The Omnivore’s Dilemma

March 12, 2010  |   Posted in Blog, Chronic Illness   |   0 Comments   Tags: dieting, obesity, Omnivore's Dilemma

I’m a grateful Michael Pollan fan.  He has taken a very complex topic (what we eat) and boiled it down to a simple 464 pages.  (Just kidding…about the length of the book being terse…not that I’m a fan…I am.)

Life is so simple for koala bears.  If it’s an eucalyptus leaf then it is breakfast, lunch and dinner.

For humans, omnivores, it’s complicated isn’t it?  We will eat anything, even snails and oysters!  We’d eat our pets if we weren’t emotionally attached to them.  Heck, we’d even eaten each other in bizarre circumstances.  (“Donner Party of five; paging Donner Party of…er four”).  So we don’t have an inborn menu of what is good for us or what we “should” be eating to be healthy.   So one member of our society will have a diet entirely different than another.  Not true for koala bears, or gorillas, or any other species on the planet.

Our palate is culturally defined and shaped by what is plentiful, cheap and readily available.  Some cultures apparently have it more healthy (Mediterraneans) than others.  In Guilford County, you won’t find hummus on the dollar menu.

So given the plethora of options, most of them weighted against us, what is a struggling endomorph to do?

I like Michael Pollan’s advice given in many of his works, but succinctly in Food Rules:

Eat food
Not too much
Mostly plants

Easily remembered, isn’t it.  Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.

But what does Michael Pollan consider to be “food”.  Well he provides multiple suggestions:

If your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized it as food, then it probably isn’t.  That means that frozen yogurt is probably not a good choice for us.  But everything one can grow in a garden in our backyard is fair game.