Welcome to spanel.com

Click here to read the whole introduction to Michael Pollan’s book. Click here to read about or buy the book.

What follows is what I find the most compelling:

…There are in fact some very good reasons
to worry. The rise of nutritionism reflects legitimate concerns
that the American diet, which is well on its way to becoming
the world’s diet, has changed in ways that are making us
increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death
today are chronic diseases with well- established links to diet:
coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Yes, the rise
to prominence of these chronic diseases is partly due to the
fact that we’re not dying earlier in life of infectious diseases,
but only partly: Even after adjusting for age, many of the so-called
diseases of civilization were far less common a century
ago—and they remain rare in places where people don’t eat
the way we do.

I’m speaking, of course, of the elephant in the room whenever
we discuss diet and health: “the Western diet.” This is the
subject of the second part of the book, in which I follow the
story of the most radical change to the way humans eat since
the discovery of agriculture. All of our uncertainties about nutrition
should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases
that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the
industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods
and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and
animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap
calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and
the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a
tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy. These
changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted:
lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar,
lots of everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known
for a long time. Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group
of doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that
wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way of
eating and adopted the Western diet, there soon followed a predictable
series of Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes,
cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. They called these the Western
diseases and, though the precise causal mechanisms were
(and remain) uncertain, these observers had little doubt these
chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet.
What’s more, the traditional diets that the new Western
foods displaced were strikingly diverse: Various populations
thrived on diets that were what we’d call high fat, low fat, or
high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed, there have been traditional
diets based on just about any kind of whole food you
can imagine. What this suggests is that the human animal is
well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet,
however, is not one of them.

Here, then, is a simple but crucial fact about diet and
health, yet, curiously, it is a fact that nutritionism cannot see,
probably because it developed in tandem with the industrialization
of our food and so takes it for granted. Nutritionism
prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various
nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying
processed foods rather than questioning their value in the
first place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of
the Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or
searching questions about it.

But we can…