As a fan of Michael Pollan's previous books, I was excited to read, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Not quite a diet book, Pollan imparts nutrition common sense as he breaks down various theories as to why American's have become so fat.

The first half of Pollan's book is dedicated to understanding nutritional advice given in American over the last century. Pollan picks apart various "ground breaking" nutritional studies and their impact on how we eat. A common thread is how we have moved from our parents and culture telling us what to eat, to putting our faith in the government and nutritional science. Pollan explains how in many ways nutrition is not an accurate science and how many of the top studies are deeply flawed.

Pollan sites 1977 as a year of major shift in attitudes towards nutrition. This was when we made a dramatic shift away from home cooked meals, to the science of pre-packaged foods that were supposedly not only more convenient, but more nutritious. This struck a cord, as I was born in 1977 and I can personally attest to being raised by a working mother, who didn't like or have time to cook, so she put her faith in the food industry. We ate pre-packaged meals many days a week and she didn't breast feed me, because she was urged by doctors to use the "more nutritious" formula. We followed the trends, like low-fat or low-carb. When sugar substitutes came into vogue, we jumped on those band wagons. If the FDA approves it, it has to be okay for us, right?

Pollan's detailed explanation of food science in America and its crossover with farming and government, is enlightening. He provides a clear context for nutrition ideals in America, before transitioning into his diet advice in the second half of the book.

To make it easy, Pollan offers three pieces of diet advice.

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

He gleaned this advice from studying other cultures and studying our own culture, prior to the turn of the century. He was trying to figure out what created the decline in American eating habits and also, what type of eating habits should we strive towards.

Eat Food really clicked with me. It's Pollan's phrase for avoiding processed food. Processed food seems to be the root of a majority of our ills. His advice is that if our great-grandparents wouldn't recognize an item in a grocery story, then it probably isn't food. It's too processed. If you don't recognize the ingredients or the ingredient list is a huge paragraph, it probably is too processed as well. He goes a step further to call processed foods, "food like" to imply that they are not actual food. Admittedly, this had me checking labels at the grocery store this week and thinking twice about the prepackaged items already in my cupboards.

Not Too Much is where Pollan explores the concept of consuming far less calories, which in many cultures seems to be optimum for health. The thing that really stuck with me in this section is the idea that part of our overconsumption stems from a lack of proper nutrition. Farming practices are yielding more food, but it is less nutritious and less of a variety than what our ancestors ate. We may have more, but it's less nutritionally dense, so we consume more to try to find the vitamins that we are lacking. The advice is to seek out a varied diet and organic produce that tends to be grown in more fertile fields.

Mostly plants isn't Pollan's call for vegetarianism. Although, it seems that a healthy diet is one that treats meat as a side dish and the vegetables as a main. We are now eating more meat than ever and the meat isn't as high of quality as it was in previous generations. Pollan suggests less meat, but when consumed, pick higher quality and animals that were fed what they would have eaten in nature. He also suggests wild game as being the more nutritionally dense choice. To roughly quote Pollan, "We are what we eat and what we eat eats."

As usual, Pollan makes a compelling argument. I was even motivated, before finishing the book, to join a local CSA (community supported agriculture) program, where I will get a fresh produce box every week from local farms. It's called Abundant Harvest Organics. I did it years ago and loved it. Thank you to Michael Pollan for giving me the motivation to rejoin!

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I thought I'd discovered gold two years ago when I chanced upon Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" on the new-book shelf at my local library. I'm a health nut, and what Pollan had to say between the covers of that book was exactly what I'd been looking for. The message blew me away. I started telling all my friends, colleagues, and family about how phenomenal and groundbreaking the book was, and encouraging them to read it. I even went so far as to buy five hardbound copies to give out and loan. But in the end I don't believe I really made any serious converts. Plenty of people wanted to listen! Telling my friends and acquaintances about the content of Pollan's book made me a big hit in social situations, but I honestly don't think many people took the time to read the book or, more importantly, to change their eating habits.

But Michael Pollan's book did convert me. Over the last two years, I have changed my eating habits--not as much as I hoped I would, but significantly nonetheless. The problem is, as I am sure anyone else knows who has also tried to follow his path: eating healthy in modern, urban America is extremely difficult.

"Omnivore's Dilemma" went on to become a nationwide bestseller. Thanks in part to the stir that book caused, and the many newspaper articles and television programs that followed, there has been a small but noticeable difference in the availability of healthier, more naturally produced vegetables, fruits, meats, and fish in the area where I live. Merchants now appear to be very conscious of the fact that many buyers are eager to know how and where each batch of produce was grown; whether fish is wild or farm-raised; and whether meats, dairy products, and eggs come from range-, grass- or grain-fed animals. In our area, the local farmers' markets are thriving, and the supermarkets...well, they don't seem to be doing so well anymore. Instead there are a number of small health food chains opening up that seem to be robbing the supermarkets of a large portion of their business. People are starting to "vote with their forks." They are saying they want better quality food, and slowly, their voice is being heard.

When I heard that Pollan had a new book out--"In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto,"--I jumped at the chance to be one of the first to buy it. It is a small book, easy and quick to read. I finished it in one enjoyable afternoon. Frankly, there is not much in this new book that wasn't already covered in "Omnivore's Dilemma." However, what this new book accomplishes that the previous book did not, is to present the basic concepts--about what is wrong with the modern Western diet and what we can do to eat in a more healthy manner--in a far more concise and readable form. Gone are the stories, the humor, the horror, the amusing dialogue, and the semitravelogue--all that was, for me at least, very delightful--but it also made the book perhaps too long and chatty for some, especially those just seeking a quick, focused, factual read. This book will most certainly appeal to a wider audience. It reads more like a practical manual for the general public.

I was hoping this new book might give me some further clues. It did that, but not as much as I had hoped. Nevertheless, I am happy that I purchased it, and read it. The most important thing it did for me was to reinforce all the lessons I'd learned from "Omnivore's Dilemma," and to present them to me with more justifications and updated scientific findings.

Hopefully, "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" will go on to become another national bestseller, and in the process continue to spread Pollan's healthy food revolution. A "Manifesto" sounds serious and political and Pollan speaks in the book about people "voting with their forks." It must be working, because many of the folks in my neighborhood appear to be voting with their forks, and the local farmers, ranchers, and grocery people are listening. There is a small revolution stirring and perhaps this book will help move it along.

I recommend this book highly to all who have not yet read "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and to those that have, I recommend this book as an inspirational updated refresher course.

Michael Pollan wrote In Defense of Food to encourage people to eat more natural foods, home cooked, out of ingredients they know. On one hand I agree completely with this message. On the other hand, I disagree with some of the commentary he provides along the way.

I took literally 8 pages of notes while reading this book. Especially during the beginning chapters I was shaking my head and writing down things I disagreed with. Michael makes gross exaggerations to get across a point or simply says questionable things. However, I toughed it out as Michael has obviously done a LOT of research to compile this information. As I got through the first part, he becomes much more evenly balanced and provides quite a lot of helpful information.

For example, I agree with him that people should eat more natural foods, including vegetables, and stay away from over-processed foods. I agree that scientists learn information in stages - they might think "all fats are bad" until they realize that there are different types of fat. Our standard white flour has been so processed to make it long lasting that they've removed the nutrition from it. Our breeding has made foods "prettier" while simultaneously removing nutrition. An apple today has only 1/3rd the iron of an apple from 1940.

So these things are great to know. However, mixed in with this information are some things I disagree with. For example, Michael takes delight in talking about the French Paradox (that French people drinking wine and eating cream are healthy) and says it proves that western diets are bad. However, a key part of living the French lifestyle is that you walk around a lot - physical activity is a normal part of the day. To say it is "all about eating what you want to eat" is extremely short sighted.

Which brings me to another key complaint. He says - repeatedly - that people should just "eat what they want" without thinking about labels. He says that people who worry about fiber or omega-3s are the ones who eat badly. He says people who just "eat what they want to" end up eating well. What?? This is COMPLETELY opposite to my experience. I hear from hundreds of visitors a month who DO eat what they want and ended up extremely obese as a result. This is simply not true.

A corollary to Michael's "eat anything" theory is that "native menus" are always perfect. Only the Western diet is bad. However, I can easily name several cultures in which heavy people are quite prevalent. Also, a culture's menu is innately tied to its activity level! The pasta-rich Italian diet is created for hard working Italian farmers. If you are a desk worker and eat tons of heavy Italian pasta every day, you're going to get heavy. It's not that an "Italian Diet" is innately good or bad. However, if you eat the food, you need to also live the lifestyle's activity level to burn off the calorie levels.

There are MANY native diets which load in the calories with the assumption that you're a farmer toiling in the fields all day and you need those calories to live. If you take in those calories without being active, you are going to have serious issues.

Michael also insists that any food with a nutrition promo on its box is evil. If a food item says "contains lots of fiber!" you should avoid it. He in general is against any nutritional information being shown, apparently. Again this makes no sense at all to me. As much as he loves the "old days", people did get scurvy and other diseases back then. People were malnourished. If something has fiber in it, it's good to know!

I definitely agree with some of his summaries. He says we now eat 300 more calories/day than in 1985 and while we are generally overfed we are still undernourished. Our bodies crave more nutrients, so we eat more food, but since we're eating nutrient-poor food it doesn't satisfy the craving.

I just wish he could have made those good points without being so single-sighted in blasting "all Western food", praising "all Eastern food". In the same manner he blasts people who "focus on just vitamins" (rather than whole food categories) and then obsesses about omega-3s.

I do think it's a good idea to read this book. There is a lot of helpful information in it. Borrow it from a library perhaps. But take the information with a grain of salt. Separate the wheat from the chaff - just like he says to do with all food writers.

Pollan has written a far-reaching, easy to read and very informative book that breaks through the nonsense of reductionist nutrition or what he refers to as "nutritionism." He steps back from the Western diet to expose how science, industry and culture have created this strange departure of human beings from their historical relationship with food. A radical break from tradition began in the mid 1800's with the ability to grind grains down to their smallest elements. At the same time as the birth of refined grains, scientists declared that metabolism could be explained in terms of a few chemical nutrients. This approach to nutrition continues today with the USDA MyPyramid nutrition guidelines.

But is that how nutrition really works? Pollan exposes many scientific mistakes that have been made since the mid 1800's. In our quest to isolate nutrients from their food, we ignore the reality that nutrition is as complex as a symphony orchestra. Rather than associating a health outcome as the result of including a nutrient in our diet, we are beginning to see that many health outcomes are due to the exclusion of another nutrient we have yet to identify! Heart disease is no longer linked to saturated fat in the diet but more likely due to the fact that the animals we eat no longer eat grass and the non-traditional use of grains.

Why with all of this science and information do we see an increase in chronic degenerative disease throughout the Western world? Could our approach be wrong? What should we do? After Pollan's in-depth look at the progression of medicine, government policy and the food industry over the past 150 years, he gives his solution. "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Sounds simple and it is. Something simple for a complex problem; that's refreshing! But, it's not easy. It requires more time and more money for less food but greater health.

Eat whole foods, traditional foods, avoid processed foods, buy from local producers, eat green (leaves) and eat foods (animals) that eat green. Eat wild foods, game and wild caught fish. Other than his omission of recommending lamb as a source of omega-3 fatty acids, his coverage of omega fatty acids, the latest nutrient `craze,' is one of the best I've seen.

Non-Western diets may be healthier not because of some `magic bullet' in these diets but because they eat more variety (our refined grain diet consists primarily of wheat, corn and soy), they don't snack, they prepare their whole food at home, they sit down together as a family to eat and most importantly... food is a tradition that they love and embrace. If we regarded food with that same joy, rather than fuss over its health consequences, we might even see a reversal in chronic degenerative disease. At the very least, we would once again have a healthy relationship with food.

A good companion book for Pollan's book is "Real Food" by Nina Plank.

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.

Great quick read about what is food and is not. Good advice. I recommend it.

Michael Pollan, professor of journalism at Berkeley, is a prolific writer on food and food-related issues, which have drawn much attention in the United States in recent years. After his more historical and philosophical works, "In Defense of Food" is a practical guide to and defense of food. To be precise, food as opposed to processed, additive-filled, can-conserved and/or microwavable goo that passes for food in most of our Western supermarkets.

Pollan uses a pleasant style and a usefully skeptical attitude towards the faddish nutritional science of the past decades to launch a critique on the industrial process of food production in the Western world, which has made us at the same time less healthy, fatter, and less nourished. As Pollan shows, typical 'rich' diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, stroke and so forth are directly and invariably correlated to following the broadly defined 'Western diet' (which despite Pollan using this name is really mostly the American diet). This, in turn, is caused partially by an excessive focus on single 'good' or 'bad' nutrients in food science, which eliminates both the interplay of various elements in given foodstuffs as they relate to our health, partially by the social and cultural contexts of food being ignored in such science, leading to useless and confusing study results, and finally in part by the food industry bribing and cajoling governments and researchers alike to make these practices suit their profit needs. He calls this 'nutritionism', following an Australian researcher on the same topic.

Although Pollan's critique is backward-looking in the sense of supporting traditional conceptions of food, where food is healthy qua food, not because of one or another 'good' nutrient du jour being part of it, its radical nature is by no means to be underestimated. Consistently, at times even repetitively, Pollan shows chapter after chapter how all the negative effects associated with the American way of eating as well as the 'food' consumed are the result of the modern agrocapitalist food industry and its unrestrained victory over any standards of healthcare or regulation other than removing explicit poison (and even that not always).

As alternative, Pollan proposes methods of food production that eliminate the artificial focus on individual nutrients as well as restoring the social context of meals in the classic sense, which implies eating natural, unaltered foods (organic or better), eating them in normal quantities, and taking your time with the meal to enjoy it. He summarizes his basic viewpoint as "eat food, not too much, mostly plants", but expands upon this in the final chapter to give some more detailed considerations on what kind of attitude to take to choosing food in our kind of society.

In a pleasant change from the normal faddish type of diet advice book, he actually looks at the structural issues around the production of food, not just choice of specific nutrients in them, and he gives tips on what kind of things to consider when choosing rather than telling the reader specifically what kind of food to eat. This is indeed a great advancement and for that reason this book is certainly to be recommended. The only downsides are a gratuitous and unnecessarily anti-socialist attitude (he repeatedly compares things he doesn't like to Marxism or the Soviet Union, even though that has no relation to the topic whatsoever), and the fact his critique gets a little repetitive over time.

Michael Pollan is something of an alarmist, but he is writing on a topic about which alarmism may be the appropriate response. Pollan has made a career (in addition to his day job as a journalism professor at UC Berkeley) out of writing not only about food, but about the human relationship with nature in general, and plants in particular. In this book he takes on "nutritionism," a term he did not coin but which he finds useful in describing what he sees as the modern scientific tendency to look at the components of foods rather than the whole foods themselves. You can get a summary version of much of Pollan's thinking in the brief Food Rules (2009), but it is worth making the slightly greater investment of time to digest the longer argument. Nutritionism, he says, is not so much a science as an ideology (hence the "ism") that, like most ideologies, operates on the basis of unexamined assumptions but which also captures the imagination and compels action. In an attempt to discover the key to healthy eating, Pollan contends, nutrition scientists have disaggregated foods into mere collections of nutrients, and have focused on a few macronutrients, specifically carbohydrates, fats, and proteins--elements that can easily be chemically manipulated in processed foods but without the beneficial results that come from eating unmodified whole foods. He sees a profit-driven cabal at work that involves nutrition scientists, government, journalists, and especially processed-food producers and marketers, all of whom have some interest in touting the supposed health benefits of the latest super-processed food that can be produced inexpensively and in large quantities. Pollan, in fact, cringes at the thought of calling these products "food," referring to them instead as "foodlike." Why, he asks, is the American population increasingly obese and in other ways unhealthy if modern science has discovered the key to good eating and food processors have filled their products with it? Pollan himself may be guilty of falling into an ideological trap at times, but in the end I found his discussion of food very appealing. It certainly made me reexamine the way I eat. At the same time, it made me realize how hard it would be to completely change my eating habits, given how busy life is and the stranglehold that the processed food industry has over the food choices one has (particularly where I currently live). Pollan will have considerable appeal to readers who appreciate the work of Wendell Berry (as I do). Particularly in the second half of the book, he encourages readers to think of food less as a thing or an industrial product or a set of selections at the supermarket, and more as a creator of relationships--between producer and consumer, and ideally between individuals sharing the experience of eating. Like Berry, Pollan takes an organic view of food and eating, one that is cognizant of the complex webs that the purchase, preparation, and eating of food involves--at least ideally. In the last section of the book, he briefly discusses eating habits, bemoaning the loss of the family meal as a time of conversation, gratitude, and socialization into patterns of manners and what might be termed "family citizenship." This is a book that will undoubtedly be dismissed by many as naïve, wishful thinking, and as an oversimplified view of the modern food-producing industry. For my money, I'd like to move a lot closer to Pollan's ideal--"eat food, not too much, mostly plants"--even knowing that it would take major adjustments in tastes and habits, and even with the increased commitment of time and money that this would involve.

Must read if you’re imterested about food and the whole world behind it. Based on research and history, this book should be on everyone’s list

Ich habe das Buch erst in Deutsch gelesen und sehr lachen müssen. Humorvolle Lektüre einer traurigen Wahrheit.

Ich habe es dann noch 2x in englisch für meine US Nachbarn gekauft. Von denen habe ich keine Reaktion erhalten,

zumindest bisher. Aber ich wollte sie informieren über eine fundamentale Nahrungsverfälschung und deren Folgen.

Es ist traurig zu sehen/lesen wie Lebens-MITTEL in chemische Keulen verwandelt werden. Also kann man sich doch

nicht wundern über eine nicht gerade gesunde Bevölkerung. Das Ansteigen von Krankheiten ist eben ein Markt der

auch gepflegt werden muss, zum Wohle der Hersteller. Es lebe der Mammon!!

Ich habe jedoch die Hoffnung, das im Laufe der kommenden Jahre die Menschen wach werden und die vielen Koch-

TV-Sendungen dann endlich ihre Wirkung zeigen und Kochen + Essen wieder zu einem schönen Ritual werden wird.

Zumal es besser schmeckt! Ich kann das bezeugen.

I always worry about what I’m eating. But man was I right in worrying. Micheal Pollan talks about the industrial journey towards mechanized food and how it’s impacting our health. Great read for those looking to learn more about why we eat and how we should think about food

Con quest'opera di Pollan si va sul sicuro, scritto benissimo, utile ed interessante.

Excellent book, and if you like to eat with good health in mind then this book is a must read.

It takes a look at the science of nutrition and throws it away. Instead suggesting that you eat food, rather than nutrients. Plenty of real science, away from that funded by fast food manufacturers, and suggestions on how to make the best choices for what eat to stay healthy.