Michael Pollan tells Syracuse audience 'nutritionism' is making us sick

By Glenn Coin / The Post-Standard
Published: Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Author Michael Pollan talks about food at the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series Tuesday at the Mulroy Civic Center. He opened up his lecture discussing food that he had bought from a local supermarket in Syracuse.

Syracuse, NY -- Michael Pollan strode on stage lugging several plastic Tops grocery bags to illustrate what is food -- and what isn't.

He pulled out, among other things, a box of Trix cereal, Special K chocolate pretzel cereal bars, a loaf of whole-wheat but still pure white Wonder bread and a microwaveable Campbell's soup container designed to fit in a car cup-holder.

"Tops is a typical American supermarket that's full of what I call edible food-like substances, which should never be confused with food," said Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food" and other best-sellers exploring our relationship with food.

To further illustrate the point, he pulled out one more item and placed it atop the stack of brightly colored packages.

"And this -- you remember this," he said. "A Braeburn apple -- and it's from New Zealand."

Pollan, the first speaker in this season's Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series, used the packages and the apple to illustrate what he sees as all wrong about the way we eat and how it affects our health. What we eat in America today -- the so-called Western diet of meat, highly refined grains and sugar -- is killing us, he said.

"We've known for 110 years that this diet leads to a high incidence of chronic diseases," he said.
Pollan blamed the very thing that's supposed to keep us healthy: the relentless government and industry focus on nutrition, an ideology he calls "nutritionism."

"All of these foods are being sold to us on the basis of nutrition," he said. "We stare right through food at the nutrients. The ironic thing about this way of looking at food is that it doesn't work."

In fact, the demonizing of "bad" nutrients and the lionizing of the "good" nutrients has only made us sicker, he said. Take the low-fat diet craze that began in the late 1970s, he said.

"Since we started trying to drive fat out of the diet, we've only gotten fatter," he said. "The average American woman has gained 19 pounds, and the average American man has gained 17 pounds."

The solution, Pollan said, is to reconnect with food not just as nutrition, but as culture and cuisine. He repeated his "Eater's Manifesto," a seven-word guide to ethical and healthy eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

One way to distinguish between food and processed food products, he said, is to ask this question: "Would your grandmother or great-grandmother recognize this as food?"

He pulled out one more product: Go-Gurt yogurt packaged in small plastic tubes.

"What would your great-grandmother do with this?" he asked. "Would she know it wasn't toothpaste?"