Pollan book makes the case for these dicta in three sections. The first traces the rise of “nutritionism,” the ideology that what we should eat can be reduced down to a set of studied nutrients, the proper proportions of which will be made known by technocrats. It was in this section that my biggest beef with the book is most prominent: Pollan seems to blame “science” in general for our sorry nutritional state, and in so doing almost appears to have a neo-Luddite reverence for the Wonderful Way Things Were. I think his case would be just as strong if he focused the blame where it belongs: in an industrial era hubris that we were unlocking all the mysteries and could synthesize the perfect way to live, in an industry concerned with profits above all else, and in a government that finds it hard to resist lobbying. That recasting of blame out of the way, his chronicle of the history is informative and his conclusions sensible.

The second section explores what makes the “Western diet” (actually, the typical American diet) so bad. He cites:

• The shift from whole foods to refined
• The shift from nutritional and chemical complexity to simplicity: over and over we think we’ve identified all the crucial nutrients, only to find out later that there’s something else, or some unknown synergistic effect that we don’t understand.
• The shift from quality to quantity
• The shift from leaves to seeds, the latter of which are more calorie-packed but don’t contain the same diversity of nutrients
• The shift from food culture (your family and environment telling you what to eat) to food science (the high priests of nutrition pronouncing that you need this or that nutrient).

The third section contains recommendations for the individual food consumer. He suggests that we abandon the “Western” (sic) diet and take the time to get to know, prepare, and savor real food slowly, as other cultures do. Specifically, we should

• Eat food. This means real food, not “food-like substances”:
  • Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother would not recognize as food
  • Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup
  • Avoid food products that make health claims
  • Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle to get the fresh food and avoid the pre-packaged goods.
  • Get out of the supermarket whenever possible and go instead to farmers’ market or your own yard. Get to know your food source.
• Eat mostly plants:
  • Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Near-vegetarians are just as healthy as vegetarians. Leaves are less calorie-laden than seeds.
  • You are what what you eat eats too: the value of your own diet depends on the value of the diet that your own foodstuffs consume. Pastured animal foods are much more nutritious than grain-fed animal foods. [And indeed, the eggs that we recently bought at the farmers' market had bright orange yolks from, apparently, the beta carotene in the green grass.]
  • If you have the space, buy a freezer so you can shop in bulk and in season at the farmers’ market and have good food year-round.
  • Eat well-grown food from healthy soils. Organic [is that where the food term comes from?] rather than chemical fertilizers are best for the plants and the entire food chain, including us.
  • Eat wild foods when you can. They have to be versatile and defend themselves from biological predators, and are likely to have a wider variety of healthful nutrients as a result.
  • Be the kind of person who takes supplements (that is, someone concerned about their health), but then save your money (except for a multivitamin as you get older).
  • Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks. Just eat foods the way cultures generally have, because they have accumulated and tested preparation knowledge over the years that turns out to be quite effective in extracting nutrition from their comestibles.
  • Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism
  • Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet. Whole dietary patterns appear to matter much more than isolated nutrients.
  • Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• Don’t eat too much:
  • Pay more, eat less. Quality over quantity.
  • Eat meals. Stop snacking already! Sit down and make the meal a ritual.
  • Do all your eating at a table. A real table.
  • Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does: no gas stations.
  • Try not to eat alone.
  • Eat slowly, both literally and in the Slow Food sense.
  • Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. Get to know your food.

This was an informative, inspiring, and fun book to read. Recommended.

I learned about this through the NY Times Tierney lab. As seems to be the case every time I bother to look (is it sampling bias?), reader comments on newspaper blogs degenerate into the tangential, irrelevant, and specious. Sigh.

Now, researchers think they may have found a new treatment in French volcanic clay.

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

Get them while they’re young, Evita, get them while they’re young…

Which brings us to the Sex Wars. Many conservatives want to establish abstinence-only sex education, reasoning that it will cut down on pre-marital sex and the myriad social problems they claim it brings about: the decay of morals, rampant hedonism, and teenage pregnancy. Many conservatives also want to restrict or criminalize abortion, in part because they see it as breaking the link between sex and procreation. For this reason, too, many conservatives are waging a war on contraception, so that every sexual act (remember, only the straight missionary position is allowed) may lead to pregnancy and the growth of the family.

These solutions put the cart before the horse. Sure, youngsters should wait to have sex, but human nature hasn’t changed in millenia: just as they did in Biblical, medieval, and Victorian times, some fraction of young people will have sex (sometimes covertly, sometimes with a wink from society). Admonitions to abstain have not worked in all that time, and they don’t work now. Given that fact, what is the best we can do? Surely it is to educate people so that the undesirable consequences are reduced as much as possible! This means comprehensive sex education, including information on contraceptives and their risks and benefits. Withholding this information, knowing human nature as we do, is tantamount to cruelly keeping our children ignorant and condemning them to carry the burden of their uninformed, if less than wise, choices.

A similar reasoning applies to abortion. Getting an abortion is no walk in the park, and I doubt many women rely on it as a means of birth control. More to the point, women have abortions even when abortions are criminalized: the rich do it with the discretion that only money can buy, while the poor do it in back alleys. Criminalizing abortion will not stop it, but will drive it underground. The results, at least for the poor, will be a higher rate of health complications and deaths, as well as the additional stigma, vulnerability to extortion, and criminal record that can dash all aspirations of building a better life.

If the conservatives really care about making lives better and not having abortions, they should make it possible for people to be informed about sex, prophylactics, and birth control, so that those who invariably can’t or do not want to live up to conservatives’ moral codes can make informed decisions. In other words, given that some people will choose to have sex in situations that put them at risk of STDs or unwanted pregnancies, our social policy should be to help them and society minimize those risks and associated costs. For this reason, the third front in the sex wars is also important: access to contraceptives must be guaranteed. This way, we can help reduce disease and unwanted pregnancy before they happen, when it’s cheaper and safer.

What seems to drive many of the conservatives in the Sex Wars is the notion that sex and reproduction ought to always remain coupled. That is a moral judgment to which they are entitled, but which should not be forced on the rest of society. I submit for their consideration a different tenet which works for other people: when done in a way that is respectful of all parties and which prevents unwanted consequences, sex is not only harmless, it is a celebration of life.

[Diabetes centers across New York] did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications

[T]the velocity of new cases among all races has accelerated significantly from just a few decades ago. Genetics cannot explain this surge, because the human gene pool does not change that fast. Instead, the culprit is thought to be behavior: faulty diet and inactivity. Dr. Vinicor, of the Centers for Disease Control, likes to use this expression: “Genetics may load the cannon, but human behavior pulls the trigger.”

The article then goes on to talk about the dire social effects of a population decimated at the prime of life by the diabetes contracted in youth:

Predicting the path of a disease is always speculative, but without bold intervention diabetes threatens to hamper some of society’s most basic functions.

For instance, no one with diabetes can join the military, though service members whose disease is diagnosed after enlisting can sometimes stay. No insulin-dependent diabetic can become a commercial pilot.

Shereen Arent, director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association, says she already fields 150 calls a month from diabetics who complain that they are being discriminated against in the workplace, double the number just a couple of years ago. She mentioned a typical case, a man rejected for a job at a baked-bean factory in Texas as a safety risk. “If this continues,” she said, “we’re in big trouble.”

In mice, said James Allison, chairman of the immunology program at Sloan-Kettering, some cancers went away after just a single injection of an antibody to CTLA-4. Other cancers required a vaccine, as well, to bolster the newly unleashed immune attack. But then, Dr. Allison found, even the most intractable tumors in mice were destroyed.