And my postman wonders why my mailbox is overflowing….REALLY

The following was stolen from the mouth of Michael Pollan! He’s smart so read on.

“Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context — out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.”

A good friend gave me this book. You might know him, he’s the lean guy walking around the box with a 6 pack…Ya that one. Initials RL… Open your eyes to what is going on around you. What is being force fed to you and your family through direct mail campaigns, TV commercials, OOH (Out of Home advertising) you know the big billboards you see driving on I-80 or I-5.

Grab a piece of fruit or a cup of green tea and dive face first into this book. Done.

Helps to have connections,

~Coach Beez

1 Comment

1. 

   I read this book at Rick’s suggestion. It is a quick and easy read that I would recommend to anyone. The book has nothing to do with the Zone or Paleo diets, but was my impetus for doing the Paleo challenge.

   The next time you are at a grocery store pick up any packaged (box / jar / bottle) food. Try to find anything without sugar, corn or soy in the ingredients. We all know that added sugar is no good. Do you know why corn and soy problematic?

   This book explains how the business of food production has turned our diets into poorly understood science experiments.

   This book will change the way you look at food. It’s up to the individual to decide what to do with the information.

   Posted by MPetersen on 02 June 10 at 7:51pm