A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A low-fat diet isn’t good for your heart, doesn’t reduce your risk of cancer, and doesn’t even mean you’ll be thin. Even Pollan says, “I was flabbergasted at the news.”
He argues — and this really seems so simple it’s hard to believe that it is an argument — that the key to keeping your body healthy is eating better-quality foods and reducing the quantity.
Foods are not just a sum of their parts. And diets can’t be taken out of the context of the culture of dining that surrounds them.
In the third section of his book, Pollan offers specific advice for eating. “Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet” is a maxim that will be deplored by writers of diet books everywhere.
He writes, “Oceans of ink have been spilled attempting to tease out and analyze the components of the Mediterranean diet, hoping to identify the X factor responsible for its healthfulness: Is it the olive oil? The fish? The wild greens? The garlic? The nuts?”
The same attention has been paid to the so-called French paradox. Most likely it’s a combination of all sorts of factors working together in ways we can’t fully understand. Maybe it’s that Greeks walk more than Americans. Or that the French spend more time shopping for food and make their meals last longer.
Pollan’s tips are obvious but, of course, little followed: Eat mainly foods from the edges of the grocery store (produce, meats, dairy). Don’t eat anything with weird ingredients you’ve never heard of, or anything that has high-fructose corn syrup. Don’t snack.
He offers, as evidence of his advice to avoid anything making health claims, a recently approved FDA health claim for corn oil: “Very limited and preliminary scientific evidence suggests that eating about one tablespoon (16 grams) of corn oil daily may reduce the risk of heart disease due to the unsaturated fat content in corn oil.”
Then there’s the fine print: “FDA concludes that there is little scientific evidence supporting this claim.” And finally, “To achieve this possible benefit, corn oil is to replace a similar amount of saturated fat and not increase the total amount of calories you eat in a day.” Confused?
Actually, the answer is simple. Eat meals of diverse, real, whole foods. Shop at farmers markets, or as locally as possible. Employ intense skepticism about any food or nutrient claim. Enjoy a glass of wine with dinner.
And most important, enjoy your dinner. It really is better to live to eat rather than eat to live. One incredibly good, organic chocolate truffle is better in every way for you and the Earth than a handful of Oreos. It might even save you on a desert island.
by Michael Pollan
The Penguin Press
What: Michael Pollan appears in Portland.
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12, Bagdad Theater, 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., 503-249-7474, ext. 1; tickets at the Bagdad or Ticketmaster, $21.95 includes a copy of “In Defense of Food.”
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Organic farming combats global warming … big time
Data from The Rodale Institute’s® long-running comparison of organic and conventional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effective at removing the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial organic matter in the soil.
Organic Farming-vs-CO2
Fast Facts
If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.
Converting the U.S.’s 160 million corn and soybean acres to organic production would sequester enough carbon to satisfy 73 percent of the Kyoto targets for CO2 reduction in the U.S.
U.S. agriculture as currently practiced emits a total of 1.5 trillion pounds of CO2 annually into the atmosphere. Converting all U.S. cropland to organic would not only wipe out agriculture's massive emission problem. By eliminating energy-costly chemical fertilizers, it would actually give us a net increase in soil carbon of 734 billion pounds.
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/NFfield_trials/1003/carbonsequest.shtml
"Farmageddon Grower's Collective"
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Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 10:16 PM