Living Well

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I listened to an interview of Michael Pollan the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and I immediately added his book to my wish list.  He says to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."  He points out that the food industry is around to make money, not to make us healthy, and natural, unprocessed foods are cheap.  For example, if oatmeal costs 50 cents a pound, you can sell it for $2 pound if you process it into cheerios, $5 pound if you further process it into cereal bars, $10 a pound if you make it into breakfast straws, etc.  And each step is more expensive and less healthy!  (Those aren't the exact numbers he used.) 

My dad's doctor gave him the same advise a while back.  "Don't eat anything from a package."  He claimed all our health problems would go way if we didn't eat anything processed and packaged.

Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you have ever tried to lose weight or just eat healthy, you must read this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  This book changed my thinking about food, health, nutrition and exercise.  I didn't realize how much of what doctors said that I just believed.  I didn't realize that what they recommend is based on little proven evidence.  Or how much contradictory evidence is just ignored. 

This isn't a diet book.  It's a book about the history of nutritional advice.  Our understanding of food and obesity, how it's come about and how it's changed over the past century.  I'll be writing more in future posts but here's what I've definitely taken away:

1. A calorie is not a calorie.  A lot of other factors matter like what kind of calorie, what kind of person, metabolism, exercise, external environmental factors, ...
2. Calories in does not always equal calories out.  Or we are not measuring all the calories in and out correctly.
3. Dietary fat does not make you fat.  Fat is not necessarily better or worse than protein or carbs.  It's not necessarily equal either!
4. Many of our current doctors are 100% convinced of what they know and not really willing to consider radical shifts in thinking.   Like they continue to recommend  eating less calories and exercising to lose weight when it's obviously not working for many people.  (Do you really lack the will power?)

More to come, but I definitely recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories.  You can read a good excerpt written by the author, Gary Taubes, on ABC News.