So, this morning I’m reading the 2017 revised edition of Jan Chozen Bays’ 2009 book Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. I own the first edition and have read and reread her work many times in the last decade. I only became aware of the revised edition this week and wanted to see what was different.
Before I could get to that, however, I was reminded in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s forward to the book of Michael Pollan’s 2009 book—Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual—in which he boils his rules down to: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. I’ve detailed the rules in my electronic chapbook and in a series of posts.
But this morning I was reminded that two years before publishing that book, Pollan wrote a long-form essay for the New York Times Sunday Magazine that I had not yet read. Pollan, in Unhappy Meals, lede:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health.
Well, yes. But if there weren’t more complication, the essay would necessarily be more of a factoid and publishers don’t typically pay a great deal for factoids. Because any maxim demands further explanation Pollan goes on informatively and entertainingly for another 10,000 words or so.
Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing—this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third—a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)
By now you’re probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.
The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and—ahem—journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help—something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees—is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition—much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.
Pollan then proceeds, in a very neat manner to blow away the fog and debunk the conspiracy beginning with how we stopped eating food and began consuming nutrients.
It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles—things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies—claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things—who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients—those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health—gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.
From this bit of Orwellian food fantasy came, what Pollan calls, nutritionism.
The first thing to understand about nutritionism—I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis—is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.
In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.
But expert help to do what, exactly?
Good, of course, question. The answer—surprise, surprise—is not to make us healthier.
So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.
Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 “Dietary Goals”—McGovern’s masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel’s recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet—indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.
This story has been told before, notably in these pages (What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it’s a little more complicated than the official version suggests.
Because science done badly for any number of reasons but mostly because corporations pay good money for bad science, gets in the way. Pollan continues:
But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.”
If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.
All of this pseudo-food science is the primary reason why so many Americans don’t trust any science. We’ve lived through too many this-is-bad-for-you-then-it’s-good-for-you-cycles in regards to what we eat. And then there’s the elephant in the room. Pollan explains:
In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and widely reported studies of diet and health leave more or less undisturbed the main features of the Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything—except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. In keeping with the nutritionism paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, the researchers fiddle with single nutrients as best they can, but the populations they recruit and study are typical American eaters doing what typical American eaters do: trying to eat a little less of this nutrient, a little more of that, depending on the latest thinking. (One problem with the control groups in these studies is that they too are exposed to nutritional fads in the culture, so over time their eating habits come to more closely resemble the habits of the intervention group.) It should not surprise us that the findings of such research would be so equivocal and confusing.
But what about the elephant in the room—the Western diet? It might be useful, in the midst of our deepening confusion about nutrition, to review what we do know about diet and health. What we know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets. (Four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving to America, people from nations with low rates of these “diseases of affluence” will quickly acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes the Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its most deleterious effects by isolating the bad nutrients in it—things like fat, sugar, salt—and encouraging the public and the food industry to limit them. But after several decades of nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the ’50s, but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.
In the end, writes Pollan, his recommendation is the KISS principal: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism. So what might a more ecological or cultural approach to the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet? In theory nothing could be simpler—stop thinking and eating that way—but this is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food environment we now inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is possible, to which end I can now revisit—and elaborate on, but just a little—the simple principles of healthy eating I proposed at the beginning of this essay, several thousand words ago. So try these few (flagrantly unscientific) rules of thumb, collected in the course of my nutritional odyssey, and see if they don’t at least point us in the right direction.
That works for me.
Bonus No. 1: What would our president do, indeed.
I confess an affinity for tumbrels and phrygian caps—at least in the metaphorical sense—and we saw a bit of that in 2018 with the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the squad to the house of representatives. That election was all about putting a leash on President Donald John Trump. The plan worked, sort of. Welcome to 2020.
The 21st of October 2008, two weeks before the historic election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of The United States of America; two weeks before a black man from Hawaii would instill terror in half of America and hope in the other half; two weeks before everything and nothing would change. And Rebecca Solnit wrote 
Politicians, political operatives and pundits toss around a lot of words and pretend that everyone knows precisely what they mean. But do we? To declare Joseph Robinette Biden electable is to imply that everyone else is unelectable. To label Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Ann Warren extreme is to mark everyone else moderate. Horsepucky!
Back in the early ’50s, my father was part of an Army unit called the Special Weapons Platoon. Their task was to assemble early nuclear weapons. Twenty five years later I found myself also involved with nuclear weapons, albeit on a much smaller scale: tactical instead of strategic. All nukes are scary, but having said that, in a world we don’t control, they’re necessary.
That the hopes of liberals in America for our Senate to do justice in the matter of the impeachment of President Donald John Trump would rest upon the good character of John Robert Bolton is the most horrible of ironies. I had a skid-mark moment driving this morning when I heard that Bolton details in his forthcoming book the critical Oval-office conversation.
Trumpism isn’t a thing. The word is used simply because to call the movement by the proper name—Fascism—is to invite accusations of overreach, fearmongering and worse. Well, so be it. The cover of this months Harper’s, however, goes the soft route and asks the question: Will Trumpism Out live Trump? The question is flat-out silly.
For a second year, 
Growing up ignorant and white in Washington County, Ohio, my personal experiences of anyone of color were zero. What I knew came from entertainment television and in the ’60s that was not a good place to learn about what was going on in America. I remember 
Because of a service-connected injury I qualified for health care from the Veterans Administration, but, for most of my life, I didn’t avail myself of that service because the healthcare from my employers was just fine and I didn’t want to take funds from other veterans who weren’t so fortunate. That change in my mid-50s when I joined the gig economy.
Crazy—or at least mentally incapacitated—presidents have served our nation in the past. (
