Seven words. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That’s Michael Pollan’s whole answer to the question of what to eat, and it’s right there at the start of In Defense of Food.
I live by that. I like to put the word “real” in front of food. If you read the book you’ll see he says that anyway, because food-like products aren’t food.
Pollan’s argument is that we’ve got ourselves in a mess by treating food as a bundle of nutrients. Fat’s bad one decade, carbs the next. Every packet shouts about protein or fibre or vitamins. He calls this thinking nutritionism, and he reckons it’s made us more confused and less healthy. Meanwhile the shelves fill up with products made in factories to look and taste like food.
His evidence is quite simple. People around the world have done well on all sorts of traditional diets, some high in fat, some heavy on carbs. The diet that keeps making people ill is the modern Western one, full of refined flour, sugar and processed stuff. In one study he describes, a group who went back to their traditional way of eating saw their health improve fast.
“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
That’s one of his simple rules, and I love it because you can use it in a supermarket aisle. A yoghurt in a tube with a cartoon on it? She’d have been baffled. An apple? No problem.
He’s got a handful more. Be wary of anything with a long list of ingredients, or ones you can’t pronounce. Be suspicious of food that makes health claims, because real food rarely needs to. Shop around the edges of the supermarket, where the fresh stuff usually lives. And eat proper meals, at a table, with other people when you can.
The “not too much” part gets its own advice. Eat slowly. Stop before you’re stuffed. Pay a bit more for better food, and eat a bit less of it. None of it is complicated, which is exactly why it works.
Cooking comes up again and again. If you make your meals yourself from proper ingredients, most of the problem takes care of itself. He also reminds you that what your food ate matters. A cow raised on grass is a different thing to eat from one fattened on grain in a shed.
Nigel Risner’s personal trainer once told him if you can’t pronounce an ingredient, don’t eat it. When that came up on our podcast, I chucked in a line from Pollan’s follow-up, Food Rules. Don’t fuel your body in the same place you fuel your car.
Why this one’s personal
I know what happens when you get this wrong. In Done Beats Perfect I wrote about a time when I abused my body for over ten years. I became obese and ill, and I used food to numb things. At that point I was most definitely a warning.
In a relatively short space of time I went from a 250 pound sick couch potato to a 175 pound ultra-marathon runner and triathlete. I came off prescription medication too. I made a decision to change, and I’ve never believed willpower is what gets you there.
Around 2014, when I was doing loads with Natural Juice Junkie, my juicing blog, I started using an acronym: AIM. Attitude, intake and movement. Most of the weight loss world works on one or two of those parts, almost never all three. Pollan’s book is about the intake, and it makes it simple enough to stick with.
The attitude part matters just as much, though. If you think of food as the enemy, or as a reward for being good, the intake side gets messy fast. Pollan’s tone helps there. He wants you to enjoy eating, as long as it’s real food you’re enjoying.
The more we understand food and our relationship with it, the more we understand our own health. And without your health, what have you got? Nothing, right?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint. I once said on that same podcast that a bit of Dairy Milk is fine, as long as you don’t feel rubbish about yourself afterwards. Nigel now has it on record that Dr Neil Martin says chocolate is good for you.
Pollan sits next to Ultra-Processed People in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, and the two make a good pair.
Eat food. Mostly the real kind.
