Book Review

In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan

This book is about the "western diet" and how much of it really is not food. The author takes quite a bit of time talking about how "Nutritionalism" as a science has been trying to break food down to it's individual nutrients, not necessarily with a lot of success. (He uses the ever changing products "margarine" and "baby formula" as examples. He figures that if they really could do it, baby formula by now would be the same as brest milk...)

Anyhow, he talks about how the macro- and micro- nutrients in foods appear to be more than the sum of their parts. His ideas are that our diet is what makes us sick as a people. (At least all kinds of sicknesses people get these days.)

The last section of the book go over 3 different sets of suggestions he has: Eat Food (as opposed to 'food like products'), Mostly Pants (He thinks eating more plants is good for us, eating less processed food is good for us, and is not necessarily just an 'organic' guy...), Eat Less (He would have us pay more for our food. We would get better food. Just eat less of it.)

It was an interesting book, I would recommend it to anyone, especially people that just eat junk all the time. One of his ideas is to have the family start sitting down for dinner together again, which we started doing before I read this book. I think the girls enjoy it, hopefully someday we can see some benefit from it... (It is still early in the process...)

By the way, I think this is the first time I have used the word "breast" on this blog. My hit count will likely go up now...