13 Aug 08 In Defense Of Food

During my lifetime, I’ve seen the move away from fresh cooked fresh produce and meat to packaged, processed stuff. I’ve always been on the opinion, only based on my own logic, that what is found is nature has surely to be better than that which has been messed around with in a factory.

I’m currently reading In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, a book that largely reinforces my own beliefs about what we eat and how it affects our health.

There are some interesting statistics in the book, and many of them aren’t something dreamed up by some pro-organic food faddist group, but are those obtained and researched by the USDA.

For example, us humans. being omnivores, are adapted to eat a few thousand different food items, along with all the vitamins, minerals, and macro and micro nutrients they contain. However, the average American gets most of their calories nowadays from just four sources – corn, soy, wheat and rice. You may think that you don’t eat much of those, but you do – in a processed form, the food processing industry has found a multitude of ways to present it.

If you’re interested in what you really eat, and how you can make simple changes to improve your long-term health and even longevity, this book is a really interesting read.

For now, I’m going to grab another banana.

Tags: amazon, fresh produce, gp, healthy food, in defense of food, lifetime, logic, Michael Pollan, paperback, processed food