A holistic view of food
I just finished a (lengthy) article called Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan. If you have–no, can make–the time to read this article, I highly recommend it.
The basic premise is that the modern approach to food (looking at isolated nutrients rather than whole foods, diets, and lifestyles) is considerably less healthful than earlier alternatives. An interesting excerpt:
This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to ”let food be thy medicine” is ritually invoked to support this notion. I’ll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about things other than bodily health — like pleasure, say, or socializing — makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the ”French paradox” — the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.
You really should read the whole article, but here are the author’s basic recommendations: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
