In his latest book In Defense of Food, Micheal Pollan explores many different arguments against food science and what is called the western diet. His main point so far is that many Americans today are not eating food; they are eating nutrients. Many of the products we see on grocery store shelves are the outcome of some food scientist’s experiment. Labels claiming things like low-cholesterol, low-fat and high-fiber are seen everywhere. Pollan tells readers that products making such health claims should be avoided. He discusses the shift of eating nutrients and the science that discovered and exploited these nutrients. Pollan also brings up history of the American diet and introduces nutritionism, a term that represents a concept in which food is defined by nutrients.
Pollan makes an argument about the governments involvement with the nutritionism ideology. The Food and Drug Administration proposed a new imitation rule that states if an imitation food was not “nutritionally inferior”(35) it did not have to be labeled as an imitation. Pollan disagrees, and so do I. If whole foods used in creating food products are replaced with substances produced in the lab we as the consumer should know about it. Just because they are nutritionally equal does not account for the real foods being replaced by fake ones.
Pollan argues that if scientists try they could come up with advantages of eating any given food. He even talks about how a candy company can find benefits of eating chocolate. This can happen with any food not commonly associated with being healthy. I agree with his argument. If someone has the money and technology, they can find something remotely beneficial to the human body and spin it into a health claim. This trend of new healthy labels has caused some companies to make up false health claims about their product. This candy company was sued because of their false labeling. I also agree that people are more attracted to regularly bad-for-you foods with a health claim than they are to normally healthy foods.
