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 enlarge | Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $11.85
You Save: $10.10 (46%)
New (81) Used (38) Collectible (5) from $11.78
Avg. Customer Rating:  174 reviews
Sales Rank: 166
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594201455
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.2
EAN: 9781594201455
ASIN: 1594201455
Publication Date: January 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Over-Written And Preachy August 15, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Pollan starts his book with sage advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Any of Pollan's readers will know that what he means by "food" isn't what most of us eat. He means unprocessed locally produced food.
He spends a couple of hundred pages beating a dead horse about problems with scientific studies about what we should and shouldn't eat. He makes his point again and again and again. Nutritional studies are faulty. Food is more than the sum of its parts, and research about what we eat tries to reduce food to its nutrients, thereby enabling food processing companies to add and subtract what nutritional gurus are promoting at any given time.
To be healthy, he advises, eat traditional diets from virtually any area of the world, and avoid processed foods.
"The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a great book, that makes the points raised in this one, but is much better written.
 After Omnivore's Dilemma August 5, 2008
This is the answer to "So now what do I do?" that one may ask after reading Omnivore's Dilemma. There is some new material and information, but if you are freshly finished reading OD, you could just give it a skim. It makes a great gift from readers of OD to those who want an action plan but aren't interested in all the juicy details in OD.
 Best information on nutrition I've read in years August 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm still not sure what made me buy this book, as I consider myself fairly well educated on food and nutrition; perhaps just the catchy "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food" line. I am glad I did as it not only reinforced and gave reasons for much that I already knew, but opened my eyes to much that I hadn't. I've been growing steadily more interested in food issues ever since a lactose-intolerant colleague made me realise how many food products have milk powder added to them, for no very apparent reason. I have struggled with my weight for years; after reading this book I finally understand WHY eating bread twice a day makes me fat within a few days, while cutting out the bread makes my waist slimmer just as quickly. For the first time I've been given a plausible theory explaining the sudden and simultaneous rise in obesity and diabetes type 2 in western countries.
I live in Australia so our situation is not quite as dire as the USA's: for example we don't have a corn lobby so the use of HFCS is much less common, and most of our cows and sheep still eat grass, not grain. I was flabbergasted by Pollan's revelation of just how much of the foodstuff sold in a US supermarket contains corn in some form or other. I've always avoided grain-fed meat on environmental grounds; now I know to also avoid it because this unnatural diet forces the animal's meat to be much higher in omega-6 than it's meant to be. Despite knowing quite well that "you are what you eat" and that cows and sheep aren't meant to eat grains, somehow I had failed to make the connection that this would have an inevitable effect on the nutritional makeup of the animal's flesh. That, to me, is the real power of this book - that it makes connections between numerous facts that I'd been individually aware of, but had failed to put together into a larger picture. Pollan does this for us.
Not that I'm complacent about Australia as our obesity rate is on par with the USA's. Today's newspaper had an article supporting Pollan's claim that the more nutritional claims a food makes, the less healthy in reality it is likely to be. More than half the food ads on tv that trumpeted nutritiional claims such as 'low fat' or 'high fibre' were for junk food ( http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2008/08/04/1217701950053.html)
Another reason I liked this book was that it put me onto some other very good books such as Wansink's "Mindless Eating" and Taubes' "Diet Delusion" (sold as "Good Calories, Bad Calories" in the US) neither of which I'd heard of but have found just as illuminating as "In Defense of Food". Pollan is generous in crediting other people's work, something a lot of authors fall short in.
The only reason I'm giving this 4 stars rather than 5 was because I found the final chapter on how to eat better somewhat slight compared to the preceding chapters. It's no news (to some of us) that agribusiness needs serious reform and I would've liked Pollan to discuss how this might be done instead of just saying it's needed. But I liked the way he pointed out that so many of us say we eat poorly because we can't afford to eat better, yet can find the money for a bigger tv or faster internet connection. In my experience a lot of people need to be reminded that they are indeed making a choice when they spend money on one thing rather than another.
Great Info August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great book, gets the point across and really makes you think. I'm glad I purchased and read it. It has already been passed on to a friend and two others are waiting in line.
Everyone wants to know "what should I eat?", but as the author details, should we really have to ask such a basic question... I believe the answer is yes and no due to the craziness which has been created with the "Western Diet".
Hopefully food choices will change for the better, but I'm not counting on it happening anytime soon.
Read this book and pass it on, it will benefit us all...
Glad this is so popular July 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Pollan gives a pretty systematic overview of what's wrong with what we eat and how we can fix it. It's concise, it's well-informed, and it's open-minded. Everyone talks about how organic food or sustainable agriculture or whatever is good, but Pollan compiles it into an excellent essay.
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