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]

Little late on this, sorry. Here's a quote from the book that exemplifies most of what we were talking about.

As we've seen, processing whole foods -- refining, chemically preserving, and canning them -- depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back: B vitamins in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal and bread. Fortifying processed foods with missing nutrients is surely better than leaving them out, but food science can add back only the small handful of nutrients that food science recognizes as important today. What is it overlooking? As the whole-grain food synergy study suggests, science doesn't know nearly enough to compensate for everything that processing does to whole foods. We know how to break down a kernal of corn or grain of what into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again. Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it.

The study mentioned is "Nutrients, Foods, and Dietary Patterns as Exposures in Research: A Framework for Food Synergy" from American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.