Finally finished!

I buckled down and finished "In Defense of Food".  After 150 pages of nutritionism and theory, it finally got to the suggestions for how to eat better.  One thing that I really appreciate about this book is that it doesn't give you "the easy answer".  There is no single evil nutrient (saturated fat... carbohydrates... etc) and no single good nutrient (antioxidants... omega-3... etc).  This book just prompts us to eat real food.  

Here are some of the suggestions in the coles notes version:

1.  Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.  (This means you powdered cheese and yogurt tubes)

2.  Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than 5 in number,  or that include d) high fructore corn syrup (a giveaway that it has been highly processed)

3. Avoid products that make health claims.  ("For a food to make health claims on it's package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed than a whole food.  Generally speaking it is only big food companies that have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved heath claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world")

4.  Shop the peripheries of the supermarket, stay out of the middle. (Whole foods tend to be around the outside)

5.  Whenever possible, get out of the supermarket (Nice idea if you live somewhere that has produce all year long.  Even our farmer's markets are only open a few months, and I've seen bananas at mine, so I'm pretty sure all the food isn't from nice, local, organic farms)

6.  Be the kind of person who takes supplements.  (This one made me laugh, because he's not promoting supplements.  There have been studies that say that people who take supplements tend to be healthier because they tend to be more aware of their health and willing to spend money to be healthy...  he recommends just being like that, and not bothering to buy supplements.)

7.  Eat meals (no snacking) and do all your eating at a table.

8.  Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.  (Be connected to your food.)

I think the very end of the book stuck with me the most...

"as you cook in your kitchen, you enjoy an omniscience about your food that no amount of supermarket study or label reading can hope to match.  Haven retaken control of the meal from the food scientists and processors, you know exatly what is and is not in it:  There are no questions about high-fructose corn syrup, or ethoxylated diglycerides or partially hydrogenated soy oil, for the simple reason that you didn't ethoxylate or partially hydrogenate anything (Unless that is, you're the kind of cook who starts with a can of Campells cream of mushroom soup, in which care all bets are off).  To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.

And what these acts subvert is nutritionism: the belief that food is foremost about nutrition and nutrition is so complex that only experts and industry can possibly supply it.  When you're cooking with food as alive as this - these gorgeous and semi-gorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh - you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, for a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients...

...The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is a given"

Overall, I found this book interesting.  There are a lot of things I don't feel I can change (for example, I'm likely not going to start herding my own cows and chickens to keep them on a grass-only diet), but I can make smarter decisions (buying beef or chicken instead of pre-made hamburgers and chicken nuggets).  I'm likely not going to follow everything in this book, but overall it had a decent idea of how we should eat in an ideal world.  Unfortunately the world we live in is not ideal, so we just need to muddle through and make the best decisions we can. 

I like that there was no magic bullet.  I too have been so confused about health and diet and weight, and I've been waiting for the previously contradicted theories to come around at tell me that now, potato chips are good for you.  I feel like I can't remember if I'm supposed to eat eggs now, or not.  Food has become so complicated that I feel a sense of relief about not having to listen to the commercials that tell me which b.regularis I should be eating, or that fruit loops are healthy now because they are made with whole grains. 

I haven't looked at calories in a month.  Very little of what I buy has an ingredient chart on it.  It's liberating.

I do need to work on some things... like eating at a table...  but that will come.  As it is, Girl is plainly too messy to eat on the couch, so that's a change that will be made soon I'm sure.