“Eat food, mostly plants, not too much”

There’s a myriad of diets out there, and for all that science suggests that basically all of them contribute to short term weight loss (apparently, paying attention to what you’re eating is a sufficient condition for weight loss) and most of them don’t show any persistence anyway, people still struggle to pick the best one. One thesis is that the Western diet itself is simply bad for us: a group of ten Australian aborigines who resumed traditional lifestyles for seven weeks as part of an experiment saw improvements in blood pressure and their risk of heart disease among other indicators, and also lost 18 pounds. The answer to the Western diet, says Pollan, is to stop eating it.

Pollan argues eating well is simple: we’ve been doing it since we came out of the trees. Unfortunately, it isn’t in the interests of the food industry, journalism, or even nutrition science to keep it that way: after all, if they just said eat more vegetables, we’d fire the lot of them. His goal is to make it simple again.

To do so, he suggests a series of simple rules: don’t eat things your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food; avoid foods with ingredients that are unpronounceable, unfamiliar, or more than five in number; only shop at the edges of the supermarket; have a glass of wine with dinner; only eat a table, and never alone; and a few others.

The book is not as good as some of his others, such as Omnivore’s Dilemma or Cooked. It’s well written though, and to my knowledge probably correct. Several points are enough to make you stop and think, too: I was interested to learn that isolated populations appear to have few dental problems, whether consuming all meat, such as the Masai in Tanzania, no dairy in the Hebrides, or agriculturalists who ate largely plants (though agriculturalists showed the most tooth decay of the three). Overall, In Defense of Food is not a must-read, but if you like Pollan or are interested in food generally, worth picking up.