Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.
Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.
With these seven words Michael Pollan summed up the essence of healthy eating. In this first Substack article I want to agree with Michael Pollan and add a few thoughts along these lines.
It has been several years now since I read and then re-read In Defense of Food: An Eaters’ Manifesto. In my mind’s eye, I still can picture the romaine lettuce with the band around it with those words written thereon. But we live in the internet age now, so here is the image for you,
Even after working in the field of nutrition for 25 years and reading many books written from many perspectives of what is right for homo sapiens to eat, this book still stands out as the one with the most wisdom and common sense. If I want to explain to someone who is basically nutritionally illiterate (a common American I suppose) what a good diet looks like, I think of these seven words—“Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants.”
Allow me to expand on this just a bit. Not for over 200 pages as Michael Pollan did, but for a few paragraphs to get the point across.
(1) Eat Food.
That is, food items that have been long recognized as food. Not just GRAS (generally regarded as safe), but actual food that your grandma (well, maybe great grandma now, it has been a few years) would have recognized as food. Smart Balance™? Tofu dogs? Tofu turkey? Velveeta™? Not a creation from a food plant, but a plant that is food. Or an animal that ate green plants. Go back to the era before refrigeration and freezers. Go back to when 80 percent of Americans lived in a rural setting, like a small farm. Go back to the turn of the century. No, not 2000, but 1900. What did people eat? Pretty sure most of it was actual food, not something designed in a lab with “flavor enhancers”, manufactured or processed in big vats, and displayed on store shelves with dates like “expires in 3 years.”
Eat Food. Isn’t that the basic idea of “Whole 30”? Eat real food for 30 days. No cheating. (OK, so they throw out grains and legumes, but some people need a real reset and that is one way to attempt a reset.) But if you go back a couple of generations (Ok, for some of you, a couple more than a couple) you wouldn’t have been able to sell people on the idea of “Whole 30.” It wouldn’t have been a novel concept. It was just a way of life to eat real food. But in our day and age the concept of eating real food is a real struggle for many. But there is way more understanding and demand for real food than there was 25 years ago. So, we are making progress as a society. More and more people are getting the connection between food and health.
Do you remember Dr. Robert Atkins, of the famous Atkins Diet? I think he was barbequing the wrong stuff, but he can be credited with at least one good thing. He helped many Americans make a connection between their food and their health. He helped people begin to see that they were ultimately responsible for their own health and that they had the power to dictate their own health outcomes. He reached a lot of people. His books were very popular. Maybe because it catered to the foods that they really liked, that seemed to be on the forbidden list of “healthy” foods. Nevertheless, he did help people start to make a connection between diet and health. And for that he can be commended.
But here is a better example of a man showing how it is done. Dr. Paul Stitt and his wife Barbara did an awesome experiment with their “Peak Performance” program in the Appleton Wisconsin school district. For five years they provided the food service for Appleton Central Alternative Charter High School (ACA), from 1998-99 to 2002-03. They offered a free breakfast with whole grain bread, bagels, muffins and granola with an energy drink (ground flax and B vitamins, to be blended with fruit juice and fresh whole fruit; not like a modern caffeinated energy drink) and milk. Their lunch program had whole grain breads, fresh fruits, a salad bar, and entrees made with wholesome ingredients with no added chemicals or additives, low fat cookies for dessert and an energy drink and/or milk. Just to be clear, it was not a vegetarian program. Tables were added for eating, instead of sitting on couches and eating from vending machines, full spectrum lighting was used through the school, relaxation music was added, and aroma therapy with essential oil blends for memory, focusing or calming effects were used throughout the school. Exercise equipment and games such as foosball and air hockey were also made available to the students during the lunch break. So, the program was more than just food.
The staff at the Appleton Alternative School thought the program was a success. They reported less disruptive behavior, fewer health complaints, fewer disciplinary referrals to the office. The staff also reported being able to cover more material at a more challenging level during this program. According to the principal negative behaviors such as vandalism, drug and weapons violations, dropout and expulsion rates and suicide attempts were virtually nonexistent. A case report with more details is available, as well as a couple of videos of interviews done in the school with the staff. A follow-up video of the effect throughout the greater Appleton School District shows a wider interest in the program at the time. Sadly, the concept of healthy food in the schools has not really caught on. A real partnership between parents and the school is needed so that a positive message about the effects of nutritious food is not sabotaged at home. A great deal of food education coupled with positive food changes is needed.
(2) Not too much.
We in the USA, and many other western countries I suppose, have a real problem adapting to modern life. We like food, and we are programmed to eat food, just in case there is a famine starting tomorrow. And our bodies are programmed to store food, just in case, well, you know.
Have you seen those charts about the growth of the girth of our nation over time? It is a bit scary.
Here is a recent set of maps from the CDC, looking at the combination of obesity and diabetes from 2004 to 2019. It makes it look like 2004 was actually good, but I have data that shows goes back to 1994 that shows otherwise.
Apparently, the people at the CDC have poor memory, or don’t think that we are interested in trends that started more than 20 years ago. Now if you look a bit closer at the cutoff numbers for the different colors, it is even more interesting. In the new data, the lowest cutoff for the “white” counties is <7.1% diabetes and <21.2% obesity (BMI >30 kg/m2). In the old dataset, the lowest cutoff numbers were <4.5% diabetes and <14% obesity. In 1994 only a couple of states were above the lowest cutoff in the 2004 data for obesity or none for diabetes. Basically, the whole country was in the “white” squares in 1994.
And I’m sure if you go back even a bit further, you will find even lower numbers for obesity and diabetes because 1994 wasn’t exactly a golden age of health either. We were a little bit less sick is all. The main point here is that both obesity and diabetes are modern plagues.
What is the point? We have forgotten, or never knew, this second part of Michael Pollan’s advice—“Not Too Much.” And there has been much written about this, and I’ve read some of it, and so have you. We live in a land where food stuff is abundant. Food is everywhere. Cheap and conveniently located. That is the beauty of a “free” market system. But food companies have been buying influence for a very long time, so it isn’t really a free market system. Anyways, food is cheap and abundant. Then, too, life is convenient and requires less physical activity for daily living. People have to go to the gym these days for a “workout” because a “workout” isn’t built into their lifestyle at all. And there are quite a few good things about a gym workout, but it doesn’t replace hours and hours of inactivity at a desk. So, we burn fewer calories throughout the day making it much easier to build up a calorie surplus. The body might be able to burn a little bit off by raising the internal thermostat just a hair, but there are limits to that system. The rest of the surplus calories, judging by the maps of obesity over time in the USA, get stored as fat. And that is a huge problem, as obesity contributes negatively to every other disease. It just makes life worse.
(3) Mostly plants.
Why plants? It turns out that evidence from multiple angles has consistently shown that dietary patterns with higher intakes of plant foods are associated with better health outcomes. Valter Longo, in his book The Longevity Diet, points out five pillars of evidence which point towards the benefits of a plant-based diet. The evidence comes from basic research like in vitro mechanistic studies and animal model studies, observational studies in people, randomized controlled clinical studies, centenarian studies, and studies of complex systems that bring us useful analogies. There just isn’t robust information pointing to a low carb diet being healthy at a population level with positive health outcomes over a long period of time.
The people in areas of the Blue Zones around the world where there are extraordinary numbers of centenarians follow a plant predominant diet. Some are high fat, some are low fat, but all have plenty of plants. (Their lifestyle is much more than a diet, so we need to pay attention to their whole experience.) And we can muster up more evidence as we go along in this Substack conversation. And in the book Michael Pollan also brings up more evidence if you are curious to know. So there are a couple of sources you can dig into. You don’t have to take my word for it, nor should you just follow anyone’s advice without checking out their sources and motives.
Why not exclusively plants? Well, it isn’t that you can’t be healthy following a vegan diet, but that it isn’t necessary to be a vegan to be healthy. Lots of plant foods? Yes. Exclusively plants? No. That is the short answer. It seems that a healthy vegan is a cheating vegan. Eating an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, along with organic whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds is more important than making sure there is no consumption of animal products at all. If we can agree on the ninety percent of the diet that seems quite solid, we can dabble and experiment with the last ten percent and not fight about it. That is the argument made by the True Health Initiative and David Katz. Sounds like a winning strategy to me.
One more point on this. There aren’t any vegan societies out there that have thrived. There have been some experiments, but all societies around the world have included some source of food from animals. Even Gandhi, committed as he was to being a vegan, ended up keeping a goat to get some fresh milk for better health and stamina. So, that might be a clue to us as well. With a few supplements, like vitamin B12, you can follow a safe, healthy vegan diet, but natural sources of vitamin B12 from plant sources are very few and far between. Like one, a certain purple Nori seaweed. So, exclusively plant diets are not necessary for excellent health, and such dietary limitations could be detrimental.
So, that is it. Eat foods. Not too much. Mostly plants. Seven words to sum up what to eat. Easy to remember, but lots to ruminate on. Over the years the wisdom of these seven words has played out quite well, so we are going to stick with them.
Have another opinion? Well, of course you do. If we all thought alike there would be no room for improvement. Or do you like what you read? Feel free to comment on this article and get a conversation going.