the same religion that's capable of hideous acts of destruction could also be capable of moments of healing and restoration that of hope but educate a girl and you educate her entire family there is a Sun within every person when that anger sets them write it write the letters but don't send them you never want to leave concrete proof of insanity [Music] good evening everyone welcome to Campbell Hall it's nice to have you here my name is Roman Brock with the UCSB Arts & Lectures program it's a real thrill and delight for us to be able to present the number one best-selling nonfiction author in the country according to the New York Times Michael Pollan it shows that you can be an academic at UC Berkeley and still be a best-selling author at the same time it's a great honor to have Michael here with us it's it's an incredibly busy schedule and to make time to visit us here in Santa Barbara is a real gift so thank you very much Michael the format for today for tonight Michael will deliver a 45 minute lecture we'll follow that we'll take the podium offstage then we'll set up two chairs and we'll have an onstage conversation between Michael and Stephanie lemon ah sure from the English department here at UCSB then we will follow that with your questions we have microphones here at the front very important that you use the microphones for your questions please no statements no notices about rallies or any other things like that a question for Michael Pollan would be appreciated and then we will follow that with an on-stage book signing borders is in the lobby with the current the new book of Michael's as well as some previous titles so please stop at the table if you haven't seen it there I realize it was pretty crowded in the lobby on the way in one last thing please take a moment now to turn off your cell phones and keep them turned off throughout the lecture this evening now it's my great pleasure for the formal introduction to present to you Stephanie lemon ah sure she's associate professor here in the English department at UCSB where she teaches classes in English and environmental studies she directs the American cultures and global context Center which is currently pursuing a two-year theme on global oh geez her current book addresses climate changing anxiety from a historical perspective please welcome Stephanie lemon ah sure [Applause] well as many of you no doubt know Michael Pollan has authored five award-winning books and numerous articles he's a contributing editor and writer to the New York Times magazine he served for many years as executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now the night professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley his numerous journalistic awards include the James Beard Award for best magazine series of 2003 and the Reuters IUCN 2004 environmental journalism his last book The Omnivore's Dilemma a natural history of for meals was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by both the New York Times in the Washington Post and that was also a book that won multiple awards his latest book in defense of food and eaters manifesto has already received excellent reviews including a wonderfully woody one by Janet Maslin of the New York Times I myself first encountered Michael Pollan's work several years ago when I began teaching his book second nature a gardeners education in a literature and environment class that I offer here at UCSB in that book which is pollens first does something for the reader and environmental enthusiasts that few books labeled environmental nonfiction do it relieves anxiety and in saying that I don't mean to imply that the book is light reading but rather that it offers a way out of the romantic philosophy of wilderness that writers like Henry David Thoreau inadvertently propagated to the detriment as it turned out of real productive thought about the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world along with environmental historians such as William Cronin and fellow journalists like Bill McKibben Pollan in the late 20th century began to teach us to get over nature that is if we conceived of nature as a kind of pristine place apart from human design Pollan also imagined and continues to imagine pragmatic alternatives to the romantic zero-sum game of man versus nature practical means for channeling our Biophilia living together with nonhumans and essentially getting over ourselves the anxiety attendant upon the condition of being human surfaces again as an environmental hazard and pollens 5th and latest book in defense of food and eaters manifesto here the existential problem that Pollan explored from another angle as quote The Omnivore's Dilemma returns as a culturally specific eating disorder that he calls orthorexia or an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating what to eat how how much pollens poetically simple response to these worried questions is eat food not too much in mostly plants and I think that these three rules could actually be a kind of battering ram that destroys the befuddling rhetoric of nutritionism which is an ideology that he contends has actually robbed us of our common sense relationship to food when Michael Pollan does for us certainly does for me in his eating's eaters manifesto is essentially what he did for us in the Omnivore's Dilemma but with different emphases he restores food contexts and in doing so he restores meaning referentiality to words that have been strategically misused and that no longer refer to anything in particular for instance the word food restoring meaningful context and reattaching words to reference and can be grasped even by our senses these are gifts that empower that relieve eco anxiety which is now a diagnosable condition that make possible democracy and wise consumerism and that mark Michael Pollan both as a brilliant ecological detective and an immensely talented writer it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Michael Pollan thank you thank you very much thank you thank you all for coming this evening I understand that there was some competition across campus I appreciate your your votes it's a pleasure it's a special pleasure to be in in Santa Barbara which is you many of you realize I hope one of the one of the places where the American food system is being reinvented right now and there are some very you know notable players in this movement and and wonderful farms and and and innovation in the food system so a lot of you I think are know what I will know what I'm talking about and our exemplars of the kind of changes that that that this manifesto is arguing for what I'm going to do today is talk a little bit about the the thinking behind this new book how I came to to write it and read a brief passage or two to give you a little bit of flavor of it before we have this onstage conversation with Stephanie which I'm really looking forward to and and to hear your questions and when we get to your questions I hope you won't ask me too much about specific nutrients or foods I'm getting the strangest questions on this book tour but last night someone said so can you offer us any pejoratives about kelp I I didn't know what to do with that I have nothing against kelp I don't like to eat it but I mean I hear it's good food now how many people in this room read at least some of omnivore is dilemma Wow well I you know I I read this I wrote this book partly because of out of concern for your welfare I kept running into people after I published Omnivore's Dilemma who would come up to me and say you know I've read about half your book and I'm afraid to go any further and I would say why that's kind of troubling to hear as a writer I know it is a long book but they would say well every time I turn the page there's something else I can't eat anymore and I'm afraid if I get to the end I'll starve there'll be nothing left now I in in doing that book you know went to the you know deep into the heart of darkness of the American food system but I did come out still eating and and it's very important we keep eating and did find that there were a lot of you know very happy and encouraging options out there and I I guess I hadn't put enough emphasis on that so it occurred to me that there were even among people who'd read this book there was still such anxiety I mean perhaps I contributed to that anxiety about eating especially with regard to personal health that I thought well it might be useful to try to get to the bottom of why we have this anxiety about eating what Stephanie said called orthorexia I call it the American paradox also a people who are who are so concerned with nutrition and yet have such poor dietary health and how could these two things coexist and I want to suggest why that might be so and and so what I was trying to do in this book was offer some very concrete rules of thumb kind of algorithms to help people navigate this what has become a very treacherous food landscape and as I dug down deep trying to learn what I could about the links between diet and health it occurred to me that the biggest problem we had was our outlook on food the ideology that we use to make our food decisions and think about food which and I use the term for that that's definitely mentioned nutritionism I want to tell you a little bit about nutritionism and where I think it came from and why I think it's such a bad bad development in our in our relationship to food and how we might clear our minds of this way of looking at food you know ideologies are very slippery things they're their ways of organizing experience that were often unconscious of they're sort of like the weather or the water we drink and we're not really aware of the assumptions underlying them but when we get in touch with those assumptions when we begin to look at an ideology and stand back a few steps and kind of take a Martians eye view of it sometimes we can begin to control it rather than have it control us so let's try to do that with nutritionism there are there are four premises I think underlying nutrition four important ones there's some minor ones too the first of course is that the important unit when you're thinking about food is the nutrient that foods are collections of nutrients and if you get the right ones and avoid the wrong ones that's the key to health the assumption is that foods are the sum of their nutrient parts and I think a lot of us accept this without thinking about it too much because it's certainly the way the food marketplace is now organized now what follows from this is the second premise because nutrients are at least compared to foods invisible and therefore slightly mysterious it falls to experts scientists journalists food scientists and food marketers to explain the hidden reality of food to us it's a little bit like a religion if the important thing is invisible we require priests to help us commune with the important thing and in this case that important thing are these mysterious nutrients because of course who was seen a nutrient except the scientist with their microscope we've never seen nutrients have you ever seen an antioxidant another assumption like most ideologies nutritionism divides the world into good and evil so that in American dietary history there is always a satanic nutrient we are trying to drive from the food supply for many years of course it was dietary fat you know during the the Cold War that was the communism of food right saturated fat in particular and then on the other side you had the blessed nutrient the saviour nutrient that if you just ate enough of that one you were gonna be fine and you might live forever so we had fiber for many years we had we now have the we had polyunsaturated fatty acids that those were okay and in fact would really help and restore the health of our heart and now of course the great savior nutrient is the omega-3 fatty acid and I predict the next evil nutrient mark my words will be the omega-6 fatty acid we are very close to a moment where there will be a raft of products filling your supermarket's boasting about the fact they have low or no omega-6 fatty acids this is the the war between omega-6 and omega-3 that that you'll you'll soon be learning about and they're in this kind of zero-sum relationship and I can tell you more about that later and then the fourth assumption and this is the one that I think we we we don't realize how weird this is but that we look at food as primarily you know the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health we take this for granted that in our eating where they're ruining our health or we're saving our health but that's what it's about and we forget the there have been many people through history and there are many people in in other cultures still who eat for a wide variety of other reasons they eat for pleasure they eat for community they eat to express their identity they eat for ritual reasons there are great many other equally legitimate reasons to eat but we seem to have narrowed it down to this this one thing health and this is what I mean about being a nation of orthorexia I didn't coin this this is a term coined by a doctor a shrink who was seeing more and more patients who had this unhealthy obsession with healthy eating and that they were paralyzed in their food decisions such that they couldn't eat anything now how did this ideology come to take hold of American culture and increasingly by the way world cultures this way of thinking about food is spreading but we are really the champs of nutritionism in this country I'm proud to say well if you look back in American history one of the things that really surprised me I thought it was a strictly modern phenomenon but in fact Americans have embraced this scientism in their eating going back to the 1860s and 1870s there was an obsession with improving the diet of immigrant populations who supposedly weren't eating well and giving them the lessons of the new nutrition science and then you had a service Sylvester Graham with his graham cracker preaching the evils of protein and then you had around the turn of the last century you had a horse Fletcher and John Harvey Kellogg who were you know great nutritional heroes absolute quacks but great nutritional heroes Horace Fletcher believed that you know we should chew every bite a hundred times and that this would be the key to health and longevity and he himself was incredibly healthy guy he was known for being able to run up and down the the Washington Monument without stopping to catch his breath and he these you know if you do to that much you you will lose weight because there's just not enough time in the day to swallow enough food to get fat but what a way to eat and by the way you know we talked about this guy as a quack and he was a quack but he was followed by a lot of very intelligent people the James brothers William and Henry James were great believers in Horace Fletcher's work and John Harvey Kellogg work was was followed by a Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford all of them went to the sanitarium and they practiced 100 time chewing and they sang chewing songs to to urge people on and they had these hourly enemas that were believed to be very helpful with Bulgarian yogurt and all these crazy crazy things on the enemy then by the way was protein and they invented breakfast cereal to drive protein out of the the morning meal so there's a history of eating pseudo scientifically in America and I would contend we're still doing it the modern history of nutritionism though that nutritionism z' hold in our lifetime really dates back to the 1970s and there are a couple red-letter dates in the that i was able to find as i tried to trace this history one is a very obscure historical event in 1973 and that was what is called the repeal of the imitation rule there had been a rule in American an FDA rule that was built into the the founding Act of the Food and Drug Administration in 1938 that held that if you were going to take a traditional food that everybody knew and had expectations about such as bread or pasta or sour cream or yogurt and you were to fundamentally change its constituents you couldn't call it bread or sour cream or yogurt or pasta you had to call it imitation bread or sour cream or imitation yogurt it seemed like okay not a bad thing to do it protected us from adulterants which we were very concerned about going back to Upton Sinclair and what he learned was going on in packing town in the meat industry and all the strange things that were getting into sausage so the purity of food the fact that they conform to our expectations of what those foods were a very important principle in 73 we throw this out at the behest of industry and at the behest of the American Heart Association why are they interested in throwing this out because they're very interested in getting the fat out of the American food supply and if imitation foods are the way to get people to eat less saturated fat which they had decided was the great evil at the moment well what stood in the way of reengineering the whole food supply was this imitation rule because nobody would buy imitation pasta would you know it's it's the kiss of death in the marketplace so they without much notice and in fact even though it was a federal law the FDA threw it out on its own so some enterprising lawyer could probably sue together get it reinstated and I encouraged that lawyer to to act so that was one red letter day the next one comes in 1977 this is a slightly more famous episode and that is when Senator George McGovern who was chair of a Senate Select Committee on nutrition issued a set of dietary goals for the United States there was a lot of concern about heart disease at that time and he took some hearings and listened to the doctors and the cardiologists and the consensus seems to be that saturated fat animal fats were the problem and he endeavored to do something we had never done before in America which is have the government weigh in on not just a particular groups diet that might perhaps have a problem you know diabetics or people with nutritional deficiencies know the whole country should change the way it eats and he came up with this set of goals and one of those goals was this he said eat less red meat very simple everyone understands what he's talking about he's talking about food he's saying eat less of a particular food and this will help with heart disease may or may not be true but that was the that was the message well this message turned out to be the most inflammatory thing he had ever said and the industry came down on him like a ton of bricks the National Cattlemen's Beef Association the the pork producers council the grocery Manufacturers everybody just protested and there was a firestorm of criticism and McGovern who of course came from a state full of cattle ranchers was forced to beat a hasty retreat and to rewrite the dietary goals and compromise with industry about them and so this is how that sentence got rewritten from eat less red meat to choose meats that will reduce your saturated fat intake now what are the differences between those two things well one makes sense and everyone knows what you're talking about the other one is kind of obscure and hard to understand unless you understand what saturated fat is also the second one doesn't have a less in it it's not saying eat less of anything it's saying eat more of meat that has these qualities and the third thing that's different and this is key is we're talking now not about foods but nutrients we're the conversation and this is the only acceptable conversation to industry is to talk about nutrients not whole foods because the industry can always manipulate nutrients but if you're if the government is going to weigh in saying eat less of a particular food that is a disaster so that began a taboo in public discussion of food that lasts to this day the government cannot say eat less of anything they can say choose foods that lower your intake of this or that but they will not tell you to eat less of anything and that's one important reason why government health advice when it comes to food is essentially useless and largely corrupt am i speaking too plainly I'm sorry this language got picked up in a 1982 National Academy of Sciences a statement about diet and cancer and they used the same language instead of talking about fruits and vegetables as being productive against cancer they talked about antioxidants and beta carotene and vitamins in these foods as being protective and over the protests of several members of that committee who said we don't know that about beta carotene we know that foods containing beta carotene have these effects but they made that leap they went right to the beta carotene so this became the official way of talking about food and lo and behold it was below by industry I'm gonna read a brief passage about what happened to the food supply once we'd established this this this frame for for our food and this little chapter it's a mini chapters called Food Sciences Golden Age in the years following the 1977 dietary goals in the 1982 National Academy of Sciences report on diet and cancer the food industry armed with its regulatory absolution said about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients than science and government had deemed the good ones and fewer of the bad a golden age for food science dawned - sprouted like dandelions in the supermarket aisles low fat no cholesterol high fiber ingredient labels on formerly two or three ingredient foods such as mayonnaise and bread and yogurt ballooned with lengthy lists of new additives what in a more benign age would have been called adulterants the year of eating oat bran also known as 1988 served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America oat brands moment on the dietary stage didn't last long but the pattern now was set and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its start earn under the marketing lights here come omega-3s you would not think that common food animals could themselves be rejiggered to fit nutritionists fashion but in fact some of them could be and were in response to the 77 and 82 guidelines as animal scientists figured out how to breed leaner pigs and select for leaner beef with widespread lipeh phobia taking hold of the human population countless cattle lost their marbling and lean pork was repositioned as the new white meat tasteless and toughest running shoes perhaps but now even a pork chop could compete with chicken as a way for eaters to reduce their saturated fat intake in the year since egg producers figured out a clever way to redeem even the disreputable egg by feeding flax seed to hens they could elevate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the yolks aiming to do the same thing for pork and beef fat the animal scientists are now at work to Netta cailli engineering omega-3 fatty acids into pigs and persuading cattle to lunch on flaxseed in the hope of introducing the blessed fish fat where it had never gone before into hot dogs and hamburgers but these whole foods are the exception the typical whole food has much more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism if only because something like a banana or an avocado can't as readily change its nutritional stripes the rest assured that genetic engineers are hard at work on this problem to date at least they can't put oat bran in a banana or omega-3s in a peach so depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy the avocado might either be a high-fat food to be assiduously avoided cold think or a food high and good monounsaturated fats to be embraced new think the fate and supermarket sales of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather while the processed foods simply get reformulated and differently supplemented that's why when the Atkins diet storm hit the food industry in 2003 bread and pasta got a quick redesign dialing back the carbs boosting the protein while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the carbohydrate cold a handful of Lucky Whole Foods has recently gotten the good nutrient marketing treatment the antioxidants in the pomegranate a fruit formerly more trouble to eat than it was worth now protect against cancer and get this erectile disfunction they have done the research they have the research and you know how they did it they studied know listen they studied rabbits did you think rabbits had this problem evidently they do a whole subcategory of nutritional science funded by industry and according to one recent analysis remarkably reliable and its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study has sprung up to give a nutritionist Sheen an fda-approved health claim to all sorts of foods including some not ordinarily thought of as healthy the Mars Corporation recently recently endowed a chair in chocolate science at the University of California at Davis where research on the antioxidant properties of cacao is making steady breakthroughs so it shouldn't be long before we see chocolate bars barring FDA approved health claims and when we do nutritionism will surely have entered its baroque phase 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 with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section silent as stroke victims while a few aisles over in cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound whole grain goodness to the rafters Thanks thank you so you see nutritionism as an ideology is the best thing that ever happened to the food industry because the food industry profits from making the most complex processed foods possible it's very hard to make money selling real food any farmer in the audience knows this it's so much easier to take something simple some commodity like corn or soy or say oatmeal and turning it into a processed food oatmeal rolled oats go to the supermarket you can get a pound of organic rolled oats for 79 cents a pound of oats is a lot of oats so you can't make money selling that and the price is always going down because American farmers get more and more productive so you make Cheerios you take those oats take 5 5 or 10 cents worth of oats and turn them into these little donut shaped things and you have a marketing campaign and a nice name and you add various other ingredients to make it even more attractive and convenient now you don't have to cook them you just add milk and then you've got a good business four dollars off of 10 cents worth of votes and then though even that turns into a commodity as other as the store brands come in and they they make their store you know Cheerios that are really just as good and look exactly the same so you have to complicate the food further because you need to grow and you need new product lines so what do you do you make honey nut cheerios cereal bars have you seen these things they come in you know they're multiple pieces of packaging and there is this little thing that is a layer of cereal glued together separated two layers and in the middle is milk okay and there's a pitcher of milk on the cover now you wouldn't think you could do milk and processed food what they have figured out how to make a milk like edible substance that goes in the middle and it has lots of calcium and and you can eat those on the run in the car on your way to school in the lunch box and there now you're making you know what you're making 10 or $15 a pound probably for those oats and then you go to the next step and the next thing in the cereal aisle appears to be in the cereal aisle is a great place to study nutrition is omits really is the full flowering of this theology is the serial straw have you seen these they take the cheerio material or some other you know grain cheap grain and they extrude it in this long straw and in the inside they line it with that same milk material and and your children are supposed to suck their milk through this straw and then they consume the straw this is a really cool product and parents feel good about it because it's getting your kids to drink more milk which is allegedly a good thing for parents to do so it all these products are marketed in a way that they appeal to kids it's candy really and but there's always a message for the parents to license the purchase of these things whole grain goodness or helps your kid drink more milk so that's how the that's how the industry makes money and it needs new products all the time it needs added levels of complexity and nutritionism is always giving a new theory a new hot nutrient around which you can regio your food and whole foods can't do that so that's why nutritionism is much beloved by industry now if nutritionism worked if thinking about food is a collection of nutrients eating for health dividing the world into good and evil nutrients was a workable way to make people healthier I would have no problem with it well I would still have a problem with it but you know because it does take a lot of the pleasure out of eating but let's say it didn't I mean let's say it worked it would be okay it would be worth it it would be a trade-off I suppose if we could use nutritionism to conquer the kind of chronic diseases that kill most of us four out of the ten top killers in America our chronic disease is caused by diet so if nutrition isn't worked okay we could give it a chance but it doesn't work and this is the the most troubling thing about it for it to work we would have to know what the important nutrients are we would have to be able to measure those nutrients we would have to know that those nutrient and ripped out of their food context work but none of this is true nutrition science is a very interesting science it's a very promising science but it's also a very young science it's only about a hundred and seventy years old that's when gust awfully big and some an Englishman named proud determined that carbohydrates proteins fats that those are the key nutrients if we get those we're gonna be alright and this is how we started looking at food this way and they made a baby formula with those three nutrients and the babies died gee we're missing something yeah they were missing something and we sent Englishmen on long ocean voyages with plenty of fat protein and carbohydrates and they got sick they got scurvy they got rickets what was wrong well we'd overlooked this other class of nutrients called vitamins so we made baby formula with vitamins in it now we thought now we've now we've got it this is as good as nature's milk but in fact the babies failed to thrive they had problems with their visual development their mental development what happened oh we didn't know about omega-3 fatty acids so then we added those in and we didn't know about the antioxidants and all the all the kind of minor plant chemicals that are turning out to not be so minor so the whole history of of nutrition science is the history of overlooked nutrients we do not yet know what is going on deep in the soul of a carrot it is a mystery foods are very complex systems they are the product of coevolution between their eaters and and themselves in which they a change to because to suit our desires now this is the story I tell and bonding desire and they you know and we change so that we can make very good use of the nutrients they have in them it's this brilliant system of design that unfolds over thousands of years by trial and error these are very complex systems they are more than the sum of their nutrient parts they are in fact not just things they are relationships are the domesticated species on which we depend so at that end of the food chain we have a very interesting mystery that we have not solved maybe someday we will maybe we won't and in fact we don't even need to but let's let's stipulate that so that's one side of the food chain other side of the food chain our bodies our digestive tracts also very imperfectly understood systems digestion looks like a pretty simple process of breaking complex things down into their chemical parts but in fact it's more complicated than that it's a very complex system did you know that you have as many neurons in your digestive tract as you have in your spinal column what are they thinking why do you need neurons to digest food not well understood at all so another mystery so the point is the science is young as I as I see it nutrition sciences where surgery was in about 1650 really interesting really promising but I'm not ready to get on the table and we should not be ready to change the way we eat based on where they are right now I spent a lot of time looking at nutrition science and how it's done and as soon as you do that you realize why it's so important diet on a certain population you do have to know what that population is actually eating how do they determine that well the best way they can since they can't follow everybody around with an invisible person with a camera taking pictures of everything they eat all the time they give them questionnaires in every three months if you're in one of these big dietary trials you fill out what's called a food frequency questionnaire now I tried to fill one of these out and I urge you to try you can find them on the web it asks you questions like how many times in the last three months did you eat half a cup of broccoli what is half a cup about how much is that and when you did what sort of fat was it cooked in I don't know I don't remember and when you know and when I ate broccoli in a restaurant I have no idea what kind of fat it was cooked with and we eat about half our meals out now or they're at least prepared by someone else we know in fact that people lie on these foods frequency questionnaires people lie more about food than just about anything but sex probably on there and but even if they're telling the truth and I tried when I filled this out to be as truthful and complete as I could about what I'd eaten over that past three months it reported when I fed it into the computer over the web it reported I was eating 1,200 calories a day now I would vanish if I were eating 1,200 calories a day clearly I was missing more than a thousand calories a day so we know they they know that these food frequency questionnaire are off by about 30% okay this is the data on which these large conclusions are based very faulty data and there's a series of other problems with the science I mean you can't for example when you're doing nutrition studies unlike say pharmaceutical studies you can't use a placebo there's no placebo for broccoli there's no placebo placebo for fat I mean so you can't really do those kind of real double-blind tests of people's eating so it's a you know I don't mean to dismiss it I think it's important science I think we should pay attention to what they're doing but I think we also should be very patient and not change our worlds based on what they figured out this week so nutrition science is not in a position to tell us how to eat now my other problem with nutritionism the last problem I think with nutritionism is that although it was created modern nutritionism to deal with a serious problem which is to say the Western diet and what it's doing to our health in the end it obscures that elephant in the room it doesn't really help us deal with it and this is what we do know I tried very hard in this book to get back to whatever solid ground of knowledge we have about food and health and there are a couple big facts we know and in fact they're the only facts we need to know to decide how to eat the big fact and with this we have known since the 1890s or so 1880s is that people who eat a Western diet people are introduced to this Western diet and let me quickly define it it's a diet characterized by lots of refined grains lots of processed food lots of red meat and lots of processed meat and very few fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains ok it's the basic fast food diet processed food diet out of the middle of the supermarket people who eat this way or are introduced to this diet reliably get a sequence of diseases that the researchers who discovered this fact and they discovered it by being in Asia in Africa in the Pacific Islands when this diet was introduced and seeing populations that had no cancer and had no heart disease and had no diabetes get these diseases they decided to call it because it was clear to them what was causing this the Western diseases caused by the Western diet so this is not controversial it's amazing but it's not controversial why is it amazing because these these medical workers and Albert Schweitzer was one of them by the way he was he wrote about this and was very alert to it as people started eating the white man's diet he found all these new diseases but also Western price an American dentist who did this research and guy named Burkitt's and Mackerras in English nutrition scientists in different parts of the world they observed that people eating traditional diets of many different kinds were remarkably healthy and what was striking about this is how different these traditional diets were so for example the Maasai warriors in Africa who eat very little other than cows blood beef and milk are some of the healthiest people on earth and you have Central Americans and Mexicans eating by and large a diet of corn and beans and smattering a vegetable smattering of meat very healthy you have Inuit in Greenland eating seal blubber and lichens no diabetes very little cancer no heart disease so what this tells us is that the human body is remarkably well adapted and if you compare that to other animals say remarkably well adapted to a great many different foods this is we are omnivores and we can live in six of the seven continents for this reason we can be healthy on a great there is no one ideal diet for humans that's a very important lesson from this the amazing thing is though that there is one diet to which we clearly are poorly adapted and it happens to be the diet most of us are eating how is it that you know thousands of years of civilization should have created the one way of eating that kills people this is astounding so the challenge begins to figure out how to escape this Western diet without having to leave civilization because if you're willing to leave civilization by the way it's easy I mean I I described very interesting experiments where Aborigines who'd moved to the cities and had serious problems with their blood pressure heart disease diabetes went back to the bush for just six weeks went back to their traditional hunter-gatherer diet and most of their their their levels of insulin and blood pressure everything fell right back to the normal range and they lost weight and essentially they were not symptomatic anymore and we've seen this with Hawaiian Islanders put back on their traditional diets so that's one way to do it but most of us are not prepared to go there most of us don't know how to hunt witchetty grubs or like to eat them or whatever of those Aborigines were eating so how do we do it here and the larger question is if science is not going to guide us in our food choices is not ready to tell us how to eat well then who is not me don't look to a journalist to tell you how to eat what I did in trying to come up with these rules of thumb was to find other sources of wisdom and of course there is a source of wisdom we have had as long as we have been human and that source of wisdom is culture culture is really just a fancy word for your mom when it comes to food the ways that the traditions of the group are passed down from mother to daughter to mother to daughter to mother to daughter think about how did you learn to eat you learn to eat from your mom how much to eat when to eat what to eat things with combinations the order in which to eat things what fork to use when you're eating these are other sources of wisdom about food the problem is of course mom has had her Authority destroyed by 32 billion dollars a year in food marketing but there is still a lot of wisdom and culture and this cultural wisdom about food we I need to remind you that this is originally how we navigated the what I call The Omnivore's Dilemma think back to that state of nature the first time that a human tried a mushroom hadn't been tried before ate it keeled over and died well the other people in his group said alright we don't want to do that again how can we avoid that mushroom and they hit on this brilliant idea well we have this tool called language we're gonna give it a name a name that's gonna help us not eat it anymore so let's call it the mmm the Death Cap we'll call it the deaf cap nobody would eat something with death in it and indeed we have this mushroom called the death cap and people avoid eating it they make mistakes but the point is culture can guide us in how to eat so what I what I try to do in this book was see if I couldn't recover some of this cultural wisdom around food and come up with a set of tips and if you think about it you you have heard these tips from your mother your grandmother you know other ancestors and indeed I encourage you if you have any to write them down and give them to me because I've been collecting them and so for example someone at a talk the other night said well my grandmother used to say when Wonder Bread was introduced or something like that she said the white or the bread the sooner you'll be dead this is very wise this is very wise so in the book I tried to help and you know with this and my mantra my little haiku which I give away I give away this whole book on the cover you don't need to buy it you just need to look at it eat food not too much mostly plants I mean that really is everything I could learn distill down to that the hard part is okay well isn't it all food no it no longer is all food and distinguishing the food from what I call the edible food-like substances that have taking over the supermarket is the hard part so I offer some tips for how to do that I'll give you just a couple examples because I want to wrap up pretty soon don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food imagine her with you as you're rolling down the aisles in the supermarket and she gets to the dairy the dairy case and she picks up the box of go-gurt portable yogurt tubes and she takes one of those tubes out of the box and she thinks what is this is this toothpaste is this food how if it is how do you eat it does it go in my mouth if she if she if she read the ingredients she knows what yogurt is yogurt is milk with a little bit of bacteria that's all it takes it's a one ingredient or one in a fraction ingredient food well look how many ingredients are in the go-gurt portable yogurt tubes they're 15 or 20 ingredients they're totally unrecognizable which leads to another point which is if a food has more than say five ingredients or it's got ingredients you can't pronounce or if it has high fructose corn syrup these are signs that something is not a food I don't mean to demonize high fructose corn syrup though God knows I've done a lot of that in the last couple years but even if it's I always hear from the Corn Refiners Association whenever I mentioned this on the air and they write me this ringing defense of their wonderful product that goes something like this it's really no worse than sugar let's grant them that it's really no worse than sugar the point is that high fructose corn syrup is a marker of highly processed food because who do you know who cooks with high fructose corn corn syrup I don't know anyone any chefs cook with high for now it's it's strictly an ingredient on the Shelf of the food scientists at the large food corporations that's it so if you avoid that that cuts out all sorts of processed foods I also suggest shopping along the periphery of the store because the food that has been less tampered with by the industrialization of our food chain is all there not that it hasn't been completely untampered with it it's not true but it's still Whole Foods real foods you have produce and then your meat and you have fish and dairy and there are a couple exceptions like the go-gurt that sneak in there but by and large the stuff you've got to worry about is in the great middle of the store those canyons of processed packaged foods that's where the trouble begins and if you can do most your shopping along the edge you're much better off you're gonna eat food I go further into this and talk about the importance of and I found this very interesting learning that food that is well grown in healthy soils turns out to be much more nutritious than foods grown industrially ship long distances we you know this was a fundamental insight of the organic movement back in the 1930s Sir Albert Howard said had this quack astounding thing to say he said that the whole the whole subject of the whole question of health in soil plant animal and human is one great subject they're all tied together your health as it turns out is indivisible from the health of the food chain you're a part of you can't eat from unhealthy soils and be fully healthy and we know the reasons for this that for plants to construct the full complement of all these these defensive compounds that's what they are for them their health compounds for us they need a rich soil they also need to be somewhat stressed and that if they're pampered with lots of pesticides so they don't have to fight off diseases and bugs themselves they don't produce these compounds and so there's a very interesting science and some great studies have been done Davis recently making this point so that's that's the whole question of what to eat that I lay out and that's the third of my advice but I also talked about how to eat because it turns out that the way we eat the the manners the taboos the culture we surround our eating with matters almost as much as what we eat to our health and to our happiness as eaters and you know Americans are we're really fast eaters we eat you know and we have been for a long time even in the 19th century Europeans commented on how we gobbled our food and and ran from the table we have a lot of trouble slowing down and enjoying food I think it's our Puritan heritage all those things that we share with with the animals eating sex things like that we're we have trouble enjoying and it's it's our Puritan inheritance and cultures that really enjoy eating that eat at leisurely meals together you know they don't eat as much it's when you eat alone in the car in front of the television you eat mindlessly and you eat too much so so I attend to that too and I and I suggest you know I have a couple suggestions like don't you know eat at a eat at a table pretty simple no a desk is not a table eating at work is a real is a real problem and another suggestion is don't get your fuel from the same place your car does I'll read you this this little tip and then I'll stop and we'll have our conversation American gas stations now make more money selling food and cigarettes than gasoline but consider what kind of food this is except perhaps for the milk and water it's all highly processed non-perishable snack foods and extravagantly sweet and soft drinks in hefty 20 ounce bottles gas stations have become processed corn stations ethanol outside for your car and high fructose corn syrup inside for you thank you very much thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the same religion that's capable of