'Healthy' Is Not Healthy

I saw a report the past few days on a health food guru. He had some interesting facts and theories on how and what we eat. It started me thinking (which isn't an easy task) about my own diet and how we, as a whole, have gotten lazy in our food preparation. It is too convenient to buy our staples in a pre-packaged, pre-processed form, ready for the microwave.

Michael Pollan is a very well known health food spokesman. He will tell you that he is not an expert of any kind. But his opinions in the organic debate is very well respected. He is a bestselling author with multiple books currently at the bookstore. Now you can ask why I single him out from all the self-help pundits, which seem to be as plentiful these days as a crabgrass infestation. Well, he has a unique set of rules in how we should shop and eat food. He also seems to hit the mark in how I've been feeling about the topic lately.

In Pollan's book "In Defense of Food: The Eater's Manifesto", he coins a new phobia he calls 'Orthorexia'. A unhealthy obession with healthy eating. He states that the food and nutrition industry always seems to have a 'good' and 'evil' additive on their agenda. He states that at this time, the good is "Omega-3", and the evil is "trans-fat acids". Now replacing one with another is not necessarily a good thing. He gives a for instance. When he was a child, the industry was villifying saturated fats. His mother was persuaded in using margarine in her kitchen. She selected it to replace the saturated fats in butter. As we now know, she wound up replacing a small evil ingredient with a really big one.

Also in the book, as the subtitle states, Pollan truely gives you rules on how to live and eat in this world. They are:

• Don't eat things that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize.


• Don't eat anything that is labeled "Healthy".


• Be vitamin-conscious in your diet, but don't take supplements.


• Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pollan states that not everything edible in a grocery store is really food. He says to remember that true real food Rots. He also states that a person should keep to the edge of the store. Most in the aisles are what he calls edible processed 'material'. Not necessarily something you should partake into your body. He says that produce, meats and dairy on the edge of a store is where you should shop.

And finally Michael Pollan states that most of our traditional recipes have been perfected over hundreds (if not thousands) of years. For instance, a greek fisherman, with his traditional recipes,is far healthier with his diet than what we put in our bodies on a daily basis.

Michael Pollan's books 'In Defense Of Food: An Eater's Manifesto' and 'An Omnivore's Dilemma' are readily available at most bookstores.