Blog Post 4

Michael Polan tries to present the argument that you should ignore everything you’ve ever heard about scientific nutrition, and just build a diet of only non-processed foods, with little or no meat. However in doing so he tries to completely discredit modern science an ends weakening his own argument. While some of his arguments for healthy eating are good his deep distrust of nutritional science undercuts his own points. Polan is too worried about trying to show us what we should eat and decrying nutritional science at the same time. His argument for the first would have been stronger if he worried less about the latter.

The most prominent example of his refusal to rely on the science of what we need to eat comes at the end of the first part of the book. Polan uses a study done by Paul Rozin in which people were asked to choose one food to take with them on a dessert island. The only two foods on the list that would suffice were the least chosen. Polan uses this as an example of people being to worried about "bad" nutrients such as fats and sugars due to what he calls "nutritionism". However if you look at the list of food choices and used the very advice Polan is trying to give, “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants” you would have come to the same choice. The fruits and vegetables that most people picked, because the public sees them as healthier, and are what Polan thinks we should eat more of are the wrong choices. The two winning choices hot dogs and chocolate are meat and two heavily processed foods. This doesn't mean fruits and vegetables are bad for you, but to answer this question correctly you need to understand what your body needs to function. An answer modern food science can give us. (If you were wondering these choices were right because they had the fats and proteins that the body needs.) But every time Polan starts to delve to deeply into the nutrition of food he apologizes as if there is something inherently wrong with looking at the nutrients in a food.

This kind of problem plagues all of In Defense of Food, Polan tries to blame all of the problems he sees in the Western diet on the science of nutrition. However I believe that rather than attack the science of what we should it itself, he should have directed his criticism towards the way it is presented to the consumer. To truly have a good diet you need to understand what your body needs. In many ways Polans argument for more plants and less processed foods is well supported by the nutrients contained within these foods. However Polan refuse to rely on what modern science has established and thinks that "nutritionism" is inherently evil. In summation his argument would have been better served by using what we have learned about nutrients to support slogan, “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants”, and not bashing science for the way the media and food advertisers abuse it to manipulate the public into making decisions.