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Escape from the western diet pollan logical appeal
Escape from the western diet pollan logical appeal
Escape from the western diet pollan logical appeal
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Mary Maxfield they say is about stop seeing food as moral or immoral but instead to trust your own body to want the food that it needs. She believes that health, weight, and diet are not linked to each other. She thinks that obesity and health has nothing to do with what you eat and that you should just trust your body to tell you what you need to eat. A disagreement she had with Pollan was one where she points out that he could be viewed as a hypocrite due to creating his own eating formula. In which she points out that he disagrees with that his formula guidelines and that they are different than that of the food prescriptions and proscriptions scientist make because his rules create different sets of dinners rather than a specific meal.
Pollan is against trusting your body with virtually everything you eat and digest. He thinks that the human body cannot always be trusted with the ability to accept different kinds of foods and nutrients. Maxfield on the other hand tried to counter Pollan’s idea as she mentioned in her article, “Trust yourself. Trust your body. Meet your needs” (446). I totally agree with Maxfield’s idea of trusting our body because we know the needs of our body and how to satisfy those needs better than anyone else. However, it is not everything we eat that we can trust at all
Michael Pollan, an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (Michael Pollan), writes in his book In Defense of Food, the dangers of nutritionism and how to escape the Western diet and subsequently most of the chronic diseases the diet imparts. In the chapter “Nutritionism Defined” Pollan defines the term nutritionism. Pollan’s main assertion being how the ideology of nutritionism defines food as the sum of its nutrients, and from this viewpoint Pollan goes on to write how nutritionism divides food into two categories, with each macronutrient divided against each other as either bad or good nutrients, in a bid for focus of our food fears and enthusiasms. Finally, Pollan concludes that with the relentless focus nutritionism places on nutrients and their interplay distinctions between foods become irrelevant and abandoned.
Mary Ray Worley does an excellent job of using her personal experiences as “proof” of the points she makes. When she attacks the idea of dieting she states, “Many fat people have made numerous efforts and spent thousands of dollars throughout their lives to lose weight and each time regained the lost pounds plus a few more” (Worley 165). She makes this point and backs it up in paragraph 11 with her personal experience with dieting and how she gave up on it. She states, “After years and years of dieting it slowly dawned on me that my body rebelled when I tried to restrict my food intake. All those years I figured that it was me who was failing, and then I began to realize that it was the method that was failing” (Worley 165). To certain audiences this article is effective due to this kind of approach. It is especially effective to people who can relate to Worley. Those who can relate to her personal life are more likely to believe what they
The author writes, “In my real life I have been known to eat organic goat’s milk yoghurt sprinkled with wheat germ for breakfast” (Gilbert 177). Gilbert clearly cared about her health while she was living in the real world. The way she describes her choice in breakfast makes it clear that this was a dietary, health related choice, not one she made because she liked goat yoghurt. It implies that she was concerned with her weight, not only for the sake of her self-perception, but because she was worried about what others think about her appearance. Gilbert writes. “I am doing such rude things to my body here in Italy, taking in such ghastly amounts of cheese and pasta and bread and wine and chocolate and pizza dough” (177). This paints a picture that contrasts sharply with her pre-Naples diet.. Clearly, something has changed for the author, allowing her to guiltlessly eat anything she wants. This is one of the signs that her self-perception has changed radically from what it used to
Geissler continually argues that one should make their own choices and others should worry about themselves (Geissler). She also makes the point that dieting is without positive results, supported by her quote from Allison which states, “suffering does not enable; it destroys” (Geissler). While in extreme cases dieting can be dangerous due to the risk of starvation that extremists may put themselves at, healthy eating of smaller portion sizes a proven way to care for our bodies. Although dieting is not guaranteed to give remarkable results, it is the stepping stone for many to climb out of obesity. The viewpoint used by the author in her argument tends to constantly turn a blind eye to normal circumstances, and it instead looks for the negatives that support her.
According to Pollan, the dietary advice made by nutritionists deprives us from the pleasure of eating, expressing our identity, and connecting to our family
He tells an experience he had when he went to a healthy food place on a trip once, he got a smoothie that was good, but had a lot of calories and cost a lot more than what was reasonable. David then brings up his second try with eating healthy foods and specific healthy places. He tried a different flavor, which he could barely handle to consume, and the price was barely lower than the first experience with a longer producing time period. Finally, he finds the perfect smoothie, low in calories as well in price, thanks to McDonalds. After telling his readers about these experiences he brings up Pollan, another author in They Say/I Say, who is very against processed foods, who expresses that organic and whole foods is the way Americans should eat to become healthier. He states “The fact is, there is simply no clear, credible evidence that any aspect of food processing or storage makes a food uniquely unhealthy” (518). This leads into his last main point, about how changing diets should not be the huge change of completely eliminating fast food and going strictly organic/whole foods, but making small, unnoticeable changes in the processed food industries, fast
Published In his article “How Junk Food Can End Obesity”, David Freedman begins by talking about how misinformed people are about wholefood restaurants and stores. These stores are run by so-called health food experts. Freedman makes himself distinguishable himself from the position of Michael Pollan and his adherents. His adherents are known as Pollanites. They are the people who believe that processed food is the reason we have health and obesity issues.
Americans are viewed by Pollan as “a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthy”(Our National Eating Disorder). An example of this obsession is the current epidemic of carbophobia.
As obesity and medical problems due to diet become a larger issue within society, it is imperative to educate humans on the importance of maintaining a healthy diet. This is exactly what Hungry for Change does. One of the key points made in the documentary is that humans no longer eat a natural diet like their ancestors did; when humans first began to inhabit the Earth they lived off a diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats. During these periods famine and disease was rampant, so humans adapted to store nutrition more productively. Now that humans live in a more developed society, they have a (practically) unlimited supply of food. However, much of this food is processed and manipulated to have a better flavour and a longer shelf life, and though this sounds like a positive situation, it has become a huge problem. According to best-selling women’s health author Dr. Christine Northrup, “We’ve lived on Earth for a millennium where there was a food shortage. You’re programmed to put on fat whenever there is food available. Now there’s a lot of food available, but it’s the wrong kind.” (Northrup, as cited in Colquhoun et al., 2012). This is a logical and widely accepted theory as to why humans continue to overindulge on foods despi...
Mayfield explains “The problem is that our understanding of health is as based in culture as it is in fact” (444). Maxfield believes diets, health, and weight do not correlate together. From a culture perspective, people think of obesity as being unhealthy and making people tell the difference between “right foods” and “wrong foods”. Maxfield believes that science has nothing to do with what foods we choose. Instead, she believes that people will eat what they want and that there is nothing wrong with that. What Maxfield believes in is simple: “Trust yourself. Trust your body. Meet your needs”
In “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating” by, Mary Maxfield (pp.442-447), she affirms a bright argument about how food is not moral or immoral. Therefore, you can eat whatever you desire and not suffer any negative side effects, which she ignores. Her key points including stated facts such as “Culturally,we resist these scientific findings,” that people can be fat and healthy, “in favor of a perspective that considers fatness fatal and thinness immortal.”(pp.445) The main point to Maxfield’s claim in healthy eating, is being active and living a fit lifestyle. In “Escape From The Western Diet” (pp.420-427)by Michael Pollan, his argument is to help the American community be enlightened with
When we think of our national health we wonder why Americans end up obese, heart disease filled, and diabetic. Michael Pollan’s “ Escape from the Western Diet” suggest that everything we eat has been processed some food to the point where most of could not tell what went into what we ate. Pollan thinks that if America thought more about our “Western diets” of constantly modified foods and begin to shift away from it to a more home grown of mostly plant based diet it could create a more pleasing eating culture. He calls for us to “Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.” However, Mary Maxfield’s “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating”, argues differently she has the point of view that people simply eat in the wrong amounts. She recommends for others to “Trust yourself. Trust your body. Meet your needs.” The skewed perception of eating will cause you all kinds of health issues, while not eating at all and going skinny will mean that you will remain healthy rather than be anorexic. Then, as Maxfield points out, “We hear go out and Cram your face with Twinkies!”(Maxfield 446) when all that was said was eating as much as you need.
According to Pollan the question “what to eat” is complicated but “to guide us we have culture” (The American Paradox). Culture influences food likes and dislikes. Culture creates food preferences which make patterns of food choices, making everyone 's selection different. Whoever the influence of our culture has been changing throughout the years, with the food industry taking over the markets. Now we do not necessarily eat what our grandparents or even what our parents used to eat, instead we have this new massive produced packaged products. This is the reason why Americans food habits are changing, now more than ver we see people consuming products not because hey are part of their culture but because is what the media tells you to consume. The 21st century has a new obsession which is body image, now more than ever people is caring about the way they look due to all the advertisement about having a perfect body. Now America is obsess with making every product beneficial to your body but how many chemicals do they use to make that diet yogurt so it can be fat free, sugar free and still have some natural ingredients in it. This is the exact point pollan is trying to make in his article we are obsess with being healthy that we forget to check what are we really eating and where ir comes
In the book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan explores the relationship between nutrition and the Western diet, claiming that the answer to healthy eating is simply to “eat food”.