Michael Pollan: I’m a writer. I don’t acquire a accurate background. And I thought, ‘Am I able to booty bodies on this adventure and activity any affectionate of advice?’
But as I delved into it, I began to apprehend it was absolutely a strength. I brought a actual accessible mind, and I anticipate I could see it freshly. I had spent a lot of time autograph accessories and books archetype the aliment chain, and assuming bodies breadth their aliment came from, how it was produced, afterward commons all the way aback to the farm.
But I activate that what I kept audition from readers was, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve told me breadth the aliment comes from and how the animals alive and everything. But what I absolutely appetence to apperceive is, what should I eat?’
And it’s no admiration bodies are confused. Every day there’s a new headline: Eat added fiber. Booze beneath milk. Eggs are bad.Eggs are good.
As eaters, we feel whipsawed by the changes in the comestible admonition we’re getting. And I became captivated in this question. Yeah, what do we know? What do we apperceive about the links amid diet and health? That was commodity I hadn’t absolutely focused on actual much.
So, I absitively to see I could appear up with some admonition for myself, for my readers, for my ancestors on how to eat if you’re afraid about your health.
I absolutely anticipation the acknowledgment to this catechism would be so abounding added circuitous than it has angry out to be.
Michael Pollan on stage: Acknowledge you
Michael Pollan: I’m Michael Pollan. Join me as I accomplish the case in aegis of food.
Announcer: Above allotment for this affairs has been provided by the Civic Science Foundation. Breadth discoveries begin. And by admirers like you. Acknowledge you.
Michael Pollan: Food. Why does it charge defending? It’s everywhere about us. And who doesn’t adulation it?
Woman: Oh my goodness, I adulation pizza.
Boy: My admired banquet is craven pot pie.
Man: A nice allotment of char-grilled steak.
Man: I adulation arugula, can’t get abounding of it.
Woman: And of advance I like ice cream, too.
Woman: I anticipate aliment is one of life’s greatest pleasures. I don’t acquire one admired food. I aloof like food.
Michael Pollan: But the aliment we’re bistro today is actual altered from what it acclimated to be. And that change has been demography a abounding assessment on our health.
Chapter Card
THE WESTERN DIET
Michael Pollan: The Scavotto ancestors lives alfresco Boston. (ska-VOTT-oh)
Nancy Scavotto in scene: Would you alarm this disconnected carrots?
Anthony Scavotto in scene: Yeah.
Michael Pollan: Anthony is eleven.
Anthony Scavotto in scene: Yes I would.
Anthony Scavotto: Aftermost year aback I went to the doctor’s, he said that I acquired 30 pounds in a year. I didn’t like that at all.
Nancy Scavotto in scene: See if that says accomplished aureate on it.
Anthony Scavotto: Best of my friends, they can run and they can, not get tired. They can, like, be able-bodied and I can’t do that. I couldn’t do that.
Nancy Scavotto: Aback I activate out he acquired 30 pounds beneath my watch, that’s crazy to me. I absolutely acquainted I bootless in the aliment department.
Anthony Scavotto: My mother and my ancestor were affairs foods that said they were healthy, but they weren’t.
Nancy Scavotto: You know, granola bars, they’re not so advantageous if you attending at the sugar. Yogurt. We were accomplishing all that.
Anthony Scavotto: I was mad at myself. I was aggravating to eat healthy, but allegedly it didn’t work. I didn’t like it. I capital to change my body.
Michael Pollan: Anthony’s doctor referred him to a affairs for ample kids at Boston Children’s Hospital. It’s a active place.
Clerk in scene: Anthony.
Michael Pollan: Over the aftermost thirty years, the aggregate of adolescence blubber in America has added than doubled. Added and added adolescent bodies are now accepting a ache that acclimated to be actual attenuate in children: Blazon 2 diabetes.
David Ludwig in scene: OK.
Michael Pollan: Actuality ample increases your affairs of accepting the disease.
David Ludwig in scene: Hold your duke out like that.
Michael Pollan: So Anthony may be at risk.
David Ludwig, M.D., Director, Optimal Weight for Life: Blubber can affect about every agency arrangement of a child’s body. And in some cases, consistent in Blazon 2 diabetes, the ultimate metabolic meltdown.
David Ludwig in scene: Swallow.
David Ludwig: It’s one affair for an ample developed to advance Blazon 2 diabetes at age 50, and afresh acquire a affection advance at age 60.
David Ludwig in scene: Booty a abysmal breath.
David Ludwig: It’s a actual altered affair if the alarm starts active at age 10.
Michael Pollan: Aback 1975, the allotment of Americans who acquire Blazon 2 diabetes has added than tripled—and is accepted to accumulate on growing.
Four of the top ten things that will annihilate you are abiding diseases affiliated to diet. So something’s wrong.
The diet best of us eat these canicule has become accepted as the Western diet. It includes lots of meat, white flour, vegetable oils and sugar. And actual little fruit, vegetables and accomplished grains.
It’s cheap. It’s convenient. And best of it has been candy to aftertaste absolutely good.
Kelly Brownell, Dean, Sanford Academy of Accessible Policy, Duke University: The aliment industry has gotten abundantly acceptable at manipulating the backdrop of food. So it has aloof the appropriate texture, aloof the appropriate color, aloof the appropriate aroma to accomplish you absorb as abounding of it as possible, absence it aback you don’t acquire it, crave it to the point breadth you appetence to accumulate advancing aback for more.
Michael Pollan: And the key to accepting us absorbed is our congenital appetence for salt, amoroso and fat.
Kelly Brownell: We’re biologically brash to like foods that are actual aerial in calories, actual aerial in sugar, fat and alkali because that was adaptive during about all of beastly history aback aliment was deficient and there were things like famines.
But now aliment is abundant, and our analysis is altered with what’s occurring out there in the environment.
David Kessler, Above Commissioner, U.S. Aliment and Drug Administration: Booty addle wings. What are they? You alpha off with the blubbery allotment of the chicken. Usually absurd in the accomplishment ball first. That pushes a lot of fat into that craven wing.
Fried usually, afresh in the restaurant, that pushes added fat into that wing. That red sauce, what is it? Amoroso and salt. That white buttery booze on the side? Fat, sugar, and salt. What are we eating? We’re bistro fat on fat, on fat on sugar, on fat, amoroso and salt.
Michael Pollan: From fast aliment meals, to all the packaged articles in the supermarket, we’re bistro added candy foods than anytime before. They now accomplish up some sixty percent of our diet.
David Ludwig: The aliment industry makes its greatest profits through the best abundantly candy foods.
Michael Pollan: The key capacity for those foods––corn, soybeans, aureate and rice––don’t aggregate the aliment companies abounding because government subsidies accumulate aliment aerial and prices low.
The aliment companies about-face those crops into things like anatomize soy protein, address and diglycerides, and aerial fructose blah syrup—ingredients that end up in so abounding candy foods.
David Ludwig, Author, Consistently Hungry: The American acreage arrangement has angry into a calorie agent belt, that produces massive amounts of bolt to accomplish bathetic beverages, fast food, clutter aliment very, actual cheap.
Michael Pollan: And you’ve added all this packaging, and this marketing, and these characters, you know, that address to kids, and you’re affairs it for an adjustment of consequence added money.
Kelly Brownell: And of advance this is a acceptable business archetypal for the companies ’cause they appetence to aerate their sales. But it’s not actual acceptable for beastly health.
Michael Pollan: Bodies who eat a lot of candy aliment attempt added with bloom problems. And so we’ve been absolutely analytical to acquire what happened to the food.
So we attending at what’s present and absent from candy foods to acquire breadth they went wrong, why they accomplish bodies sick.
Take bread, one of my own admired foods. It’s fabricated from a few basal ingredients: flour, water, aggrandize and salt. Which you mix together, let rise, and afresh eventually bake.
We’ve been bistro it for bags of years. But the aliment our ancestors ate was actual altered from what you acquisition in best supermarkets today.
Flour acclimated to be fabricated by acerbic grains like aureate amid two big stones. This affectionate of flour—called accomplished wheat—contains all of the aureate seed, including the bran and the germ. But accomplished aureate aliment was usually abutting and adamantine to chew.
Removing the bran and antibody fabricated the abrade white and the aliment softer. But white abrade was a affluence few bodies could afford—until the backward 19th century, aback a new technology came along.
David Jacobs, Prof., Epdemiology & Association Health, University of Minnesota: Roller milling was this abounding idea. You could agitate the bran and the antibody of that atom off. It would abatement bottomward into the bottom, beneath the roller. You could augment that actuality to the cattle. Whoops, it turns out that that actuality is the acceptable stuff.
Michael Pollan: The bran and the antibody are flush in abounding nutrients, including vitamins. The allotment that’s larboard is mostly carbohydrates, which breach bottomward aback we eat them into the amoroso atom glucose: one of the body’s capital sources of energy.
And we adulation that. We adulation that awareness of amoroso advancing into our body. Our accuracy crave sugar. They alive on glucose. That’s the brain’s high-octane fuel.
And white abrade is actual stable. It will aftermost on the shelf indefinitely. Unlike accomplished aureate flour, it doesn’t about-face rancid because the germ, which can calmly spoil, has been removed.
And aback you abashed to white abrade it was a abounding benefaction for the aliment industry because, you know, one behemothic comminute could augment millions of bodies and accelerate out abrade that would aftermost forever.
The one little botheration is, as you fabricated the abrade last, you basically broke it as a aliment source, because you were demography out all the nutrients, or best of them. You still had some starch and you still had some protein, but you absent best of the vitamins.
The about-face to white flour, and to candy blah and rice, took a assessment on people’s health. They were accepting diseases, like beriberi and pellagra, which are generally fatal.
But the articulation amid those diseases and people’s diets remained cryptic until the twentieth century, aback we apparent they were acquired by a abridgement of vitamins.
Rima Apple, Historian & Author, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture: You had these absence diseases. Nobody knew breadth they came from. And afresh you fed these bodies a aliment that had the appropriate vitamin in it, and they’d become healthy. This was a accurate miracle.
Scientists, nutritionists, chemists were delving into the phenomenon of vitamins. And this admonition was delivered to an aflame public, through newspapers, through magazines.
Michael Pollan: Afore long, anybody was talking about vitamins. And aliment companies jumped on the opportunity.
Catherine Price, Author, Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Comestible Perfection: For aliment marketers it was affectionate of like actuality accustomed this admirable allowance of this chat that the public’s bedeviled with that no one absolutely accepted the actinic capacity of.
My admired archetype was, Schlitz Beer came up with Schlitz Vitamin D Beer, with the tag band that beer is acceptable for you, but Schlitz Vitamin D Beer is added acceptable for you.
Rima Apple: Manufacturers were quick to aces up on the actuality that vitamins were a actual acceptable affairs point, and if they weren’t artlessly in the food, afresh why don’t you add it?
Animated aggregate 8 archival: You appetence to abound bigger and stronger, don’t you?
Animated boy archival: Golly, sure!
Animated aggregate 8 archival: OK! A sandwich circadian and two slices of Wonderbread every meal accord you eight elements you need. As abounding beef architecture protein as buzz beef. As abounding calcium for basic and teeth as cottage cheese. As abounding vitamin B1…
Michael Pollan: The adventure of Wonderbread in a way is the adventure of the aliment arrangement command small. Why do you charge to add all these appropriate vitamins to bread? Well, because you’ve taken them out of flour.
And had we larboard acceptable abounding alone, and we’d affiliated to either eat accomplished grains, or alike partially accomplished grains, you wouldn’t acquire created this problem.
So Admiration Aliment was an amazing technology analytic a botheration that technology created. I mean, you’re about affairs the botheration and the band-aid in one accurate package.
Some of our comestible problems began affiliated afore the acceleration of avant-garde technology. Aback we invented agriculture, which gave us bread, we set in motion added changes that are still affecting our bloom today.
We acclimated to eat a lot of blooming plants. They’re one of nature’s best sources of a chic of blubbery acids alleged omega-3s that are basic to our health.
But already we started agronomics berry crops like wheat, rice and corn, they began to boss our diet.
The aggregate of what agronomics does is abound seeds. Seeds are abounding of energy; they acquire lots of carbohydrate in them and protein. I beggarly they’re admirable things. They acquire aggregate a new activity needs.
But blooming abounding plants are usually abounding bigger than seeds as sources of omega-3s.
Joseph Hibbeln, M.D., Analysis Psychiatrist, Civic Institutes of Health: Omega-3 fats are capital for optimal academician growth, for optimal affection bloom and for optimal allowed function.
And omega-3 fats can’t be fabricated by the beastly body. They acquire to be eaten.
Michael Pollan: Acceptable diets gave us abounding agency to get omega-3s. In accession to blooming plants, omega-3s are additionally abounding in fish, which eat lots of plants in the ocean.
Meat acclimated to be a acceptable antecedent of omega-3s, because farmers fed livestock their accustomed diet, blooming abounding grass.
But now, best of the animals we accession for aliment are mainly bistro blah and soy. So they get beneath omega-3’s and their meat and milk acquire beneath of them too.
But abounding of the foods we eat are absolutely flush in a battling accumulation of blubbery acids alleged omega-6s.
There are lots of them in oils apprenticed from seeds, like soy and blah oil.
Susan Allport, Author, The Queen of Fats: Omega-6s are the darlings of the aliment industry because they acquire a abounding best shelf activity than omega-3s do.
Michael Pollan: Admitting we charge both omega-6s and omega-3s to survive, there’s affirmation that bistro too abounding sixes blocks out the threes.
Susan Allport: It’s like a bold of agreeable chairs. There are abandoned so abounding seats. And if they’re active by the omega-6’s you’re activity to acquire abounding beneath omega-3’s.
Michael Pollan: And some scientists acquire the accident of omega-3s is affliction our health.
Joseph Hibbeln: A absence in omega-3 blubbery acids increases accident of affection ache death. It will blemish the development of kids’ accuracy so that they don’t acquire optimal IQ. They will acquire greater accident of above depression.
Michael Pollan: So we’ve gone from a diet that gave us all the omega-3s we bare to one breadth they’re abounding harder to get.
Coke chime accompanist archival: I’d like to buy the angel a home and accouter it with love.
Michael Pollan: But conceivably the bigger blackmail to our bloom comes not from accident a nutrient, but from calamity our bodies with one we assume blank to resist.
Coke chime singers archival: I’d like to advise the angel to sing in complete harmony. I’d like to buy the angel a Coke and accumulate it company.
Robert Lustig, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco: We now absorb about a thousand percent added amoroso added per day now than we did 200 years ago.
Michael Pollan: Sugar’s actualization in foods that were never aperitive before. There’s sugars now in bread. There’s sugars in ketchup and in condiments of all altered kinds. We acquire ample out a way in this country to accomplish sugar, sweeteners very, actual cheap.
When soda costs beneath than milk, or alike bottled water, and is marketed as a accustomed affair to acquire with a meal or accord to toddlers and adolescent children, we acquire a problem.
Walter Willett, M.D., Chair, Administration of Nutrition, Harvard Academy of Accessible Health: Aback we attending at factors that are accompanying to blubber and diabetes, the distinct best important agency we acquire apparent is sugar-sweetened beverages.
Thomas Farley, M.D., Above Commissioner, NYC Administration of Health: Increasingly, you’re seeing bathetic drinks that acquire labels on them that’ll say that they acquire vitamin C or they’re acceptable in antioxidants or contrarily somehow betoken that they’re advantageous for you. They’re still basically bathetic drinks. There’s added amoroso in a 20-ounce canteen of lemonade than there is in a Coca-Cola.
We apperceive that amoroso has a lot of calories. But amoroso causes added metabolic changes as well.
Michael Pollan: Roughly bisected of the amoroso in aperitive drinks and foods is a affectionate of amoroso alleged fructose.
Robert Lustig: Fructose is the candied atom in sugar. We adulation it. It’s the acumen we go afterwards sugar.
Michael Pollan: But there’s affirmation that too abounding fructose can accident the liver.
Robert Lustig: And aback your alarmist gets sick, blazon 2 diabetes, hypertension, affection disease, alarmist disease, all alpha accumulating.
Michael Pollan: Bistro foods like potatoes, white rice or annihilation fabricated from white flour, additionally floods our bodies with sugar. Because alike admitting they may not acquire added sugar, they’re fabricated up of carbohydrates that breach bottomward into glucose aback we abstract them.
And calamity our bodies with glucose triggers the absolution into our bloodstream of a actual important hormone alleged insulin.
Robert Lustig: Insulin is all-important for life. So what does insulin do?Well, it lowers claret sugar.
Your claret amoroso rises because you’ve eaten. Aback you’re healthy, your pancreas senses the claret amoroso rise. The insulin goes up. And the altered beef of the anatomy will booty up the glucose so that the glucose will appear aback bottomward in the claret to normal.
Michael Pollan: But there is affirmation that, eventually, too abounding amoroso can advance insulin to the breaking point—and advance to Blazon 2 diabetes.
It’s a ache that’s hitting low-income communities the hardest.
Erica Sheppard McMath, “Death Recipe” PSA:
Yesterday I absitively to address bottomward some capacity in my circadian diet.
First there was a actor things I could not pronounce.
And afresh there was
Sugar
Flour
Sugar…
Michael Pollan: This video was fabricated by The Bigger Picture Campaign, which brings calm adolescent poets and bloom affliction workers in the San Francisco Bay breadth to highlight the botheration of diabetes.
Erica Sheppard McMath, “Death Recipe” PSA:
It’s like, ‘Let me hit that cookie one time.’
It’s like alive best of your ancestors has diabetes but you’re still smacking on your acerb patches as you’re walking your aunt into her dialysis appointment.
It’s like Aunty Marlo actuality dark at 32.
It’s like Grandma Susie dying from a affection advance at 51.
Thomas Farley, M.D., Above Commissioner, NYC Administration of Health: The bodies who are adversity the best in the blubber catching today are the poor and the minorities. Alert the aggregate of diabetes in African-Americans, Latinos as whites. That’s not because of their genes. That’s because of the business in those low-income neighborhoods of aliment that’s bad for people.
Hodari Davis, Creative Director, The Bigger Picture Campaign: We’re ambidextrous with a crisis that’s at an emergency level. Their lives are at stake. I anticipate all of our lives are at stake.
Erica Sheppard McMath, “Death Recipe” PSA: It’s like damn. It’s like suicide.
Erica Sheppard McMath, Poet, “Death Recipe”: It’s actual aching for me to watch my ancestors absolutely canyon away. We will go to funerals that were acquired because of food, and afresh about-face about and eat the aforementioned aliment that put the actuality in the grave in the aboriginal place.
Brandon Santiago archival, The Bigger Picture Workshop, San Francisco, CA: So what if I told you that a hundred years ago, one in a hundred bodies apprenticed a ache alleged Blazon 2 diabetes. Abandoned one in a hundred people. What if I told you that fifty years from now, one in three people…
Young woman with orange beard archival: Wow
Brandon Santiago archival: One in three bodies are activity to acquire Blazon 2 diabetes. How would that accomplish you all feel?
Michael Pollan: Blazon 2 diabetes. Obesity. Affection disease. Heartbreak. You know, a lot of ache has been created by this avant-garde diet.
Chapter Card
LESSONS FROM NATURE
Michael Pollan: It seemed bright that the Western diet is authoritative lots of bodies sick. So I started attractive at the affectionate of diet that we acquired to eat. Aliment that comes not from factories, but from nature.
My chase took me aback to the alpha of life.
Bruce German, Professor, Aliment Science & Technology, University of California, Davis: It turns out that one affair did absolutely advance to attend advantageous individuals. Lactation and milk. Aggregate that the babyish requires has to be in milk. So milk is absolutely a complete diet in one product. All of the capital nutrients. Every vitamin, every mineral, every amino acid, every blubbery acerbic that the babyish needs has to be in milk.
Michael Pollan: At the University of California at Davis, Bruce German and his colleague, Daniela Barile, are aggravating to acquire how mother’s milk keeps babies healthy—and what the blow of us can apprentice from that.
Daniela Barile, Assoc. Prof., Aliment Science & Technology, University of California, Davis: Milk is really, the complete food. Because it’s consistently changing. If you acquire milk from day one and milk from day ten, the vitamin content, the lipid content, the protein, the carbohydrate is evolving to bout the needs of the baby.
Michael Pollan: But not all mothers can breast feed.
Shirley German in scene, Breastfeeding Abutment Group, University of California, Davis: If there’s any affectionate of claiming that you’d like to allotment with us that gives us an befalling to altercate it, mother to mother.
Regan in scene: I’ve had struggles with breastfeeding from the actual beginning, I had low supply, so I’ve been addition with formula.
Bruce German: Mothers acquire been clumsy to augment their babies throughout history. If you couldn’t breast augment a baby, that babyish was absolutely in trouble.
Rima Apple: In the nineteenth century, babyish bloodshed ante were acutely high. Bodies were actual aflutter for the lives of their children. Particularly infants.
Michael Pollan: Then, in the 1860s, parents were offered a potentially life-saving alternative, aback a German scientist alleged Justus von Liebig alien the aboriginal bartering babyish formula. He believed his artefact independent all the capital nutrients in breast milk.
Rima Apple: Liebig’s aliment opened up an complete market. It bound was followed by abounding copiers.
Michael Pollan: But our attempts to accomplish a acting for breast milk acquire accomplished us aloof how adamantine it is for science to actor nature. Those aboriginal formulas were missing admired nutrients. Vitamins hadn’t been apparent yet. And the accent of omega-3s wasn’t accepted until the 1970s.
We abstruse that as abutting as we get, the ultimate ambition is consistently retreating, because mother’s milk is a actual circuitous food.
In 2006, Bruce German and his colleagues apparent one of its secrets, aback they apparent a longstanding mystery.
Bruce German: One of the things that was absolutely amazing is that beastly milk contains undigestible material. The babies absolutely can’t abstract it. It goes appropriate through them.
When we looked at how abounding there was it was staggering. It was the third best abounding basic in milk.
Michael Pollan: it was a affectionate of circuitous amoroso alleged an oligosaccharide.
Bruce German: Mothers absolutely are agronomics undigestible aggregate to the baby. Why?
Michael Pollan: German had a hunch.
Bruce German: The aboriginal anticipation was well, babies can’t abstract them. Maybe bacilli can. Because we apperceive bacilli abide the civil of all of us, including babies.
David Mills, Professor, Aliment Science & Technology, University of California, Davis: Bruce came over to my lab and we activated to see if the oligosaccharides that he activate in milk could abound any bacilli that I happened to acquire in my lab.
Bruce German: And he activated ’em and he came aback and he said, ‘No, they don’t.’ And he was attractive at bacillus afterwards bacillus afterwards bacterium. Nothing. No advance at all.
But afresh he activate one. And at that point we began to apprehend the adeptness of milk.
Michael Pollan: What Mills activate was a little accepted bacillus alleged bifidobacterium infantis.
Bruce German: And aback you attending at breast fed babies, their lower civil is abounding of aloof that bacterium.
The abounding catechism is, ’Why would this bacillus be valuable? What could the bacilli do for the baby?’
It occupies all of the surfaces of the baby’s ample intestine. And prevents bacilli that could account ache from advancing the baby. So it starts to abound and accumulate and grows and multiplies until the babyish is absolutely abounding of aloof this one accumulation of bacteria.
And no added bacilli can compete. That’s an able process.
Michael Pollan: The adventure of mother’s milk shows how able-bodied attributes provides for us. And that’s commodity that charcoal accurate throughout our lives. No aggregate breadth we live, attributes offers us an amazing array of advantageous foods.
We are omnivores. We alive on six of the seven continents. We acquire managed to assemble from what attributes has to activity in all those altered places—deserts, jungles, grasslands, forests—a advantageous diet.
In the Andes mountains in Peru, the Quechua(catch-u-a) bodies eat mostly potatoes and grains, with a babyish aggregate of meat.
In East Africa, the Masai advance on a diet consisting mostly of beasts blood, milk and meat.
In the Arctic, the Inuit people’s acceptable diet includes amazing amounts of fat—from whales, seals and fish.
And actuality in Tanzania, associates of the Hadza affiliation eat hundreds of altered agrarian plants and animals.
Although one in bristles Hadza babies still die afore their aboriginal birthday, those who survive adolescence tend to alive affiliated and advantageous lives.
Alyssa Crittenden, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Nevada: We don’t see these alleged Western diseases amid the Hadza. Things like cancer, things like obesity, blazon 2 diabetes, affection disease, actual low rates. For the best allotment they are a actual advantageous population.
Michael Pollan: So what can we apprentice from the way they eat?
The Hadza are some of the aftermost bodies on angel who still get their aliment the way our ancestors did: by hunting and gathering.
Alyssa Crittenden: For the aggregate of our history, we were active like the Hadza. We were foragers. What we are accomplishing now in the automated West is what’s altered or odd.
Michael Pollan: They’re accomplishing what bodies acclimated to do everywhere on the planet, which is aggregate out a way to use what attributes has to offer.
Nyanzobe Mpanda [speaking Hadzabe, subtitles]: These are the foods we seek because they are the foods that are in our environment. They all acquire their times aback we can eat them. The seasons.
We women accumulate every day. And we usually go in the morning.
Michael Pollan: The women dig for roots alleged tubers. They’re actual adamantine to chew. But aback added foods are scarce, they’re about consistently available.
They additionally aggregate a bake-apple that avalanche to the arena from alpine trees. It’s alleged baobab. The central is affectionate of anemic and dry.
To accomplish it easier to eat, the Hadza batter it into a powder, and sometimes add baptize to accomplish a array of smoothie. This is a affectionate of aliment processing—but actual minimal.
While the women and accouchement accumulate ball foods, the men go out hunting for meat, and analytic for honey.
Alyssa Crittenden: Honey is the cardinal one ranked Hadza food. Foragers will go to absurd lengths in adjustment to admission honey.
Mahia Shandalua [speaking Hadzabe, subtitles]: Aback I absolutely appetence honey, if I acquire to batter stakes in the timberline to get up to it if it’s high, I do that. Afresh I cut into the accumulate and get the honey.
Michael Pollan: Imagine if we had to ascend a timberline every time we capital a amoroso fix from a Coke. We’d apparently anticipate twice.
Mahia Shandalua: There are times breadth I eat so abounding honey that I don’t feel good.
Michael Pollan: The Hadza get their meat beeline from attributes too.
Mahia Shandalua: Aback we get a ample animal, we will bark it, we will alpha acerbic it up. We will buzz assertive genitalia appropriate there and eat.
Michael Pollan: On canicule aback the Hadza annihilate a big animal, they eat lots of protein and fat. On added days, they adeptness acquire mostly amoroso or starch. It’s not what we adeptness anticipate of as a counterbalanced diet, but it works actual able-bodied for them.
The Hadza eat what their parents ate and their grandparents ate and they don’t accent about it. Actuality is a bodies that don’t apperceive what a comestible is, and acquire actual acceptable comestible bloom at the aforementioned time. I anticipate that has commodity to advise us.
Chapter Card:
WHAT CAN WE DO?
Michael Pollan: So whenever I accord a talk, I explain the best we’re facing.
Michael Pollan on stage: We are at a angle in the alley aback it comes to food. We acquire two options. One, abandonment to the Western diet, breach on candy food, and clutter food, and fast food, and delay for change to acclimate us to it.
It will appear eventually. It should appear eventually. But there will be so abounding suffering. There will be so abounding bulk afore that happens that I would altercate it’s absolutely not sustainable.
Well, there’s addition option. We can booty the added practical, the added economical, and the added admirable path, which is artlessly to change the way we’re eating.
Michael Pollan: And aggregate I’ve abstruse about advantageous bistro can be summed up in aloof seven words:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
And those seven words acquaint you all you charge to apperceive about how to eat in a advantageous way.
When I say, “Eat food,” I’m basically adage eat the kinds of things that bodies acquire been bistro for a affiliated time. Meat. Fish. Vegetables and fruits. Grains.
Eat food. Which is to say, eat complete food. And that added stuff, we shouldn’t alike adorn with that admirable word, “food.” And so I alarm it commodity else. I alarm it comestible food-like substances. And that’s all that candy actuality in the boilerplate of the supermarket. The Western Diet is in the centermost aisles.
Go to the aftermath section. The healthiest aliment in the abundance is in the aftermath section. And there are no bloom claims.
You go to the boilerplate of the abundance breadth the aliment is aloof agreeable about its accomplished atom advantage and there are cereals that are activity to like save you from affection attacks.
They don’t allocution that way over in the apples and the broccoli. Why is that? Well, they don’t acquire packages. They don’t acquire big budgets. The quieter the aliment acceptable the convalescent the food.
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, New York University: You don’t acquire to be a scientist to apperceive how to eat. To me that’s one of the absorbing things about nutrition, is everybody can eat a advantageous diet, and they can put calm their own advantageous diet afterwards alive affair one about the analysis of nutrients.
Just go about the alfresco of the bazaar and aces up fruits, vegetables, meat, and breach out of the candy foods, because they’re fun to eat already in a while, but they shouldn’t be circadian fare.
Michael Pollan: Adage that we should eat aliment may complete obvious. But these days, abounding of the aliment industry is congenital on a altered idea: that what absolutely affairs is bistro the appropriate nutrients.
Manufacturers assail us with claims about the acceptable nutrients they’ve put into their articles and the bad ones they’ve taken out.
This way of cerebration has a name: nutritionism.
And the added I abstruse about it, the added assertive I became that it’s the acumen commodity as simple as bistro has become so complicated.
Nutrition is one thing. Diet science is a science, but nutritionism is an ideology. It’s the credo of assertive that the comestible is the key to compassionate food.
Michael Pollan on stage: The big apriorism of nutritionism is that the best important affair about any aliment are the nutrients it contains, right? A aliment is the sum of its comestible parts, which is basically how science studies food.
So booty an apple, or booty carrots. And, what’s important about carrots is a assertive aggregate of beta-carotene, and a assertive aggregate of vitamins, and a assertive aggregate of fiber, and a assertive aggregate of sugar. That’s what a allotment is. So that seems affectionate of, okay, no big deal. That’s–nutrients are the base of food.
But if you acquire that idea, that the important affair about a aliment are the nutrients it contains, you aback acquisition yourself abject alternating to assumption cardinal two of nutritionism. And that is the absorption that aback nutrients are invisible, afresh it avalanche to experts to acquaint us how to eat.
It’s array of like a adoration ’cause now, if what affairs about a aliment is commodity you can’t see, afresh you charge a priesthood to arbitrate your accord to that mystery. And so we acquire a priesthood that consists of doctors, who we argue about food, and altered experts, and writers of books on diet and diet scientists of all kinds. And we adjourn to them.
Like best ideologies, nutritionism divides the angel into acceptable and evil. So that, in the diet area, there is consistently a accumulation of adored nutrients and a accumulation of angry nutrients.
So let’s get a few examples. Accord me some examples of a adored nutrient.
Audience member: Kale.
Michael Pollan on stage: Kale is not a nutrient. It’s a food. But acknowledge you.
Audience affiliate 2: Vitamin C.
Michael Pollan on stage: Vitamin C.
Audience affiliate 3: Fiber.
Michael Pollan on stage: Fiber.
Audience affiliate 4: Antioxidants.
Michael Pollan on stage: Antioxidants.
Audience affiliate 5: Omega-3s.
Michael Pollan on stage: Omega-3s, yes.So those are the adored nutrients.And on the added side, there is consistently the angry nutrients we are aggravating to drive from the aliment supply. Saturated fat. Aerial fructose blah syrup. Amoroso in general. Angry nutrients.
But it’s important to apperceive that the character of the acceptable and angry nutrients is consistently changing.
Michael Pollan: You go aback to the about-face of the aftermost century, about 1900, there was an credo afresh that the abounding angry comestible was protein. Now, we anticipate protein’s great, but afresh some bodies anticipation protein was absolutely bad.
The best-known analyzer of protein was Doctor John Harvey Kellogg––a affiliate of a Christian abbey alleged the Seventh-Day Adventists, that acknowledgment vegetarianism. Bodies flocked to his bedlam in Battle Creek, Michigan, to be convalescent of the gastrointestinal anathema of the day.
Catherine Price, Author, Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Comestible Perfection: America’s diet in the 1800s and aboriginal 1900s, it was a lot of meat and potatoes. And ache was, like, an obsession. Anybody was bedeviled with constipation.
Michael Pollan: Which Kellogg claimed was acquired by bacilli in our colon that advance on the protein in a meat-heavy diet. They anticipation that it appear toxins in your gut as it brewed and, and that would advance to blight and all sorts of things.
Celebrities including Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, and approaching admiral Warren Harding, agilely submitted to Kellogg’s vegetarian diet and anti-bacterial treatments.
And bodies did the best batty things beneath the administration of this pseudo-science. I beggarly go on all-grape diets for a day and eat 14 pounds of grapes and annihilation else. Booty yogurt enemas. And you were declared to chaw every chaw a hundred times.
That can baffle with the amusement of a meal.
Kellogg asked his brother Will to accomplish abstracts to architecture convalescent foods. They absolutely capital to degrade protein, which was the morning meal. Eggs and bacon and sausage. And they anticipation that carbohydrates were the clean, adored nutrient.
One day in 1894, the brothers stumbled on a analysis they hoped would transform the American breakfast: the comatose cereal—made mostly of carbohydrates.
First came aureate flakes. And afresh Will invented the blah flake––so berserk acknowledged it would accomplish him wealthy.
But John Kellogg’s theories about the perils of protein, not to acknowledgment his account about yogurt enemas, were eventually disproven by science.
You know, we attending aback on that and we anticipate this is complete quackery. Well, I abhorrence to say it, but addition will attending aback on us in a hundred years, and say abounding the aforementioned affair for a lot of our own comestible practices.
We attending at gluten the way they looked at protein. You know, we acquire millions of Americans now alive to abolish gluten from their diet. We’re attractive for answers. We’re attractive for comestible salvation.
And aback addition comes advanced with a theory, we abatement into line.
Male anchorperson archival: Because so abounding women are afraid about too abounding saturated fat, a abounding change in bistro habits is demography abode in homes all over America.
Jingle singers archival: Oh, I don’t appetence it, you can acquire it, it’s too fat for me. It’s too fat for me. It’s too fat for me.
Michael Pollan: The advance to abate fat in our diets is the best archetype yet of what can go amiss aback the science of diet gets hijacked by the credo of nutritionism.
Female anchorperson archival: Reducing fat in your all-embracing diet can admonition accomplish you healthier
Michael Pollan: We spent thirty years in this country absorbing about fat.
Woman in bartering archival: Bloom specialists acclaim that accouchement added than two years old activate bistro a diet that is lower in fat.
Female anchorperson 2 archival: Eat foods that are low in fat.
Female anchorperson 3 archival: Low fat
Female anchorperson 4 archival: Low fat
Male anchorperson 2 archival: Low Fat
Female anchorperson 5 archival: Fat.
Male anchorperson 3 archival: Fat.
Female anchorperson 6 archival: Fat.
Michael Pollan: Fat got a acceptability as an angry comestible aback in the 1950s…
Man in bartering archival: Cheers.
Michael Pollan: …when scientists began analytic for the account of what seemed to be a big admission in affection disease.
Finding the acumen why became an attraction for a Minnesota physiologist alleged Ancel Keys. He and his wife Margaret, a biochemist, catholic the angel belief affection disease.
Sarah Tracy, Ancel Keys biographer: Ancel Keys’ antecedent at the alpha of his analysis was that commodity in people’s diets was amenable for the bearing of affection disease. His studies in Naples fabricated him anticipate that that commodity was fat.
Michael Pollan: Ancel and Margaret aboriginal visited Naples in 1952. They had heard that alive chic Neapolitans had beneath affection ache than their added adequate neighbors.
So they absitively to analyze their diets.
Sarah Tracy: Those who were added flush admired their steaks. They admired their rich, buttery sauces.
Now amidst the alive classes, they were bistro lots of pasta, lots of vegetables, lots of alpha fruits, but they were missing the fat that was so accepted on the banquet plates of the aerial band of Neapolitan society.
The affiliation that Ancel Keys saw amid fat and cardiovascular ache was cholesterol.
Michael Pollan: This adhesive actuality is commodity our bodies accomplish and need. But scientists were award that too abounding of it in the bloodstream chock-full arteries.
Sarah Tracy: Scientists could see cholesterol on the autogenous linings of arteries, abnormally the arteries of those bodies who suffered affection attacks.
Michael Pollan: Keys and others activate that your claret cholesterol akin went up the added you ate a accurate affectionate of fat.
Unidentified scientist archival: Saturated fat. Like palmitic acid, stearic acid. They are saturated with hydrogen
Michael Pollan: Saturated fats are usually solid at allowance temperature. We get them best generally from meat, milk, adulate and cheese.
Sarah Tracy: As he looked about the globe, Keys activate that the added beastly fat, red meat and dairy products, the added affection ache aural the population.
Michael Pollan: Keys was practicing a statistical affectionate of science alleged epidemiology. He was attractive through abstracts about ample numbers of people, aggravating to acquisition patterns.
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, New York University: Epidemiology is actual able in its way because it identifies trends and abeyant relationships.But you consistently acquire to be agnostic of any of those kinds of associations unless you’ve got added kinds of abstracts that appearance causality.
And it should be accounting on every distinct epidemiological study, ‘Red flag, affiliation does not necessarily beggarly causation.’
Michael Pollan: But based on the able affiliation Keys saw in his abstracts amid affection ache and saturated fat, he brash bodies to eat beneath of it.
By the 1970s, Keys’ approach was actuality discussed in the Senate.
George McGovern archival: There were some one actor bodies who died in 1967 from affection disease…
Michael Pollan: In 1976, George McGovern was administrator of the Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition.
McGovern attestant archival: We’re bistro abounding added beastly fat…
Michael Pollan: They apprehend over and over afresh that beastly fat is the problem. And they affair a set of guidelines alleged the Comestible Goals of the United States.
The goals apprenticed Americans to abate fat to 30 per cent of the calories in their diets. How? By bistro beneath meat and beneath dairy. ‘Decrease burning of meat,’ they said.
Marion Nestle: And never has a diet address been added controversial.
Sarah Tracy: The meat industry would acquire none of that.
Marion Nestle: They went appropriate to their accompany on Congress. Congress captivated hearings.
Sarah Tracy: And McGovern had to carbon those guidelines.
Michael Pollan: So, ‘Eat beneath red meat’ is rewritten as, ‘Choose meats that will abate your saturated fat intake.’ And in the move from that aboriginal book to that added sentence, that adaptation activity to my apperception is the alpha of complete nutritionism.
Because anticipate about it. Aboriginal of all, we’re no best talking about a aliment that everybody recognizes, meat, red meat. We’re talking about a comestible that no one has anytime seen, absolutely understands, and is an abstraction, saturated fat.
For the aliment industry, the authorization to abate fat was an befalling to advertise new products—low in fat, perhaps, but generally aerial in sugar.
Sarah Tracy: The aliment industry could all of a abrupt use low-fat or no-fat as a business strategy. Don’t you appetence commodity that’s advantageous for you? Why not buy a abominable processed, sugar-laden cookie that is fat-free?
Michael Pollan: Bodies thought, ‘God, there’s no fat in this. I’m not aloof activity to acquire one of those cookies, I’m activity to acquire a accomplished box.’
Snackwell’s Bartering Woman archival: I anticipate they’re zesty. I could eat a million. I anticipate I will.
Marion Nestle: The bulletin to eat beneath fat was translated into, ‘It’s acquire to eat added sugar.’
Michael Pollan: So the aliment industry re-engineers the f ood and if you attending at it, fat as a admeasurement of calories in the diet goes down, which sounds absolutely good. But in actuality what happened is fat backward akin and we ate a lot added carbohydrates. And that meant added calories. So we were badinage ourselves, and the industry was allowance to let us kid ourselves.
Blue Bonnet chime singers archival: It looks like and cooks like the high-priced…
Michael Pollan: Prodded by bloom experts, the industry additionally encouraged us to about-face from adulate to margarine.
Blue Bonnet chime singers: America’s admired margarine, Blue Bonnet. Everything’s bigger with Blue Bonnet on it.
Michael Pollan: Margarine is fabricated from vegetable oils. They accommodate polyunsaturated fats, which were accustomed as adored nutrients, because some of them can lower cholesterol.
But to accomplish vegetable oil adamantine abounding to spread, you acquire to hydrogenate it. That agency injecting hydrogen gas into the oil beneath controlled temperature and pressure. A activity that changes some of the polyunsaturates into a affectionate of fat alleged auto fat.
Margarine and added vegetable oil articles with auto fat were cheaper than butter, and backward alpha longer. They became accepted in broiled goods, deep-frying, and all kinds of candy foods.
For decades, we were told they were advantageous alternatives to foods with saturated fats. But in the 1990s, scientists apparent that auto fats were in actuality not actual advantageous at all.
Walter Willett, M.D., Chair, Administration of Nutrition, Harvard Academy of Accessible Health: Abounding bodies associated with the American Affection Affiliation had been advising bodies to absorb margarine that was loaded with auto fat. Although lower in saturated fat.
As it turns out bodies who had added auto fat in their diet had college ante of affection ache and diabetes. Those margarines were about the affliction things that bodies could be eating.
Michael Pollan: So, anticipate of it: what we told bodies is to get off a possibly ailing fat alleged “saturated fat,” and alter it with a fat that we afterwards abstruse absolutely does accord you affection attacks.
As time went on, abounding bodies began cerebration that all fats were bad.
Paul Rozin, Above Editor, Appetite, Prof. of Psychology, U. of Penn.: Fat was oversold as accessible adversary cardinal one. Now fat is an capital ingredient. You will die afterwards assertive blubbery acids soIyou charge some fat.
There are abounding bodies in the United States who anticipate you should eat a no-fat diet.
You’d be dead.
Michael Pollan: In 2001, scientists at the Harvard Academy of Accessible Bloom issued a belittling report. “The low-fat campaign,“ they wrote, “has been based on little accurate affirmation and may acquire acquired adventitious bloom consequences.”
Essentially, to apprehend this commodity is to see the complete accurate building about the low-fat advance crumble afore your eyes.
The scientists said the low fat advance had oversimplified the science.
They appear that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat did lower the accident of affection disease.
But they acclaimed that while a cogent affiliation amid saturated fat and affection ache was activate in two studies, it was not activate in seven others.
And they acicular out that as bodies replaced fat with carbohydrates and sugar, the prevalence of blubber and diabetes grew dramatically.
It’s tragic, because in the activity of accomplishing this, all allegedly with the absorption of convalescent the accessible health, we may acquire fabricated the accessible bloom worse.
This was a amazing accessible bloom mistake. And that aberration was accepting so bedeviled with a distinct nutrient.
Joan Gussow, Professor Emerita, Diet Education, Columbia University: The allure is in the nutrients, and there’s no catechism that aback you do that, you blunder bottomward the aisle and you hit commodity and say, ’Oh, that’s it. That’s it, it’s fat. It’s fat. Cut out the fat.’
And afresh about ten years later, you say, ‘Well, now, delay a minute. It absolutely isn’t all fat.’ And they’re consistently advancing out with commodity new, cogent you what’s the ideal diet. So of advance bodies are confused.
Michael Pollan: Scientists now acquire that a advantageous diet has to do with a lot added than one affectionate of aliment or nutrient.
Joan Sabaté, M.D., Professor, Academy of Accessible Health, Loma Linda University: A distinct comestible or a distinct aliment are not the abracadabra bullet. That is, the aggregate of foods that is the best important account of health.
Robert Lustig, M.D., Author, Fat Chance: We should not be talking about nutrition-ism, we should allocution about nutrition. We shouldn’t allocution about apparatus of food. We should allocution about food.
Super: South Bronx, New York City
Michael Pollan: But bistro aliment isn’t consistently easy—especially for the millions of bodies who alive in low-income neighborhoods breadth so abounding of what’s accessible is candy food.
Stephen Ritz, Educator: If you go arcade beyond the street, you’ll be able to acquirement a advanced array of cigarettes, chocolates, soda, malt liquor and potato chips. Apparently some canned vegetables, rice, sugar, bread, cheese and candy meat.
People accomplish decisions based on what they can afford. And sadly, what they can afford, often, is bargain food. Things that will accredit you to amplitude your dollar as far as possible.
Luis Novoa, South Bronx Resident: Growing up what I about ate was fast food, whether it’s Mickey-Dee’s or a Burger King, activity to the bend abundance affairs a bag of chips and a soda for beneath than three dollars. That’s what you’re acclimated to.
Stephen Ritz in scene: We’re gonna move all these building into this admirable accumulation and afresh we’re activity to go farming.
Michael Pollan: But all over the country, including actuality in the South Bronx, bodies are award able agency to get complete food.
Stephen Ritz in scene: Malik activate a home. One for you. But don’t cut yet. Let’s airing our way through this. Do we appetence to booty all the leaves off the plants?
Students in scene: No
Stephen Ritz in scene: No. So what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna appear over actuality we’re gonna go appropriate bottomward to the bottom, booty the top shoots off, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. Boom.
Michael Pollan: Teacher Steve Ritz runs a arrangement of aliment projects––which includes this hydroponic vegetable garden.
Stephen Ritz: There’s a allegory that bodies are blessed with cheeseburgers and French fries. They’re not.
Stephen Ritz in scene: You got a accomplished lotta crop activity on here, sweetie.
Alexandra Payne in scene: I know.
Stephen Ritz: But abounding bodies don’t apperceive there are added options. And that’s what we’re accomplishing here, teaching bodies about options.
Kimberly Velez in scene: Tastes acceptable and fresh…
Alexandra Payne in scene: I know, right?
Stephen Ritz: What we activate is that aback you accord bodies in low-income areas the befalling to abound food, they acknowledge resiliently.
Stephen Ritz in scene: You’ll be acrimonious the aftermath at the aiguille of bloom and comestible value, so not abandoned are you accepting alpha food, you’ll be accepting convalescent food.
Michael Pollan: Ritz got his alpha growing aliment aback in 2005. He had become annoyed of seeing his acceptance abound fat and become diabetic.
With alpha vegetables adamantine to acquisition in the Bronx, he and his kids got admission to a abandoned lot––and started growing their own.
Stephen Ritz: We were able to transform this amplitude from commodity that was a austere breadth into commodity that was a advantageous area, and that fabricated the kids feel good. It fabricated me feel great. I couldn’t acquire it.
Michael Pollan: Ritz now has kids growing vegetables all over the Bronx. And they’re agronomics hundreds of bodies a week.
One accumulation he works with are teenagers who’ve abandoned out, or been kicked out, of the accessible schools.
Bill Peacock in scene: All appropriate accept up. Advanced comestible guys, that’s you, you and you. If these kids don’t apperceive what they’re doing, accord them a hand. This is abandoned their fourth day in the kitchen. All right.
Michael Pollan: Ritz abstruse that JVL Wildcat Academy, a academy that gives kids added chances, had a restaurant kitchen and was training kids to become able cooks.
Bill Peacock in scene: I’m activity to authenticate how to accomplish pesto, archetypal pesto, OK? It’s a basil-based sauce, ah, with basics and cheese. All right? Why don’t you guys go and get done up, affirmation your stations and let’s go.
Stephen Ritz: I saw a abounding bartering kitchen that has kids from afflicted backgrounds acquirements how to baker and be affianced in the aliment account industry. And abutting to that kitchen, I saw a huge, accessible space, and I said to myself, hmm, wouldn’t it be abounding to abound the aliment that they charge for that kitchen appropriate abutting aperture to it, aught afar to plate, if you will?
Michael Pollan: So the basil they abound in the garden goes appropriate into the pesto they accomplish in the kitchen.
Bill Peacock in scene: Let’s grab some chives.
Michael Pollan: The arch of the kitchen is Bill Peacock.
Bill Peacock in scene: Let’s appear on bottomward here. Let’s go over to here. Bristles arugula.
Michael Pollan: Afterwards years affable in restaurants, he came actuality to advise in 2003.
Akeem Luke in scene: Two butterheads?
Bill Peacock in scene:Yep.
Akeem Luke in scene: All right.
Bill Peacock, Chef, JVL Wildcat Acadaemy: These students, they’re activity out to fast aliment and they’re bistro accessibility foods. They’re not activity to be bistro alpha bake-apple or alpha vegetables because it’s not there.
But now we’ve got the hydroponic garden. They’re seeing the activity cycle. And seeing these things absolutely growing. They’re affective it from date to stage. Makes a big difference.
Luis Novoa, Assistant Chef, Graduate, JVL Wildcat Academy: Actuality able to abound our own artefact appropriate abutting to breadth we baker aloof seemed apperception blowing, the actuality that we can do that. And show, you know, breadth we alive that we can do this is commodity I can’t describe. It’s an amazing thing.
Bill Peacock in scene: OK, why are we authoritative it, authoritative abiding it’s so dry?
Randy Robinson in scene: So the bloom won’t abatement off.
Bill Peacock in scene: Not the salad…
Randy Robinson in scene: The bloom dressing.
Bill Peacock in scene: There you go is, the bloom dressing.
All right, accept up. We are advancing appear time to eat. Now everybody is activity to baker their own bowl of pasta. Acquire fun. All right. There you go.Where’s your plate?
Bill Peacock: The bloom was a big champ today, which was hasty because these kids acquire never eaten annihilation like this. Never knew that a blooming can acquire a fiery flavor. Never knew that a blooming could acquire a soft, attenuate flavor.
Bill Peacock in scene: All right, let’s see what we got here, Gustavo. Actual nice. All right, grab your salad, get yourself an algid tea and adore your meal.
Bill Peacock: The actuality that all those kids shoved that bill in their aperture today was abandoned because they grew that lettuce. So it’s an ownership.
Bill Peacock in scene: You attending like you’re bistro it.
Stephen Ritz: If you betrayal bodies to locally grown, advantageous food, they tend to like it. They absolutely do. It’s not commodity that’s exclusive. It’s not commodity for the apish or for the fringe, you know, binding outliers.
And aback you can abound your own food, bodies are absolutely advancing by that.
Michael Pollan: But the big aliment companies, of course, still accommodate best of the aliment bodies eat. And they say they’re authoritative candy aliment healthier. How? By accomplishing what they’ve consistently done: tweaking the nutrients.
Heather Leidy in scene: This is absolutely seeing can comestible protein abandoned appulse angular accumulation account it’s consistently been…
Michael Pollan: Added than twenty thousand bodies are acquisition in Chicago for America’s bigger aliment expo: the anniversary affair of the Institute of Aliment Technologists—the IFT.
Colin Garner, Rice Bran Technologies: The IFT brings calm all address of companies, from the babyish to the boilerplate to the huge multi-billion dollar corporations. It’s a bazaar of capacity for the aliment producers.
Michael Pollan: And those producers are authoritative foods that last.
If you appetence commodity alpha you could go to the basal of the garden. If you appetence commodity that is activity to alive in your abdomen for three months, nine months, or added than that, afresh you’ll acquire to acquire commodity that’s able-bodied preserved, and congenital in such a way that it is stable.
Michael Pollan: Bodies from companies like Kraft and Accepted Mills appear actuality to see what aliment scientists are developing for tomorrow.
Like hot dogs fabricated with rice bran, the vitamin-rich allotment of the rice berry that’s usually befuddled away.
Or gluten-free pizza, whose band has no wheat, and is fabricated instead from a byproduct of cheesemaking alleged whey.
Polly Olson, Davisco Foods: The gluten-free industry has gone crazy. And it’s amazing how abounding are absorbed in the gluten-free. And they can’t acquire the aberration that it doesn’t aftertaste funny. It tastes like the complete pizza band that would acquire aureate in it.
Michael Pollan: And one of the world’s bigger aliment companies, Cargill, is actuality assuming prototypes for convalescent candy aliment articles for kids.
Adam Waehner, Cargill: The affair of our display this year is about adolescence nutrition. We understand, or, admit that blubber is a affair in the United States and that added and added bodies are attractive for added benign alternatives to the aliment choices.
Michael Pollan: Cargill buys a huge allotment of the world’s acreage products––from which it makes hundreds of aliment ingredients. The aggregation is assuming how some of these capacity could be acclimated to booty advantage of the growing absorption in convalescent eating.
Adam Waehner: The aboriginal display we’re activity to attending at is a peanut adulate advance that has added chicory basis fiber. You get three grams of cilia per serving.
Next, we acquire a chewy amber dent granola bar.This contains accomplished atom blah so you can get some added cilia there as well.
This is our bargain amoroso amber milk, and it’s had 25 percent of the amoroso replaced with Cargill Stevia blade extract, which is a accustomed aspartame that reduces the all-embracing amoroso content.
One affair we’ve abstruse over and over afresh is if aliment does not aftertaste good, consumers artlessly won’t buy it. And that’s the claiming that the aliment scientists booty on aloof to acquisition that complete candied atom of health, convenience, and taste.
Michael Pollan: There’s no catechism that candy aliment is acceptable and generally tasty. But aback it comes to health, the claims manufacturers use to advertise their articles are frequently confusing, if not deceptive.
Michael Pollan on stage: A cruise to the bazaar has become affectionate of a adventure through a betraying landscape. I mean, what are we to accomplish of a artefact like Splenda with fiber? They’re affairs the abridgement of one nutrient, sugar, and the chargeless attendance of another, fiber. So it allows you to acquire this amazing thing, never afore tasted in the history of mankind, which is high-fiber coffee.
These guys were absolutely the champs of advancing bloom claims, POM, POM Wonderful. They were announcement these articles as allowance aggregate from, uh, your affection to your prostate, to—and I kid you not—erectile dysfunction, this booze appropriate here.
They got in a little hot baptize for that because they activated it.They–they performed these abstracts on, rabbits. And some beastly rights bodies got actual upset. Okay.But the affair that addled me is, do rabbits acquire this problem?
Anyway, they went too far, though, aback they put a bloom affirmation on or a byword that was, I’m not kidding, Cheat Afterlife with this product. And the FTC said, you can’t do that. You can’t affiance uh, aeon with your products.
You anticipate about bodies aggravating to accomplish acceptable choices in the bazaar and award themselves not accident weight, not convalescent their health, and you admiration why.
Well, attending at yogurt. Yogurt is a advantageous choice, we’re told.We accord it to our kids in huge amounts. This is Yoplait. This is one of the aboriginal of the actual acknowledged yogurt brands. And this is, Yocrunch, and this one comes with M&Ms. Allocution about a abashed message.
But here’s the thing. Yoplait, Coca-Cola–obviously, this is the bigger choice, right? But if you attending at how abounding amoroso is in this, there is absolutely the aforementioned aggregate of amoroso in these two things. This is the latest amoroso commitment system. And so we feel acceptable about not giving our kids soda, but we accord them this instead. So that’s what I beggarly aback I say it’s absolutely gotten betraying out there.
Michael Pollan: So how do you apperceive what’s absolutely advantageous and what’s not? How can you acquaint the aberration amid aliment and comestible food-like substances? I’ve appear up with some astute guidelines I alarm aliment rules.
Like: eat abandoned foods that will eventually rot.
Eat abandoned foods that acquire been adapted by humans
And abjure foods you see advertised on television.
So if we’re activity to eat complete food, the abutting accessible catechism is, what affectionate of complete food?
And that allotment of my all-embracing aliment admonition is in some agency the best controversial. Mostly plants. Why do I say mostly plants?
It didn’t amuse vegetarians, who anticipation I should go all the way. And it absolutely didn’t amuse meat-eaters, who anticipation I was dissing meat. But I acclimated that chat afterwards a lot of consideration, because it’s a somewhat ambiguous message.
There are bodies who demonize meat, but there’s no acumen to do that. Meat is advantageous food. Humans acquire eaten meat for a actual affiliated time with abounding pleasure.
I anticipate our botheration is we eat too abounding of it. So, and that’s why I say mostly plants.
Michael Pollan on stage: Every added circadian confined of vegetables and bake-apple reduces your accident of achievement by 5 percent and your accident of affection ache by 4 percent.
We abandoned eat about amid two and three portions of vegetables and bake-apple in this country. If we up that by aloof one more, that would save 30,000 lives and bristles billion dollars in healthcare costs.
Man in scene: Remember our rules for absolution them out?
Kids in scene: Don’t bother them.
Man in scene: Don’t bother them, that’s right. But we are activity to badge them abroad from our vegetables, right?
Michael Pollan: At a day afflicted in Sunnyvale, California, Stanford scientist Christopher Gardner is exploring what it takes to get accouchement to eat added vegetables.
Christopher Gardner, Director of Diet Studies, Stanford Prevention Analysis Center: One of my analysis interests is aloof how abounding vegetables could I get a kid to eat. What are the barriers? What are the things that get in the way? Is it a associate burden thing? Is it absolutely a aftertaste thing? Is it familiarity?
Asha in scene: So today we acquire garlic basil hummus and we additionally acquire auto cucumbers, blooming beans and corn. You can try the raw veggies by themselves. You can dip them into the hummus.
Erin Bird in scene: Here’s addition absolutely big one over here.
Erin Bird, Afflicted Director, Abounding Circle Farm: What they apprentice is that it’s absolutely adorable food. But it’s aloof demography that aboriginal jump into activity adequate abounding to try it.
Erin Bird in scene: So, in agreement of teamwork…
Michael Pollan: To accomplish that jump easier, in the affable appointment that culminates the week, the kids acquire been told to use three altered vegetables to make…pizza.
Emmy Williams in scene: Does pickles calculation as a vegetable?
Erin Bird in scene: Yeah.
Christopher Gardner: One of the capital credibility of the afflicted is to get the kids affiliated with food. Because you see this ablaze ball go off over their active and a animation in their eye aback they see, ‘Oh, that aliment it grows aloof like this!’
Erin Bird in scene: So bygone we came up with a list. We acquire squash, peppers, kale, blooming beans, cucumber. Eggs is not advised a vegetable but it can be an added topping to your pizza.
Emmy Williams, camper: It’s appealing abounding dough, and afresh I acquire pesto, amazon adhesive or sauce. I acquire cheese, a mixture, we adapted onions, peppers, and garlic calm so I acquire that on my pizza. Tomatoes. And afresh I acquire an abutting arena of pickles, which I’m absolutely aflame about because I’ve never had pickles on a pizza.
Woman in scene: What do you think, does that attending done?
Christopher Gardner: I’m affectionate of abashed absolutely how abounding altered vegetables they’re accommodating to try by the end of the week, and how abounding they’re accommodating to say they like, aloof aural a few days.
Michael Pollan: Aback bodies eat a plant-based diet their accomplished lives, the allowances are impressive. Actuality in Loma Linda, California, abounding bodies accord to the aforementioned religious abbey that the Kellogg brothers did: the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Woman in scene: Blooming onions.
Michael Pollan: Founded aback in the nineteenth century, the abbey has consistently emphasized advantageous living.
Woman in scene: Blooming chards, lots of blooming chards.
Michael Pollan: Today, Adventists acquire the longest activity assumption of any accumulation in the United States.
Woman in scene: I can’t acquire you’re activity to be a hundred and one in August.
Michael Pollan: The association at this retirement home are about all Adventists.
Carol Nelson, 92 years old: We feel that our bodies are the temple of God. And we owe it to ourselves and to our association to accumulate up our health.
Exercise baton in scene: One, two…
Carol Nelson: We acquire at atomic two or three bodies who are a hundred years old here. And they assume to get alternating actual well.
I’m ninety-two years old. The boilerplate age is ninety-three.
I airing 4 afar a day. I acclimated to airing outside. But now I airing in the alcazar here. I accomplished that if I go from end to the added and aback 6 times, it’s a mile.So I go aback and alternating 24 times in the morning.
Michael Pollan: About all Adventists abjure from smoker and alcohol. And about fifty percent of them are vegetarians.
Carol Nelson: I acquire been a vegetarian all my life.
Interviewer: And you, Richard?
Richard Nelson, 94 years old: I could say the aforementioned thing. And I haven’t absent anything. It’s appealing able-bodied accustomed that abnormally the red meats are not absolutely that acceptable for you.
Michael Pollan: And that’s accurate if you eat too abounding of them. Studies appearance that the added red meat you eat, the greater your accident of accepting affection disease, diabetes and assertive cancers.
Some of the meat studies were done at the Harvard Academy of Accessible Bloom in Boston.
Walter Willett, M.D., Chair, Administration of Nutrition, Harvard Academy of Accessible Health: From what we’ve apparent in our research, bistro mostly plants is a acceptable idea. We’ve done a alternation of analyses over the aftermost few years comparing red meat with banty with fish, with nuts, with legumes in affiliation to accident of cardiovascular ache and diabetes. And actual consistently replacing red meat with added protein sources turns out to be accompanying to lower accident of bloodshed from these diseases.
Michael Pollan: In Cleveland, advisers acquire fabricated a new award that they anticipate adeptness explain some of the risks of red meat. Stanley Hazen is a cardiologist.
Stanley Hazen, M.D., Cardiologist, Cleveland Clinic: We were attractive for appropriate markers or appearance in the claret that predicted near-term accident for affection attack, achievement and death.
Michael Pollan: Hazen and his colleagues activate commodity that seemed to do aloof that: a admixture alleged TMAO.
Stanley Hazen: Aback we aboriginal activate that this admixture was associated with affection ache risk, we didn’t apperceive actual abounding about it. So we approved to about about-face engineer, breadth did it appear from?
Michael Pollan: The acknowledgment acicular to red meat, which contains a actuality alleged carnitine. Bacilli in our belly augment on carnitine, and admonition about-face it into TMAO.
Hazen activate that the added TMAO there is in our bloodstream, the added acceptable we are to advance affection disease.
Stanley Hazen: What we acquire activate is that TMAO is acceptable affection ache accident by alteration cholesterol metabolism.
Michael Pollan: In mice, college levels of TMAO fabricated the adhesive deposits of cholesterol alleged applique added acceptable to anatomy in their arteries.
Stanley Hazen: I like to anticipate of TMAO as a rheostat on a ablaze switch. If you acquire a aerial TMAO, you’re activity to acquire added plaque. If you acquire a low TMAO level, you end up accepting beneath plaque.
Based on our findings, I acquire not chock-full bistro red meat but I acquire decreased the aggregate and additionally the frequency. So now instead of accepting it altered times a anniversary I try to acquire it at best one time a week.
Michael Pollan: We still don’t acquire absolutely why meat causes problems.It could be the carnitine. Or the affectionate of adamant in it. Or the saturated fat. Or the botheration may artlessly be that meat crowds plants out of our diet.
But we do apperceive this: bistro beneath meat and mostly plants is acceptable for you.
Joan Sabaté in scene: OK.
Michael Pollan: Diet scientist Joan Sabaté teaches at Loma Linda University. He and his wife Carmen, who both grew up in Adventist homes in Barcelona, chase a vegetarian diet.
Joan Sabaté: For supper I eat a acceptable salad, or a acceptable soup, and vegetables with carbohydrate foods such as pasta, or potatoes, or bread. And afresh bake-apple for dessert. That seems like a acceptable meal.
But don’t stick with aloof cauliflower and potatoes. The ball commonwealth is actual flush in textures, in flavors, in colors. So, a flush array of ball foods is the best.
Michael Pollan: Sabaté has done studies comparing the constancy of both kinds of Adventists: meat eaters and vegetarians. He’s activate that vegetarian Adventists alive three to four years best than non-vegetarian ones, and six to nine years best than the blow of us.
Mrs. Wareham in scene: You’re clumsily accessible to please, honey, I charge say.
Michael Pollan: Ellsworth Wareham is one of those vegetarian Adventists. He’s 99. He was a affection surgeon for added than bristles decades, and retired at the age of ninety-five.
Ellsworth Wareham, M.D., surgeon (retired): During the aftermost 20 years I assisted in cardiac surgery. I wasn’t the arch surgeon. But I formed full-time.
I try to alive a advantageous lifestyle. And that involves, of course, aggravating to acquire able nutrition.
Do I accumulate a account of things that I’m activity to eat? No.
Mrs. Wareham in scene: This has little hot peppers in it.
Ellsworth Wareham: You eat a plant-based diet. I appetence to aloof say how simple it is. It is simple to acquire acceptable bistro habits.
Michael Pollan: At the University of Pittsburgh, advisers are exploring aloof how bistro mostly plants may advance health.
Colon blight specialist Stephen O’Keefe spent abounding years alive in Africa, breadth he saw actual little colon blight amid his patients.
But aback he abashed to the United States, he was addled by the actuality that African-Americans acquire one of the accomplished colon blight ante in the world, alike admitting abounding are genetically agnate to Africans.
Stephen O’Keefe, M.D., Professor of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center: Studies acquire approved that the agency best associated with differences in colon blight amid Africans and African Americans is diet.
Michael Pollan: Best Africans tend to eat added vegetables, fruits, beans and accomplished grains, and beneath candy aliment than we do in the West. And those plant-based foods accommodate substances our bodies can’t digest—which we alarm fiber.
We accepted for a affiliated time that cilia was important, and we anticipation it was important to admonition bodies afflicted ache and advance what’s alleged alteration time of aliment through your body.
But O’Keefe’s studies acknowledge that cilia does commodity else. It feeds bacilli in the colon that admonition to accumulate it healthy, by bearing a admixture alleged butyrate.
Stephen O’Keefe: Our beef don’t aftermath it, but bacterial beef do. If you eat abounding fiber, you advance a bacterial citizenry that catechumen the cilia into butyrate which maintains the bloom of the colon and prevents cancer.
Michael Pollan: Cilia is aliment for these microbes, and if you don’t augment it to them they’re not activity to be able-bodied and you’re not activity to be well.
And the beneath cilia you eat, O’Keefe has found, the added bacilli you acquire that accomplish adverse compounds that can advance to cancer.
Since the Western diet that abounding African-Americans eat is low in fiber, and best Africans get affluence of fiber, O’Keefe wondered what would appear if Africans and African-Americans switched diets?
O’Keefe’s aggregation fed fiber-rich diets to African-Americans, and fiber-poor diets to bodies in South Africa.
Stephen O’Keefe: And afresh we basically abstinent substances that are acceptable or bad for the colon, afore and afresh two weeks afterwards their comestible switch.
Michael Pollan: Afterwards aloof two weeks, the aggregate of adverse compounds added in the colons of the Africans, while the aggregate of benign compounds like butyrate added in the African-Americans.
Junhai Ou in scene: This is the butyrate.
Stephen O’Keefe in scene: It’s actual dramatic. It’s actual accessible to see. Yes.
Junhai Ou in scene: Yeah.
Stephen O’Keefe: The agitative affair is that by alteration your diet you or I can access our accident of colon blight in aloof two weeks.
Michael Pollan: So the beyond assignment is that we’re not aloof bistro for ourselves. We’re bistro for the trillions of bacilli that abide us. Like the ones that admonition assure breast-fed babies.
The association of bacilli central us has become accepted as the microbiome. But scientists are aloof alpha to acquire how big a role those bacilli comedy in our comestible health.
Jeffrey Gordon, M.D., Distinguished University Professor, Washington Univ. Academy of Medicine: Our adeptness to transform the circuitous chemicals in the foods that we eat into articles that we can grab ahold of and use, actual abounding depends aloft our microbial partners. And in a sense, we never banquet alone. And that’s why we proceeded to try to acquire this circle amid the foods that we eat, the bacilli that we harbor, and our health.
Michael Pollan: Jeffrey Gordon and his colleagues acquire activate that these bacilli can absolutely access both blubber and malnutrition.
In Malawi, his aggregation advised abnormal pairs of twins. Alike admitting they’d been fed agnate diets, in dozens of cases, one accompanying was malnourished, and the added one wasn’t.
It angry out that their abdominal bacteria—for affidavit still alien –were starkly different.
Jeffrey Gordon: This appropriate that there may be a causal accord amid the bacilli and malnutrition, but it didn’t prove it.
Michael Pollan: To analysis this hypothesis, the scientists crude the children’s abdominal bacilli into mice that had been bred to acquire none of their own.
The mice that got the ailing twins’ bacilli developed affection of malnutrition. Those that got the advantageous twins’ bacilli did not.
Gordon did a agnate absorption of twins in the United States, this time attractive at obesity. In cases breadth one accompanying was adipose and the added wasn’t, it afresh angry out that they had altered kinds of gut bacteria—which suggests that assertive bacilli may accord to obesity.
Jeffrey Gordon: If we anticipate about our bacilli as a garden, how can we abound this garden? How can we breed it to ensure our health?
Michael Pollan: In places like Bangladesh, Gordon is investigating whether acceptable diets may do that by auspicious the advance of a advanced array of abdominal microbes.
Jeffrey Gordon: One alluring award that we acquire fabricated is that Westernization is associated with a abridgement in the array or affluence of microbial activity in the gut. And diets that admission affluence are apparently activity to be beneficial.
Michael Pollan: Researcher Jeff Leach thinks the Hadza in Tanzania can additionally acquaint us a lot about how to breed our microbiome.
Jeff Leach, Founder, The Beastly Aliment Project: One of the angelic grails in microbiome analysis is aggravating to aggregate out what is an optimal or counterbalanced microbiome.
Michael Pollan: The Hadza’s gut bacilli augment mainly on agrarian foods, like the affectionate our ancestors ate for tens of bags of years.
Jeff Leach: We anticipate that the Hadza accommodate in their abdomen a microbial Noah’s Ark to what ails the world.
Michael Pollan: To apprentice added about these microbes, Leach is accession stool samples from some 500 Hadza: men, women and children.
Jeff Leach: We accommodate the individuals in the apple little tubes and a swab.
Jeff Leach in scene: Samples for Bahti?
Assistant in scene: Bahti.
Michael Pollan: The samples are alien to the labs of Leach’s U.S. colleagues, who can absolutely analyze the bacilli they contain.
Jeff Leach: At the end of the day, what we achievement to acquisition is, are there assertive diets that drive assertive groups of bacteria? And what does that acquaint us about the bloom of the person?
Michael Pollan: Studies advance that the Hadza acquire altered kinds of bacilli than bodies in Western countries. And this may partly axis from the aerial levels of cilia they get from all the plants they eat.
Jeff Leach: I anticipate the Hadza are gonna advise us that plants should be the primary antecedent of calories in the diet, and that those plants should additionally accommodate lots of comestible fiber.
Michael Pollan: I anticipate one of the best absorbing things that Jeff Leach is up to is attractive for that baseline of what the beastly microbiome looked like afore the acceleration of agronomics and afresh afore the acceleration of candy food.
We don’t apperceive how these changes in our diet may acquire afflicted the bacilli central us. The bacilli may accommodate a actual important missing articulation amid aliment and health. We charge to booty them into application aback we’re chief what to eat.
So there are abounding acceptable affidavit to eat mostly plants. There’s affluence of affirmation to advance that bistro a array of vegetables and fruits can apparently abate ante of stroke, affection disease, and some cancers.
They’re alimental and acquire lots of fiber. They’re acceptable for the bacilli in your gut. And if you’re bistro mostly plants, you can be abiding you’re not bistro too abounding meat.
So, amusement meat as a additive or appropriate breach food.
If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was fabricated in a plant, don’t.
Eat your colors—that is, eat as abounding altered kinds of plants as possible.
And now the last—and best challenging—of my seven words: not too much.
In a country breadth two-thirds of us are overweight, this may assume obvious. But it can be boxy not to eat too much. One big acumen is that we’re consistently actuality tempted by food.
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, New York University: Bodies are bistro added food, added generally and in greater portions. Aliment is everywhere. You acclimated to be asked to leave aliment alfresco if you came into a accouterment store. Now they accord you snacks.
Michael Pollan: The admirable beastly academy of the meal, this time breadth bodies stop what they’re doing, sit bottomward at a table, eat socially, is in trouble.
We eat at our desks. We eat while we’re driving. We eat while we’re walking bottomward the street. There were amusing taboos on all these activities already aloft a time and they’re all gone.
Marion Nestle: We can see if we attending at abstracts on the cardinal of calories that bodies are eating, bodies are bistro abounding added now than they did 25 or 30 years ago. And those kinds of trends are activity to booty a lot added than removing a gram or two of amoroso or alkali from a aliment artefact to accomplish any difference.
Michael Pollan: And that’s why we charge to talk, not aloof about nutrients or alike aloof about food, but about how abounding we eat.
Brian Wansink in scene: Thanks for advancing for cafeteria today. Like I promised, it’s a chargeless lunch. OK. So let’s go on, let’s get started.
Brian Wansink, Director, Aliment and Brand Lab, Cornell University: One affair that I’ve learned, accepting done hundreds and hundreds of studies apropos to bistro behavior, is that to a person, we acquire we are adept and administrator of all of our aliment decisions. But we’re not.
We accomplish over 200 decisions about aliment a day. And the majority of these decisions are basically benumbed to us.
Brian Wansink in scene: So, um, grab a bowl up there, the pasta is appropriate on the stove. Serve yourself up.
Michael Pollan: Brian Wansink is an able on bistro behavior. He’s apparent we’re generally not acquainted of why we eat as abounding as we do. Sometimes it’s because of commodity we don’t accord the aboriginal anticipation to. Like the admeasurement of our plate.
Brian Wansink: We’ll accompany bodies in, we’ll accord them a ample plate, to serve themselves, but what they don’t realize, is that the pasta is cold.
Michael Pollan: Wansink concocts an excuse, so that anybody has to get a altered plate, which is hardly smaller.
Brian Wansink in scene: These things weren’t the appropriate temperature. So I’d like you to appear aback and aloof grab addition bowl out of the cupboard, there.
Brian Wansink: One of the things we acquisition is that they’ll serve themselves a added time, they won’t acquire they served an aggregate any altered than they did the aboriginal time.
Brian Wansink in scene: Did you guys apprehension annihilation any altered amid the aboriginal time you served yourself and the added time you served yourself?
Young man in blush shirt: Bowl feels a lot smaller, it looks smaller.
Woman: Oh!
Brian Wansink in scene: So here’s one affair we found. The admeasurement of a bowl abundantly biases us in agreement of how abounding we serve.
Michael Pollan: The abate the plate, the beneath aliment bodies take.
Brian Wansink in scene: You serve four ounces on a nine-inch plate, you go, ‘Holy cow, I’m never activity to be able to eat that.’ So let’s booty a attending at what happened to you guys.
So the big plate, two hundred and seven calories. The abate plate, it abandoned bottomward to a hundred and sixty-two calories. Whoa. That’s about forty calories,
If this happened three times a day, over the advance of a year, by application a abate plate, you’d end up belief nine pounds beneath than you would if you had a bigger plate. Aloof really, absolutely babyish things accomplish this absolutely huge difference.
Brian Wansink: Aback it comes bottomward to it, the changes we can accomplish best anon are the changes we can accomplish aback we go home tonight. They’re the changes we can accomplish in our kitchen or in our own house. Like artlessly application abate plates.
Michael Pollan: Use abate plates and glasses.
Serve the vegetables first.
Super: Lansing Aerial School, Lansing, New York.
Michael Pollan: Wansink has additionally activate that the adjustment in which we appointment foods influences not aloof how abounding we eat, but what we eat. He’s now alive with schools about the country, to re-design cafeteria curve so that kids will accept convalescent foods.
Brian Wansink: This is about the best difficult abode in the angel to get bodies to eat better. It’s a boilerplate academy and a aerial academy cafeteria. Here’s how we do it.
We re-organize the line. Put the healthiest aliment first. We acquisition bodies are eleven per cent added acceptable to booty the aboriginal affair they see than the third thing. So let’s bulk it up with the advantageous vegetables.
After that we’ve got the low fat hamburgers. Accomplished atom buns here, bean quesadillas. It’s abandoned afresh do they hit the absolutely indulgent stuff. But you apperceive hey, it’s too late. Their plates are already abounding with the acceptable stuff.
Sandi Swearingen, Aliment Account Director, Lansing Central Academy District: You apperceive that it’s alive by the actuality that, we acclimated to abandoned do, 25 pounds of carrots a anniversary for all three barrio and now we, we go anywhere’s from 70 to 75 pounds of carrots a week. And they don’t alike apprehend it, a lot of ‘em, that ‘Wow, we’re bistro better.’ It’s aloof happening.
Brian Wansink: The added affair we do, we booty the bake-apple and we put it appropriate abutting to the banknote register.What we acquisition is that bake-apple sales go up a hundred and three per cent. Artlessly by putting the bake-apple in a nice bassinet and putting it abutting to the banknote register. And the exact aforementioned affair that works for affairs Twinkies in a accessibility abundance works for accepting bodies to eat convalescent in aerial schools and inferior highs.
Michael Pollan: And it’s not aloof kids who are afflicted by breadth and aback they see food. The adjustment of items at a breakfast cafe had a agnate aftereffect on adults.
Brian Wansink: We activate that the aboriginal three things they saw comprised 66 percent of aggregate they took.So in one case they saw abominable eggs first, they saw bacon, they saw absurd potatoes. Two-thirds of their plate, abominable eggs bacon, absurd potatoes. If instead they saw bake-apple first, and low fat granola, low fat yogurt, they’d end up demography two-thirds of their bowl from those items.
It’s absurd the appulse the adjustment of aliment has on whether we booty it or not.
Michael Pollan: All these little ecology cues are actual important in our appetite. We anticipate of appetence as this biological absolute. ‘This is how athirst I am.’But, in fact, it, like so abounding added things, is constructed. It’s socially constructed, environmentally complete and afflicted by all these little, little things.
So I see abounding abeyant to accouter that affectionate of cerebration and those affectionate of insights to redesign the cafe line, to redesign the plate, to redesign the aliment ambiance in which we live.
It’s actual absorbing how we’ll put up with amusing engineering from corporations, endlessly. Aback they appear up with the Big Gulp they are amusing engineering, right, they’re accepting us to booze added than we would otherwise. Aback they dispense the salt, fat, and sugar, all that is amusing engineering too and we don’t resent it.
Yet as anon as it’s actuality done on our behalf, an adopted official accomplishing it on our behalf, this is too much. This is amusing engineering. This is socialist, we can’t, we can’t go there.
So it seems to me we acquire a bifold standard.
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, New York University: The government is already complex in aliment choice, up to its ears. Government activity has bent the affectionate of aliment arrangement that we have. It determines what aliment articles get accurate and which ones don’t.
So what those of us who are advocating for a convalescent aliment arrangement are afterwards is not accepting the government complex in aliment policy. It already is. We aloof appetence it tweaked so that the government role in aliment activity is to aftermath a aliment arrangement that promotes health. Convalescent bodies and a convalescent environment.
Jeffrey Ritterman archival: This is the aggregate of amoroso that your adolescent or you eat aback you booze one can of soda a day for a year. I’m gonna put this bottomward in front.
Michael Pollan: In 2012, Richmond, California administrator Jeffrey Ritterman proposed that the burghal aggregate a penny-per-ounce tax on bathetic beverages. He hoped the tax would abash bodies from arresting so abounding sugar.
Chairwoman archival: Amuse be admiring while we’re discussing this. Acknowledge you.
Michael Pollan: Ritterman is additionally a cardiologist.
Jeffrey Ritterman archival: Unequivocally, medically appropriate now it is accurate that one can of soda a day increases your accident of Blazon 2 diabetes. It causes affection attacks, and it causes blubber and it makes some cancers grow.
Michael Pollan: The tax proponents aloft abutting to seventy thousand dollars.
But in this burghal of about 100,000 people, the soda industry spent about two-and-a bisected actor dollars to defeat the tax.
Phone coffer woman archival: I was calling on account of the Association Coalition Adjoin Cooler Taxes.
Marion Nestle: They accustomed an apparent grass roots alignment to activity the soda tax. They went into boyhood neighborhoods and put up big posters saying, ‘Your rights are actuality taken abroad from you.’
Courtland ‘Corky’ Boozé, Richmond Burghal Council archival:When we get to the point of actuality a absolutist to people, I anticipate it’s wrong.
Reporter archival: Admeasurement N is losing. We can now affirm that it has gone bottomward to defeat.
Michael Pollan: In the end, Richmond voters alone the tax by a allowance of about two-to-one.
Across the country, New York Burghal Ambassador Michael Bloomberg came up with a altered activity to cut bottomward on people’s assimilation of sugar. He proposed a adjustment to absolute the confined admeasurement of sugar-sweetened beverages to 16 ounces.
Michael Bloomberg archival: There’s an catching in this country of bodies actuality ample adjoining on obesity. The number, allotment of the citizenry that’s adipose is skyrocketing. We’ve gotta do commodity about it.
Thomas Farley archival: So this is the proposal. The best admeasurement that a aliment account enactment could advertise of a bathetic booze is sixteen ounces….
Thomas Farley, M.D., Above Commissioner, NYC Administration of Health: If you go into a fast-food restaurant in New York City, you can acquisition an abominable lot of things like this. This is a 64-ounce container. That’s a bisected a gallon, by the way. It contains about 800 calories or added than 50 packets of sugar. To accord you an absorption of what we’re talking about, this is how abounding amoroso is in there.
Marion Nestle: We apperceive from analysis that bodies eat what’s in advanced of them.If you accord somebody a 16-ounce soda, that actuality will booze 16 ounces. If you accord that aforementioned actuality 32 ounces, that aforementioned actuality will booze 32 ounces and acquire alert as abounding calories.
Michael Pollan: The cooler industry filed clothing to stop Bloomberg’s rule, and launched a glossy advance to about-face the accessible adjoin it.
PSA Announcer: New Yorkers don’t appetence the ambassador to acquaint them what admeasurement cooler to buy.
PSA Man: I’m an developed and I can accomplish my own decisions about what I drink.
PSA Announcer: Hey New York. It’s time to booty a stand. Join us.
Michael Pollan: In March 2013, a adjudicator disqualified in favor of the industry and threw out Bloomberg’s rule, calling the absolute ‘arbitrary and capricious.’
Michael Bloomberg archival: Actuality the aboriginal to do commodity is never easy. Aback we began this process, we knew we would face lawsuits. Anytime you accept a groundbreaking policy, appropriate interests will sue. That’s America.
Marlboro anchorperson archival: Appear to breadth the acidity is. Appear to Marlboro Country.
Michael Pollan: Personal abandon additionally acclimated to be one of the tobacco industry’s admired arguments adjoin government regulation. But the affirmation of abuse became so cutting that the government assuredly had to act.
Kelly Brownell: For abounding years there was actual durably accustomed science that smoker cigarettes was killing people. But it took a affiliated time for government to react. Already it did, though, it did things that were advised extraordinary at one time. Standing up to the tobacco companies?
Bel Air chime singers archival: Breathe easy. Smoke clean. With new Bel Air…
Michael Pollan: In 1970, 37 per cent of American adults smoked cigarettes. The U.S. government banned cigarette announcement on television that year, and cigarette taxes began to rise. Aback then, the allotment of adults who smoke has been cut in half.
Kelly Brownell: So I don’t anticipate it can be actual far off breadth we ask government to do with aliment what it’s done with tobacco.
Michael Pollan: And in 2014, bodies in Berkeley, California did aloof that, casual the aboriginal soda tax in the nation’s history.
Vicki Alexander archival: Got the admeasurement passed. Whoo!
Michael Pollan: This time, tax proponents auspiciously countered industry spending––thanks partly to above Ambassador Bloomberg.
PSA Announcer: If we’re activity to abandoning the catching of adolescence obesity, it starts November 4th.
Michael Pollan: He spent a appear six hundred fifty thousand dollars in abutment of the measure.
PSA Announcer: And no to adolescence blubber and diabetes.
Michael Pollan: I anticipate it’s a big accord because we are activity to analysis this absorption that by adjusting the bulk of soda, you can abate the burning of it.
It’s already alive in Mexico, breadth a civic soda tax took aftereffect in 2014.Since then, Mexicans acquire been bubbler decidedly beneath soda, suggesting that the aggregate we eat or booze is added than aloof a aggregate of willpower.
Now we’ll see whether a tax can acquire a agnate appulse aback we try it in aloof in one city. And if we ascertain that that works, and in about-face we acquisition ante of blubber and Blazon 2 diabetes abstinent or declining, we will acquire apparent a actual able tool. It may or may not work, but I’m captivated that assuredly we’re activity to get to try this.
Make baptize your cooler of choice
Stop bistro afore you’re full
And eat added like the French do.
Eat added like the French do? Aren’t they accepted for their adulation of flush food?
Well, one of the arresting things about the French is that they absolutely adore bigger bloom than bodies in abounding added Western countries. It’s a abstruseness accepted as the French paradox.
They eat actual blubbery foods actual often. They acquire lavish, abundant desserts. They booze lots of wine. And it drives us crazy, but they’re not as fat as we are, and they acquire beneath affection disease, and hardly bigger longevity. How could this possibly be? They’re breaking all our rules of eating.
Claude Fischler in scene: [speaking French, subtitles]: Hello, M. Philippe.
Butcher in scene: Hello, M. Fischler, How are you?
Claude Fischler in scene: I’m well.
Michael Pollan: Claude Fischler is a French sociologist who studies how bodies eat.
Claude Fischler in scene: I would like a dogie roast.
Butcher in scene: OK, a dogie roast.
Claude Fischler in scene: …for six people.
Butcher in scene: For six people.
Claude Fischler, Director of Research, French Civic Centre for Accurate Research: The French are actual adamant aback it comes to issues associated with eating. They eat at absolutely the aforementioned time, in all regions. Any accustomed weekday at 12:30, you can be abiding that 50 percent of the French that are active eating.
Across the English Channel or in the U.S., it’s, added like 15, 16, 17 percent of bodies that are bistro at the aforementioned time.
Michael Pollan: Fischler thinks this rigidity, or assurance on tradition, absolutely makes activity easier for the French.
Claude Fischler: It’s not such a maddening alone attraction about authoritative yourself. Because there’s a lot that is controlled by the culture.
Paul Rozin, Above Editor, Appetite, Prof. of Psychology, U. of Penn.: The big aberration amid the French and the Americans is that they serve beneath food. That’s the big one. They serve abate portions. That’s allotment of their tradition.
Another affair is they anticipate of aliment added as commodity you enjoy.
Fischler in scene: Hello madame
Shopkeeper: Hello
Fischler: How are you?
Shopkeeper: I’m well, and yourself?
Fischler: Good.
Fischler: I’d like a little array of cheeses.
Shopkeeper: an assortment…
Claude Fischler: The French appearance of bloom issues is, ‘Si c’est bon, c’est bon.’If it tastes good, it’s acceptable for you.
Fischler: Acknowledge you actual much.
Shopkeeper: Acquire a acceptable evening!
Fischler: Goodbye. See you soon.
Paul Rozin: The French, aback they say they eat, beggarly they acquire a meal together. They wouldn’t alarm bistro a snack, eating. The way they use their chat bistro is an event. They acquire a angel in which aliment is a anniversary with others.
Michael Pollan: Tonight’s banquet is at the home of Fischler’s friend, Hervé de Lannurien.
Female Guest: I’d like a babyish glass
Male guest: I’d like some too.
Male Guest: This is consistently a bit ceremonial.
Fischler: How is this?
Michael Pollan: In befitting with tradition, the meal follows a script. Appetizers. A aboriginal course. A capital course. A cheese course. And salad. Afterwards they had dessert.
In France, they eat slowly, which is actual absorbing and significant. One of the best arresting things about the American way of bistro is we are some of the fastest eaters on the planet.
Claude Fischler: It’s about a hundred and thirty-five account a day in France spent eating. Compared to commodity like seventy-four, I think, for the U.S.
Paul Rozin: So they’re acclimated to bistro abate portions, but they’re acclimated to demography best to eat them. So the amusement of bistro comes from the acceptable aliment in your mouth.
Michael Pollan: So the French absurdity may acquire annihilation to do with the phenomenon of comestible in the red wine, which some bodies thought, but it may acquire aggregate to do with habit.
As able and admirable as science is, ability additionally can advise us how to eat. And so far, until science makes the breakthroughs it needs to make, ability is the best adviser we have.
Try to absorb as abounding time adequate the meal as it took to adapt it.
Don’t eat annihilation your great-grandmother wouldn’t admit as food.
Michael Pollan on stage: Aftermost rule, breach the rules already in a while. Cultivating a relaxed, non-punitive attitude against aliment is essential. Actuality afraid about your bistro cannot be acceptable for your health. What affairs is not the appropriate breach but the accustomed absence practice.
So I angle with Oscar Wilde, actually, who said it best.He said, ‘All things in moderation, including moderation.’ Acknowledge you actual much.
Michael Pollan at farmers’ market: Tomatoes, assorted.
Seller: Do you appetence a birthmark to go?
Michael Pollan at farmers’ market: Acknowledge you.
Michael Pollan: There’re abounding aspects of our lives breadth we feel like we acquire actual little power. But aback it comes to food, we do acquire power.
The acceleration of farmers’ markets, the acceleration of amoebic agriculture, the acceleration of the aliment movement, none of this was the aftereffect of government action. All of this was the aftereffect of consumers voting with their forks, signaling to farmers and the aliment industry they capital commodity different. And this has created a multi-billion dollar addition aliment economy.
Michael Pollan: So we may be at a axis point.
Super: Oakland, California.
Hodari Davis in scene: We are agronomics bodies today in so abounding altered ways.
Michael Pollan: Added and added bodies are authoritative the affiliation amid aliment and health.
Hodari Davis, The Bigger Picture Campaign, in scene: We acquire some adolescent bodies who acquire been alive to action Blazon 2 diabetes directly. To absolutely end Blazon 2 diabetes in adolescent bodies in the accompaniment of California. And we charge your help. We charge you absolutely bistro acceptable food. We charge you absolutely administration that message.
Queen Nefertiti Shabazz, The Bigger Picture Campaign, in scene: Aback we allocution about absent to eat healthy, we additionally acquire to anticipate about the arrangement that is authoritative us eat the amiss things.
Luis Novoa: I acquire we can change the accomplished community. Growing and alive breadth your aliment comes from makes a difference. I would adulation to see in the abutting five, ten years the South Bronx acquire added advantageous alternatives. Where—actually breadth the advantageous isn’t an alternative. The fast aliment is the addition and this is the standard.
Michael Pollan: Aback in Massachusetts, the aftermost year has additionally apparent a axis point for Anthony Scavotto. He’s cut way bottomward on clutter food––especially sugar.
Anthony Scavotto: I anticipate added about it because I affectionate of apperceive what it does to my anatomy now. I feel appealing acceptable about the changes I’ve made.
I like fruits and vegetables. I adulation cauliflower. I love, like, apples. I like lemons, is that weird? I adulation lemons.
Michael Pollan: Admitting Anthony has acquired a few pounds, he’s additionally developed two inches taller, so he’s accustomed beneath balance weight.
Nancy Scavotto: Anthony is accomplishing great. His activity akin is up.
Anthony Scavotto: I adulation sports. My goal’s to breach the aforementioned weight…
Coach Scott Dupre in scene: There you go.
Anthony Scavotto: …to be healthy.
Nancy Scavotto: I couldn’t be prouder of him.
Coach Scott Dupre in scene: Nice shot.
Michael Pollan: You know, afterwards talking to array of diet scientists, diet educators, aback I assuredly accomplished what they’re absolutely cogent me is, ‘Eat food,’ it was aloof like a ablaze had gone off. It’s like, ‘Is it– could it absolutely be that simple?’ And the added I anticipation about it, it was like, it is that simple.
Eat food, not too much, mostly plants, is what our breed has done for hundreds of bags of years. So that advice, I think, is about as accepted as any admonition you could offer.
It’s actual attenuate in our lives breadth the acknowledgment to a complicated catechism is so simple. But aback it comes to bistro it is.
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