What does it mean to be Healthy?

    In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, he made several arguments. However there is one critical flaw in In Defense of Food. Pollan put too much emphasis on food. Pollan made food seem like the only element in the stair way to being "healthy". In reality it is not the only factor. There are a couple of other factors, Pollan himself also recognizes that it isn't the only factor but he chooses not to elaborate that in his book. Some of these factors are exercise, eating habits and possibly many others. Take in mind that he hints at these "other" factors throughout the book but chooses not to divulge in them because his ultimate goal is to promote food from the farmers market. So he had no choice but to ignore these "other" factors.

First of all, Pollan throws the word "healthy" around excessively without properly giving a good definition of it as he did for the "Western Diet". Does Pollan mean that a certain type of food [processed vs. fresh produce] is healthy or does he mean us, humans, being healthy? This is unclear because he mentions both. " Yet as a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot … watch out for those health claims"³⁹ Here Pollan uses sarcasm to compare a box of cereal to raw potato and carrots. He obviously tries to convince the readers that the carrot and raw potato is a whole lot better [healthier] than the cereal. If we go with this example then that means healthier food produces healthier people. If the readers go with this logic then Pollan is right, which is the way Pollan wants the reader to think.

However later on in the book he mentions other elements of "healthy" which isn't in terms of whether the food is "healthy" or not but whether the person is "healthy" or not. "Yet people differ in important ways. We all know that lucky soul who can eat prodigious quantities of fattening food without ever gaining weight"⁶³ However he just drops it right there and didn't go further with this example. So who is this "lucky soul" and what are the ways that we, humans, differ? Maybe the fact that some of us would rather be a couch potato than be an athlete. The varying amount of exercises that we perform has a huge effect in not "gaining weight" from "eat[ing] prodigious quantities of fattening food". If we go with this logic then that means food plus exercise gives us "healthy", which isn't the way that Pollan wants us to think.

    In the book it could be seen that he subconsciously supports this view [that food plus exercise gives us "healthy"] but in order for him to attain his objective like the food industry he has to push the readers in focusing solely on food. Pollan mentions the compromise of food and exercise in " How a culture eats may have just as much of a bearing on health as what a culture eats"¹⁸² Here he acknowledges the fact that food is not the only factor it's what we do. As he quotes "Rozin focused on portion size and time spent eating"¹⁸³. Using this quote he shifts the focus from what we do which is more general- encompassing the elements of exercise, how we eat, where we eat, and basically what we do- to portion size and time spent on eating which boxes out all the other elements which is more specific.

    In this way Pollan twists the facts that eating healthy food promotes good health. The fact of the matter is it is not the only variable. Health goes hand in hand with what we do and partly with what we eat. We cannot go without consuming the right amounts of nutrients or our body would have a deficiency of nutrients and that could lead to a various amount of problems. Like the sailors case.²¹ We also cannot go without having exercise. There needs to be a balance between the two to have a healthy person.