I listened to an interview with Michael Pollan on NPR a couple of days ago and found him fascinating. Pollard is a lecturer in Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley, a writer for the NY Times Magazine and an author of several books. He was discussing his most recent book, In Defense of Food, in which he makes some intriguing claims.

What I found interesting was Pollard’s discussion of what he calls “nutritionism.” Nutritionism, according to Pollard, is not a science, but an ideology laden with presuppositions and axes to grind. Nutritionism, more specifically, is the ideology that views food as nothing more than nutrient bundles that may be mixed, modified, combined and ingested for the purposes of regulating health and wellness. Pollan’s first objection to this is that we are presupposing that we know precisely what it is in foods that contributes to our health. But that’s quite an assumption. Is it the bare Omega 3 Fatty Acids in an avocado that are good for us or is the means of receiving them, namely eating an avocado, essential? Pollan’s point is simply that we don’t know exactly how nutrients work, or everything about what in food makes us healthy.

His second objection is that the results of nutritionism evidence its failure. Nutritionism has been the predominant cultural ideology with regard to food and health for some time now and yet obesity, heart disease, cancer and the other major Western diseases are still rampant. There really is little reason to believe that nutritionism actually leads to health.

In contrast Pollan seems to argue for a fairly common-sensical approach to food and eating. Food is to be enjoyed. We eat for many reasons, not just because we are hungry or lacking nutrients. We eat for pleasure, to build community, to relax and be refreshed, etc. Pollan says that we should primarily try to eat natural foods that are not highly processed or filled with chemicals. For instance, many foods that we buy today have things like cotton-seed oil in them. One problem with this is that cotton-seed oil, for the vast majority of human history was not considered a food. Much of what is in processed food falls into this category.

Pollan put it simply at one point suggesting that if it’s something your grandmother or great-grandmother would have never heard of or recognized you probably should think twice before you eat it. The idea is that if you want to eat both well and healthy, eat when you are hungry and stick to fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and generally smaller amounts of meat (especially red meat) than our culture is used to. Do what you can to spend the extra money to avoid chemical-laden foods (including meat from drug fed animals). I think this makes a lot of sense, and I think doing it for a few weeks bears out the value in the way you tend to feel. (Also, I would recommend avoiding processed sugar. It’s not good for you at all, and you can lose the taste for it quite quickly by trying to stick to natural sugars and sweeteners.)