Michael Pollan’s
book “In Defense of Food’ has been a global best seller within the genre of
books on food and health. It appears to be extremely popular among journalists
since it bashes conventional wisdom on food. Twice, correspondents for the
Irish Times chose to feature this book and marvel at its wisdom. Pollan’s book
is peppered with half-truths, circular arguments and highly selective
supporting material. His fundamental point is that we should focus our dietary
choice on foods and not bother too much, if at all, with all of this
nutritional advice that abounds today.
Pollen’s belief
that health is the driver of food choice in the modern era is a cornerstone of
his argument. Take for example the statement he makes: “That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively
new, and I think, destructive idea”.
As I pointed out in my blog of April 2nd, the interest in
healthy eating is as old as civilisation and this obsession is the pursuit of a
relatively minor section of society[1].
The vast majority chooses food that they plan to enjoy and, in making those
choices, take care to get some level of balance as regards to their personal
health. Every study that has examined the drivers of food choice have come away
with the conclusion that the “go – no go” part of food choice is whether the
consumer likes the food. Pollan’s
assumption that it is the pursuit of health that drives food choice is an
opinion based his personal reflections and observations. However, our own
research, published in peer-reviewed journals shows the opposite. In a survey
of over 14,000 consumers across the EU, some 71% either ‘agreed strongly’ or
‘agreed’ with the statement: “I do not need to make changes to my diet as my
diet is already healthy enough”.
Figure that Mr Pollan!
The putative
obsession with food and health of modern consumers that Pollan puts forward
arises from the dogmatism and doctrine, which he calls “nutritionism”. He
argues that nutrition has reduced the food and health issue to nutrients. In
his view, nutritionists see foods solely as purveyors of nutrients and
summarises their view thus: “Foods are
essentially the sum of their nutrient parts”. He quotes his fellow food saviour and author Marion
Nestle who says of nutrition: “…it takes
the nutrient out of the food, the food out of the diet and the diet out of the
lifestyle”. Eloquent, but utter baloney! This needs to rebutted along
several lines. In 1996, I chaired a joint WHO-FAO committee that issued a
report entitled “Preparation and use of food-based dietary guidelines”. The
notion behind this was that many developing countries did not have detailed
data on the nutrient content of their food supply, that they didn’t have
nutritional surveys and that we should encourage the development of healthy eating
advice in terms that consumers can understand. Indeed, statistical techniques
such as cluster analysis are widely used to study food intake patterns and
moreover, there are many examples of systems that score food choice for their
nutritional quality. To write a book based on the impression that nutritionist
see foods solely in terms of nutrients is simply daft.
Let me go a
little further with this. Take the disease spina bifida, which is one of
several forms of neural tube defects (NTD) that occur early in pregnancy.
Extensive human intervention studies have shown that an increased intake of the
B vitamin, folic acid, will significantly reduce the re-occurrence of an NTD
birth in women who have previously had a child with this condition. This research
has led to a threshold value of folic acid in blood above which this reduction
occurs and the research shows that in human intervention studies, it is not
possible to attain this threshold with normal foods, naturally rich in folate.
Such folate has a rather low bioavailability and the threshold can only be
reached if the volunteers consumed foods fortified with synthetic folic acid.
This has led to the mandatory fortification of flour in the US with folic acid
leading to a dramatic reduction in the incidence of new cases of spina bifida.
What is
laughable about Pollan’s approach is that he himself engages in his so-called
reductionism because he devotes at least almost 11 pages to the argument for
and against the polyunsaturated fats from plants (omega-6 variety) and the
polyunsaturated fats from fish (omega-3 variety), ultimately favouring the
latter and then ends up with the statement: ”Could
it be that the problem with the Western diet is a gross deficiency in this
nutrient?” Now Michael you can’t have it both ways. You can’t decry
nutritionists for studying individual nutrients in relation to health and then
proceed to do so yourself! And remarkably, this champion of foods over
nutrients goes on to argue that older persons should take multivitamins. Don’t
take a bow Michael. Just stop doing summersaults.
The final piece
in his jigsaw is to dismiss the modern processed food as though bread, cheese,
yogurt, pasta, wine, chocolate, coffee and the like are not processed. Their
processing details were worked out long ago and so they don’t qualify for the
derogatory tag of “processed”. As I pointed out in a recent blog, the first
sugar refinery was built in Crete in 1000 AD and that the Arabic name for
Crete, Qandi, gave rise to what we today call “candy”. This process requires
the sugar can to be pulped in water, the water filtered through muslin and the
water evaporated in the searing heat of the Crete sunshine, which is why Crete
was chosen and not Cork. And he makes the inevitable mistake of the agricultural
romanticist that organic food is nutritionally superior to conventionally
farmed food, which is palpably untrue but let that be next week’s blog.
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