy treats, and eat meat from healthy
animals. The last rule, “Break the rules once in a
while” speaks to food’s happiness factor,
recognizing that strict dietary regimentation makes for miserable
lives.
In
Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
is Pollan’s attempt to scientifically justify his food
rules. The vast majority of Pollan’s readers are
not trained to critically analyze scientific data. Neither is
Pollan. He’s a writer. While his books
are reasonably well referenced, for lay-person diet books, he
necessarily picks and chooses studies that make his point. It
made reading the book a chore for me. I was irritated a few
too many times as I read his clearly biased, and at times misleading,
“scientific” analysis.
For example, he quotes Bruce Ames, famous for devising a test for
carcinogen-induced mutations in bacteria, saying that numerous vitamin
and mineral deficiencies mimic DNA radiation damage. While
this is at best a stretch, Pollan stretches it further, asserting that
this may be the reason that people who eat more fruits and vegetables
seem to contract less cancer. He ignores the facts that the
best sources for half of the implicated nutrients are not fruits and
vegetables, and that most of these nutrients have been tested in
randomized, controlled trials (RCTs), and don’t, by
themselves, prevent cancer.
The book progresses something like this: Nutrition research
is flawed and deconstructs food into individual nutrients, which
enables public health officials to make simplistic
recommendations. These give food manufacturers impetus to
refine out naturally healthy food components and add back the
fashionable nutrient du jour. “Western”
chronic diseases, like heart attacks and metabolic syndrome, are
rampant, in part because of changes in the food supply and dietary
patterns. If we stop deconstructing food, and instead eat
non-manufactured food based mostly on plants, we would be healthier.
I don’t disagree with any of these assertions. The
path he lays out to justify them, however, is a little too
sensationalist, using selective analysis of nutrition science to spew a
non-selective path of destruction. Along with ridiculing
public health recommendations, media and food manufacturers, he
castigates scientists for just being scientists.
Pollan does a reasonable job of explaining the inherent difficulties of
nutritional science, but then calls it “bad
science.” Research is research, and it is the
nature of scientists to try to figure out why and how things
work. To do this, one designs studies that reduce variables
to one, in order to be able to make a conclusion. He
criticizes this as “reductionism,” but
Pollan’s really criticizing the scientific method itself.
He criticizes the fact that we study the nutrients we know.
Duh. Yes, there are as-yet-unidentified nutrients, evidenced
by the fact that food is better for you than a pile of macronutrients,
13 vitamins and a few minerals. The history of devising a
formula to provide nutrition by vein proved that to us: As
nutrition knowledge evolved, essential fatty acid free, biotin free,
and selenium free formulae all caused deficiency symptoms, teaching us
that they are essential.
It’s not often that an Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (the discoverer
of vitamin C) comes along to discover another vitamin.
Bioflavonoids are the latest addition to the nutrition cadre.
We have to ask questions of the science we know to discover the
nuances, vagaries and substances we don’t know. Who
knows which blip on a chromatography print-out will be the next
important nutrient?
He, and every nutrition scientist, criticizes the facts that, in
nutrition research, 1) one variable necessarily changes another; 2)
people lie (to themselves and/or the investigator) on their
food-frequency surveys; and 3) people don’t follow exactly
the dietary changes expected of them. That’s the
way it is and all of us who have ever done nutrition research rue those
realities. Reducing dietary fat either reduces total calories
or increases another calorie source (carbs, protein or alcohol), making
two variables in the study. How many can remember what they
ate last week, let alone arrive at an accurate estimate of how often
they ate cruciferous vegetables last year? How many will
admit to regularly devouring large bags of chips? Who of you,
or anyone trying to follow a diet, can give up foods you like or whole
food groups for more than a few weeks?
Rather than criticizing the research itself, he should limit himself to
criticizing the over-reaching conclusions, premature publicity and
overly zealous public health recommendations which result from
it. He does these things exceedingly well, and, if he had
stuck to these issues, it would be a much better book. He
spends whole chapters, with cute titles like The Melting of the Lipid
Hypothesis (which unfortunately has some erroneous statements), Eat
Right Get Fatter, and The Elephant in the Room, bemoaning the fact that
scientists, food manufacturers and public health officials attempt to
change whole cultural dietary patterns based on incomplete
data. There is nothing wrong with eating oat bran instead of
Krispy Kreme donuts, but should it be in every food we eat?
Should we eschew it just because it didn’t lower cholesterol
the already normal levels of a few healthy dietitians?
People embrace the concept of snake oil: Eat this one
nutrient and you can compensate for your crappy lifestyle without
having to change, reductionism in a nutshell. If you can buy
it in a bottle, or get that marvel mineral in your sugar cereal,
it’s much easier than a balanced variety of wholesome foods
every day. News media feed into the snake-oil
mentality. They don’t want to hire scientists to
help them sort through the literature or critique the
science. They jump on single articles, giving the glowing
author undue credit for breakthrough science, choosing to forget the
studies that came before. The formula for a nutrition
“news” article is to make an absurd population-wide
pronouncement, briefly summarize the conclusions without giving the
limitations of study group and methods, interview the lead author and
one other person in the field, and call it a wrap. Thus one
out of millions of studies gets the circulation sufficient to either
change people’s buying and eating habits or convince them
that scientists can’t make up their minds about
what’s right.
I have no problem with his criticism of the “reigning
nutritional orthodoxy,” which determines, for example,
whether avocados are healthy (new school) or verboten high-fat balls of
death (old school). We have suffered (or enjoyed, depending
on your taste) cultural food shifts, with ‘experts’
pushing low-fat, low carb, high fiber, fish oil, flax seed, walnuts,
red wine, no-dairy, high-dairy and on and on.
In the end, in spite of the less than perfect journey, his advice is
good. We really should eat real food, mostly plants and not
too much.