Nutritionism And The Western Diet In Pollan's In Defense Of Food

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In the book, “In Defense of Food” Pollan argues how “nutritionism” and the Western diet plays an important part of ones health and eating habits. In fact, Pollan points out that Americans worry a lot about nutrition, but they have poor eating habits. There are four theories of “nutritionism” that people make about food. The first is nutrients, if what matters in food is invisible, the world can be divided – good versus evil and the whole point of eating is healthy. Pollan outlines ideological purposes of “nutritionism.” Due to all of the food choices and lack of success in our society, people are still not making wise decisions about eating. In his opinion, what we should eat comes down to a few simple words; eat food, not too much and mostly …show more content…

One major contributor to this lifestyle is the Western diet. During this time the low fat trend was in. Scientist found that people were binging off of low fat foods because they thought it would help their diet. However, the low fat trend led to horrible diets such as the Western diet, which consist of processed foods, meat, lots added flour, fats, sugars everything except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Freedman states in his article, “How Junk Food Can End Obesity” that there is no hard evidence about health risk in processed foods. An essential claim about whole foods is that it does not stay in our system for days, weeks or months as industrialized food does. All of these things can lead to major health issues. Some of those health issues include high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. On the other hand, people eating traditional diets do not normally have as many health concerns if any at all. There are many diverse diets, however; we are addicted to the diet that can make us all sick the Western diet. There are many diets to choose, but the Western diet is truly a problem for more than one reason. Americans can continue to grow a high tolerance for the Western diet or wean themselves to better eating habits. Other countries eat what they want such as beans and rice and they still do not have the same issues Americans

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