Eating Healthy Options

[Hartmann]

I just finished "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. He basically rips apart the idea of "nutrionism" pointing out that things like omega-3 pills are nowhere close to as good for you as just eating fish. How beta-carotene pills that were touted to prevent cancer actually cause it.

His whole point is that if we eat food we should eat mostly plants and not too much. He cites the French, the Italians, the Japanese and how their diets are completely different from each other but they're still healthier than us.

[Spectatrix]

Dude, we're mostly agreeing with you. If you read and understand nutritional labels, processed food can be fine, but if people aren't paying attention, they're usually better off with fresh foods.

The other thing that Hartmann was getting at was foods where they strip nutrients from the raw product (e.g. white flour) and then try to add the vitamins and minerals back in. Enriched white flour is better than unenriched, but wheat flour is better than both since the "enrichment" isn't going to add back everything they stripped out in the first place.

To answer one of your earlier questions, no, I don't freak out about seeing chemical names in ingredient lists, nor do I pay 3x the price for something just because they slapped an "organic" or "natural" label on it. You know damn well that I'm not that dumb.