Dietary Rules Explained: What Should We Actually Eat?

The book I want to introduce, "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual" (83 simple food guidelines for everyday practice), is essentially a condensed essence of "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto". It is a small book you can finish quickly and grasp the key points from.

The recently published "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (Commonwealth Publishing) is actually the same book as the Chinese edition published in Taiwan, China back in 2008, "What on Earth Should We Eat? - The Truth About Fast Food, Organic and Wild Natural Foods" (Jiuzhou Publishing); it is a retranslation of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The Chinese title "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is more faithful to the original meaning. After reading this book, you will understand the entire production process of, for example, American beef, along with its political and commercial motives.

Michael Pollan exposes the harms of processed and fast food

Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley. While tracing the food production process on American dinner tables, he uncovered many shocking secrets unknown to most people, and so he wrote the excellent book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" to expose the various problems of industrial food and organic food, and also to explore sustainable agriculture. He then wrote "In Defense of Food", examining Americans' misunderstandings about food and what they really should be eating.

Although Michael Pollan proposed 83 simple food guidelines for everyday practice in "Food Rules", his principle can be further simplified to "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants".

"Food Rules" is basically written for Americans who treat fast food and processed food as their main meals. Although Taiwanese society has become increasingly Westernized, when it comes to diet it is still far behind the excesses of Americans. Still, the Taiwanese market is increasingly flooded with fast food and processed food, along with an embrace of the American diet. So I strongly recommend that if you truly want to understand the harm the American diet does to health, society, the environment, agriculture and politics, you should really read Michael Pollan's two classic books, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food". Regarding these two books, I already have a series of reviews: "Damn, what on earth are we eating!?" and "What on earth should we eat?".

The high-salt, high-sugar and high-fat American food culture

Although the United States is a superpower and the wealthiest country, when it comes to food culture Americans can be called the weakest in the world (fellow sufferers with the British), and this is the hardest thing for all immigrants and international students to adjust to. Michael Pollan pointed out that the refrigerators of American immigrants are the last thing to be assimilated. Anyone who has lived in the United States also knows that unless you cook yourself, most of the food in the American market that is truly meant for people to eat can only be found in restaurants selling foreign cuisine.

Americans spend the smallest share of their income on food of anyone in the world; on average they spend only about one tenth of their income on food. There are many reasons: first, they are too wealthy; second, processed food is so dirt cheap it drives you crazy; third, Anglo-Saxon culture deliberately rejects refined and delicious food. When we were studying in the United States, Americans found it quite puzzling that we wanted every meal to be delicious. To some Americans, food is merely what keeps normal physiology going, and enjoyment is not necessarily the same thing, so they deliberately spend less of their income on eating.

Americans inherited the bland eating habits of the Anglo-Saxon people, and then in a society of vigorous industrialization and capitalist expansion they transformed their eating habits and food content even more extremely. Food scientists discovered that to make Americans, who do not care about fine food, believe food is delicious, the principle is actually simple enough to drive you crazy: just make it three highs: high salt, high sugar and high fat. Yes, it is that simple! So they invented many processed foods that look like normal food, or novel and bizarre snacks.

I believe most Asian readers' mothers or mothers-in-law must have told us as children that we had better eat as little as possible of food that is too oily, too salty and too sweet. But trust me, American mothers and mothers-in-law who do this are pitifully few. That is because they grew up eating high-salt, high-sugar and high-fat food, and to them that is normal food. Yet they assume that the people of the great United States will automatically have the common sense that all of us Asians know. So Americans really do need a good re-education in their eating habits, and Michael Pollan even wrote a simple version for primary and secondary school students, "The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat".

Government withdraws from regulation, processed food runs rampant

Americans' understanding of food has been misled for a long time by the scientific community and the food industry. The American scientific community has long been dominated by nutritionism; nutritional scientists think that the components of food can all be reduced and studied, yet they do not consider at all that normal food contains tens of thousands of different components. Take tomatoes: even a fool could guess that different varieties and different places of origin will have differences in composition. But for the convenience of research, nutritional scientists sometimes reduce tomatoes to lycopene for study. Add political factors, and beef, mutton and ostrich meat are all classified as red meat for research, but can the red meat of mammals and the red meat of birds really be mentioned in the same breath? 

Add American capitalism: when President Reagan advocated small-government laissez-faire, it let businesses innovate as much as possible with fewer regulations. But the consequence American capitalism did not foresee is that fewer regulations also mean more exploitation, not only of labor (American agriculture has tens of thousands of illegal immigrants working under harsh conditions), but also tangible exploitation of the environment and intangible exploitation of health. And once unrestrained businesses expand into big businesses too big to fail, they can make money lying down and do not need much real innovation at all. The few recent innovations of the American food industry are nothing more than reassembling ingredients into processed food.

The deregulation advocated by American capitalism can reduce bureaucracy, but when some appraisals and inspections that government should do are all delegated to the businesses themselves to carry out, and then the market is blindly trusted to teach a lesson to those who perform poorly, the result is troubling. In fact, more and more reports in Europe and the United States show that this blind trust in businesses has sown many seeds of disaster. In the United States, every year people fall ill, and in serious cases even die, because beef is contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

The United States abandoned the official regulation it should have carried out, greatly lowering costs for businesses. This was originally meant to be good for consumers, but what was not expected is that the market's lesson to unscrupulous businesses is often insufficient, or comes too late. Because when businesses can make money lying down, the main innovation they want to pursue is to suppress information by any means and to buy off lobbyists. Otherwise, why would it take the hugely popular host Jamie Oliver to expose on his program that American fast food businesses mostly use inferior ground beef soaked in ammonia, which may endanger health, in order to create enough public pressure to teach a lesson to businesses that had been feeding people like dogs for years?

Americans dare to mess around even with what their own people eat; do you believe what they buy is good stuff? Blindly believing that American regulation is done well is nothing short of naive.

Ractopamine is banned in the EU, Japan and China

Not to mention that the United States also allows the use of toxic substances such as ractopamine. The brand name of the ractopamine product approved for use in the United States is Paylean, and its main ingredient is ractopamine. Ractopamine was originally mainly used as a drug to treat asthma, and later businesses accidentally discovered it could make pigs grow more lean meat. Ractopamine belongs to the class of beta-agonists; it can promote protein synthesis, making pigs grow more lean meat and less fat, and it can be added to pig feed for long-term consumption by pigs; the pigs raised this way have a muscular physique and yield relatively higher profits.

Farmers can mix ractopamine into pig feed and feed it to pigs, after which the pork quickly grows lean meat. After pigs eat ractopamine, the drug mainly accumulates in the pig liver, pig lungs and other places. If it is not used according to regulations and the residue is too high, after eating a large amount of pig liver or pig lungs, even if cooked, symptoms of poisoning such as nausea, dizziness, anxiety, headache, muscle trembling, abnormal taste, dry mouth and throat, palpitations and rising blood pressure may appear immediately.

Toxic substances like ractopamine should never be added to pig feed at all. The EU, Japan and China ban it completely. Although Japan allows the import of pork with a permitted ractopamine residue of 10 ppb, Japan long ago castrated itself diplomatically, having absolutely no stance it should have, and instead letting Europe and the United States push it around and carve it up; this has long been an open secret.

Pork exported from the United States to the EU cannot contain ractopamine. If Taiwan, China starts importing pork with ractopamine residue, it will be worse off even than China. Even if conceding on ractopamine some trade benefits, so what? Let the big bosses make money and eat premium pork neck, and then let the people eat ractopamine pork? Is making money not for living a good life? A person can only live once; if you sacrifice precious health, how can you live a good life?

Stay away from processed food and recover traditional food culture

The lack of official regulation and the flood of capitalism have turned the American government and food companies into an intricate structure of accomplices that disregards consumer health. "Food Rules" also mentions that although processed food is increasingly unhealthy, it increasingly tries to advertise itself as healthy, and the methods they use are nothing more than exploiting whatever topic is popular at the time.

For example, when saturated fatty acids and cholesterol became public enemies, they replaced real butter with margarine, then advertised zero saturated fatty acids and zero cholesterol, super healthy; but when trans fats were found to be worse for the cardiovascular system than cholesterol, they switched to advertising "zero trans fats", also super healthy. Otherwise they add some beneficial ingredient that the media has hyped, to cover up other harmful additives. In fact, many ingredients such as vitamins are added to processed food only because they were destroyed during processing, a last resort, not because it is meant to make the food healthy.

Nutrition science is still a discipline that is only just getting started; we still do not know how important the other nutrients that get destroyed are to humans, or what adverse effects the products of that destruction have on humans.

When it comes to choosing food, American consumers mostly let businesses push them around and carve them up. But Michael Pollan wants readers to know real food, and he advises American readers to eat the food that their great-grandmothers' generation would have wanted to eat. He advises readers to listen to the messages their own bodies provide, to really pay attention to what is in their food, and, most importantly, to genuinely enjoy how good food tastes.

Michael Pollan believes food is not just about providing energy; it also has cultural and social meaning, so he advises readers not to eat junk food alone, but to share the pleasure of eating with friends and family. However, in the United States, truly eating delicious and healthy food probably requires a certain high income. Because in the United States, real food and good ingredients really are mostly more expensive than junk food and more time-consuming to prepare.

Americans, because their grandparents' and parents' generations were misled for a long time by the food industry, have lost the food culture they should have had. But Michael Pollan points out that although some traditional food guidelines are unreasonable, many are valuable experience accumulated over hundreds of years.

So if an elder tells us not to eat food that is too oily, too "heaty", too cold, too salty, too sweet or too filling, and to eat more vegetables and fruit, please do not find them naggy. Because the food culture and taboos they pass down not only make us healthier, but also let us enjoy delicious and tasty food cheaply. On this point, we might actually be happier than the richest 1% in the United States.

This article is reprinted from the author's blog http://skygene.blogspot.com/2012/02/food-rules.html