All that I Know is that I Know Nothing

     Michael Pollan knows food. At least, he thinks he does. At the very least, he claims he knows food better than the thousands of nutritional scientists around the world working hard to find the simple elements that, when added together in a diet, can create the perfect nourishment for health and happiness. These scientists know nutrition, not food. That, Pollan says, is their Achilles’ heel.
     Ever since the discovery of macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrates), scientists have been trying to find the exact amount of specific nutrients that will lead to the perfect diet. The foods that our ancestors had been consuming for millennia have been broken down and analyzed. The results are in. According to lipophobes, as Pollan addresses them, fats are bad, carbohydrates are good, and protein makes kids grow to be big and strong. Public health warnings were created against fats. Over the years scientists have discovered we need to consume fats to survive, carbohydrates make people obese, and too much protein can be toxic and very harmful to the body. Public health warnings changed. Pollan provides evidence to show that as soon as the formula is shifted around a bit, a new harmful outcome is created. Maybe the perfect formula lies in something else beyond these three macronutrients.
     Breaking food down even further leads to the discovery of micronutrients including vitamins and fatty acids. Science has proven that a lot of these micronutrients are essential to human wellbeing and have begun fortifying food products with them. Pollan explains food fortification, by introducing breads with omega-3 and vitamin-fortified milk, both of which can be found in grocery isles throughout America. What the packages fail to acknowledge is that these products are practically stripped of many of their nutrients in the first place. Wheat contains protein, folic acid, antioxidants, and even omega-3 fatty acids before it is turned into flour used in bread. If people had to take the engine, A/C, and speakers out of their car to install a CD changer, we would all still be driving around listening to cassette recordings. Pollan claims that this is the logic of many fortified foods, and recommends staying away from fortified processed foods for this reason.
     One of Pollan’s other arguments is the notion that maybe the sum of all the nutrient parts in a food does not equal the food itself. Basically, a single food is actually a system at work, and it cannot be derived by simply taking every nutrient separately and ingesting them. For example, the olive oil some cultures enjoy with their tomatoes actually helps make the lycopene in the tomatoes more easily accessible to the body. If this is the case, it may also be possible that one nutrient in a food interacts with another so as to optimize the effects of the two. This would not occur if the nutrients were ingested separately, as many nutritional scientists try to persuade their audiences. In fact, Pollan cites studies that have shown that this is true. As more experiments come in, Pollan expects that this philosophy will have to change to accept the results.
     Pollan also uses thyme to explain his argument. Thyme contains about 35 different antioxidants. Rather than trying to isolate and analyze each antioxidant separately, a task which is nearly impossible to do in the first place, we should just accept that the antioxidants are all contained in the plant to protect it, and the fact that thyme alone is good for us should be reason enough to include it in our diet. People do not need to see which antioxidants are helpful and which do nothing at all, as long as the overall effect is beneficial.
     This leads into what Pollan spends his entire book explaining. He believes that the perfect formula that nutritional scientists are looking for is right before our eyes. Food is the perfect formula. From an evolutionary level, it makes sense. Plants need help germinating, and they attract this help by being healthy and nutritious to the carriers of their seeds. Animals that eat healthy have meat which is, not surprisingly at all, healthy. So rather than spending time, effort, and money on a science which has failed to understand how even the most basic of nutrients work, people should just eat whole foods as they were meant to be enjoyed. Scientists are trying to understand nutrition rather than the foods themselves, and it is not making diet any healthier. Michael Pollan knows this, so he is already one step ahead of so many nutritional scientists.