In Defense of Food

With New Year's Resolution's in full swing, I decided to re-connect with one of my all-time favorite books. Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it.

I was watching the Hour on CBC a couple of years ago. There was Michael Pollan talking about the twinkie that he's had for years. Still soft and squishy like when he first got it. He recommended making it a personal rule to never eat anything that won't spoil. If bacteria won't eat it, then it isn't food. That was what made me go and purchase his book.

The book is summarized by three points. Eat food. Not Too Much. Mostly plants. I will share his points, and some of my comments to go with them over the next few Mondays.

Sadly, Eat Food needs to be expanded on. As he discusses so well in part two of his book, food needs to be defined. We have been so diluted by the industry, that we no longer recognize what is imitating food.

His first suggestion is to not eat anything that your Great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. His example is brilliant - yogurt tubes. Look at the list of ingredients. It's not yogurt!

Simple, whole foods have been replaced with highly processed foods. They are full of sugar, fat, and salt - things that we love. We eat more of them than we need. We crave more once we've stopped. And so our obssession with food goes.

I see this with many of my patients. A homemade meal has become a frozen meal they bought at the grocery store and put in the oven at home. This is not homemade - it's home cooked I guess.

Let's teach our kids about food. Let's make this next generation have the taste for food in it's natural state - without the additives. To me, that would be the best reform to health care that we could make.

Yours in health,

Kerri