Michael Pollan’s 7 rules for eating.
1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce, ask yourself, “What are those things doing there?” Pollan says.
Saving your life.
Yes. By all means, please ignore the last 100 years of food science. Better drink only river water because there’s FLOURIDE in the tap water. Don’t eat splenda because getting 800 calories of pure sugar from caffeinated soda (which was around 100 years ago) is much better for you. And don’t even think about using canned goods that use modern day sterlization processes.
The natural foods movement mentality is just as dangerous to science and the public at large as psychic surgery is. Don’t say it’s personal belief, there’s a real harm because people who actually believe natural holistic processes are always better are prevented from getting the medicine and nutrition they actually need. And then they die.
Keep in mind that Nature has not always provided for us so perfectly. Just ask a diabetic whether he should have his insulin shots because it’s not natural. Or ask people with wheat allergies about modified bread or lactose intolerant folks about lactaid.
But let’s ask my Great Grandmother what food science and medicine have done for us. The average life span in 1900 (when my Mom Mom was born) was 50, while today it’s 79.
What did my Grandmother do? She was a grocer that lived to 102.
I get what Kurt’s trying to say here, but the point Pollan is making is: EAT WHOLE FOOD. The kind of food that can live on a shelf for years without perishing certainly won’t kill you (and yes, you can thank modern day science for that) but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
I’ll take the whole piece of fruit that—thanks to the advent of refrigerator is still fresh after days—over the twinkie that’s shelf-stable—thanks to the advent of preservatives—any day.
Food science helps us eat foods that otherwise would make us very sick, but does that mean we should eat them? We’ve also learned how to preserve foods better. We don’t have to store fish in salt anymore in order to keep it from rotting because we can refrigerate it, but my great grandmother would still recognize that refrigerated fish as food. Berry Blue Blast Go-gurt, on the other hand? Not so much.
