"Eat real food. Not too much. Especially plants.' With that message, philosopher Michael Pollan shook America up. Eating healthy has never been so easy. Read here why.
It says on the label 'Delicious curd strawberries'. In addition, in large letters 0% fat. You'd think there's nothing wrong with that. There's even a health logo on the front. But according to American philosopher Michael Pollan, you should distrust any food item that has more than five ingredients on the label. Or ingredients you can't pronounce. Such as oligofructose, modified tapioca starch or acesulfame-K. Those are the ingredients that are on the label of the sweet curds. That there are only two strawberries in such a container of cottage cheese is also doubtful of course.
According to philosopher Michael Pollan, we have no idea what we get on our plate every day. Nutritionists contradict themselves on so many points and health claims are so frequently retracted that it's hard to say what's healthy. For a long time, scientists agreed that it was important to eat as little fat as possible – because it would protect you against breast and colon cancer, suddenly science agrees that fat is good.
Each era has its own health rules. First generations were filled with cod liver oil. After that, milk was good for each. In the 1970s, the Bulgarians and Greeks brought us hope with their consumption of yogurt and garlic. Then suddenly milk was no longer good for everyone and we had to eat like the Japanese. With lots of rice and steamed vegetables. Low in fat and high in fiber, that was it. As in the widely acclaimed Mediterranean diet. Fat, as it turned out, was actually good. But then polyunsaturated. And red meat, you had better avoid that too. Eating fish twice a week was better.
According to Pollan, all those health claims have only created fear and confusion and kept us from making healthy choices. The food industry makes smart use of this by making the choices for us. With logos and 'healthy' recommendations on the labels. "But," Pollan says, as soon as it's labeled, you have to be on your guard right away.
Several years ago, when Pollan was as lost as everyone else, he decided to take a deep dive into the simple question:What should I eat? He approached his search as he is used to as a journalist for The New York Times. By doing thorough research. He soon discovered that scientists know far less about the relationship between diet and health than he had always believed.
Fortunately, all nutritionists agree on a few things. Pollan sums it up as:Eat real food. Not too much. Especially plants.
He thinks we should buy less food and pay more for it. This not only benefits us, but also the environment and our society.
Real food is food that is nutritious. Many products in the supermarket have been processed in such a way that natural building materials have been replaced by additives of lesser quality. An example:To make dairy products semi-skimmed, it is not enough to remove the fat. As a manufacturer, you also have to make an effort to maintain the creamy structure through additives. In this case, that is usually the addition of powdered milk. But powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, which is much worse for your blood vessels than regular cholesterol. In addition, removing the fat from milk makes it a lot more difficult for the body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins, which are one of the reasons for drinking milk. Real food is food that has not or hardly been processed by manufacturers.
Food must be recognizable as food. That seems easy. But is it? Do you still recognize the potato in the chips? Or the fish in the fish stick? According to Pollan, if you are looking for real food, it would be a good idea to take it with you in the shopping cart with an imaginary grandmother. When you look through her eyes at what you put in your cart, you automatically make the right choices. Grandmothers, Pollan believes, recognized food as food. When bread was still in a brown paper bag and soup simmered in a pan and didn't come out of a bag. That may sound like everything was-better in the past. But that's not what Pollan means. He just wants you to see from a different perspective the food that is on supermarket shelves in tubes, plastic bags and cans and that has come a long way from the natural place it comes from.
Not all additives are equally bad. A little salt in the peanut butter, pine nuts in the pesto, there's nothing wrong with that. So what should you pay attention to? A food label lists the ingredients in order of weight, from highest to lowest. Once you know that, you will see that the main ingredient of gingerbread is high fructose corn syrup. Syrup made from corn and the cheapest sweetener claimed to be worse than sugar. But Pollan limits himself in his book to health claims that are indisputable. He is not saying that high fructose corn syrup is unhealthier, but that all sweeteners are bad, and certainly in excessive amounts.
In America, where high fructose corn syrup is in many more products than we do, labels sometimes say the product contains "real cane sugar" instead. As with us, items are often advertised with 'sweetened with natural honey'. Sugar is sugar in any form. That's why you should avoid any processed product that has a sweetener listed among the three main ingredients.
Products with the most powerful health claims are often based on incomplete and poor research, Pollan believes. One of the first products that was claimed to be healthy – margarine – turned out not to be healthy at all, because it was full of harmful trans fats. A product that proudly reports that it has 0 percent fat may contain as much as 90 percent sugar. No label is almost always healthier than a product with a label that says it's healthy.
Many foods are processed in a way that makes us buy – and consume more of them. We have an innate preference for sweet, salty and fat and are served at our beck and call by the food industry. And it's not just sugar, salt and fat that are added in the factory to products that don't need it. If you look critically at the label of chips, you will see E621 – whether monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed protein or plain flavour. All names for the same flavor enhancer that messes up our natural satiety mechanism. That is why it is so difficult to eat ten chips, for example, or just one piece of prawn crackers. The flavor enhancers in chips and prawn crackers give your brain the signal:eat this bag as quickly as possible.
Food spoils because fungi, bacteria and insects recognize something as real food. Processing food once started to extend shelf life and keep the little critters at bay for as long as possible. But the more it is processed, the less nutritious. Real food lives, and what lives also dies, it rots. Not everything rotten. Honey, for example, can also be kept indefinitely in unprocessed form. But food that you can keep for years to come can only be processed.
No matter how many nutritionists disagree when it comes to healthy foods, they all agree on one thing. It's healthy to eat vegetables. Vegetables are an important source of vitamin C. If you eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, you will live longer and get sick less often. By plants Pollan primarily means leafy vegetables, because he sees them as the healthiest. But in the broadest sense of the word, these are all products that grow on a tree, shrub or with their roots in the earth and that live on water and sunlight.
“It would have been easy to write 'eat organic',” Pollan says. Yet he doesn't. Because there are also farmers who supply excellent products and who do not meet the requirements of organic cultivation. Moreover, biological is not a magic word. Organic lemonade is still lemonade and therefore not necessarily healthy. What is healthy is food that grows on rich soil. And food that has not flown halfway around the world or has been kept in a cold store for hours. High quality fresh food provides the best nutrients. That's why you need less of it. And quality may cost a bit. Therefore:pay more, eat less.
If there's one rule you really need to remember when shopping, it's this:don't eat products that list more than five ingredients on the label. Because the more ingredients, and the more unknown the names, the more intensively the product has been processed. The label of a bag of broccoli cream soup (Cup-a-soup) lists no fewer than twenty-seven ingredients, including corn syrup, dextrose and E621. All in that very small bag. Don't buy, Pollan says. Fortunately, the last rule of the book is:sin against the rules every now and then. For those who don't want to go crazy, that might be the best rule to remember.
Text:Manon Sikkel Source:Michael Pollan Image:Unsplash
Also read:
8 plant-based foods you should eat more often
7 common mistakes when you start with a plant-based diet
These are the three healthiest diets in the world
