In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Rating: 5.0

What it's about:
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, the follow-up to his widely praised The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, should probably come with a warning: After reading this book, you may never shop, cook, or eat the same way again.
-taken from Barnes&Noble.com

My thoughts:
The advice Michael Pollan gives in his new book, In Defense of Food: an eater's manifesto, is sound. It's important to be knowledgeable and make informed decisions about what we put into our bodies.

Pollan talks about food as science in the first part of the book. Scientists are trying to find out what is healthy and what is not but in many cases they are going about it the wrong way. They use a reductionist approach by looking at just vitamin C and lycopene, for instance, instead of looking at the whole tomato.

In the second part of the book Pollan looks at the Western Diet and all the diseases that are linked to it. He talks about how Industry has taken over the supermarket and changed the way we Americans eat.

Lastly, Pollan gives great advice on how we should be eating: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. This may sound simple but he goes into detail about how most of what we see at the grocery store is not real food but food-like substances. Here is some of my favorite advice he gives: If your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it. Shop at the periphery of the grocery store and you'll stay away from most of the junk. If something contains more than 5 ingredients don't eat it.

In Defense of Food really gets one thinking about what our ancestors ate and how different it is from what most Americans eat today. I think we would all do well to follow Pollan's recommendations about what we eat and the way we eat it.