Over the past 8 years, I have read and researched many, many hours on food, nutrients, supplements, and other health-related issues. I’m currently reading the book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. I bought this book well over a year ago, but for some reason had put it on the shelf and am just now getting to it. There’s really no excuse, but as stated in my previous blog last year was a really busy year with lots of new things: new jobs, new house, new schools , etc. and being a busy mom of 4 young kids doesn’t help. I have so many things I want to do at any given time, but there’s only so much I can physically get done in any given 24 hours. So, I set priorities and the most important things get done, while the not so important ones get pushed to the side.

Well, this year is the start of a new year for many things as well, but more so a transformation from the inside out that’s been in the works for a long time. With that, I have vowed to myself that I will educate myself even further on health related issues for myself, my family and to share it with you. With that said, I wanted to share with you some things I have learned from the book so far. Michael Pollan goes into great detail on the history of food and he has listed out 13 pages of sources he used for this 200 page book. It’s really impressive, to say the least, that he thoroughly has done his homework.

So, here’s what I have found interesting, maybe even a little disturbing so far. Michael says it best himself, so some things I’ve left in quotes, adding a few of my comments here and there:

• “The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules requiring that the word “imitation” appear on any food product that was, well, an imitation….Hard to argue with that…but the food industry did, strenuously for decades, and in 1973 it finally succeeded in getting the imitation rule tossed out….The revised imitation rule held that as long as an imitation product was not ‘nutritionally inferior’ to the natural food it sought to impersonate-as long as it had the same quantities of recognized nutrients-the imitation could be marketed without using the dreaded ‘i’ word.
With that, the regulatory door was thrown open to all manner of faked low-fat products: Fats in things like sour cream and yogurt could now be replaced with hydrogenated oils or guar gum or carrageenan, bacon bits could be replaced with soy protein, the cream in ‘whipped cream’ and ‘coffee creamer’ could be replaced with, well, whatever the food scientists could dream up, because the sky was now the limit.”

This was a huge part of where things went wrong. Do you understand the impact this had on our food supply and our health? Foods could be engineered and not labeled as imitation or fake! We have been eating fake foods for years with no idea, seriously?! We have been tricked into thinking that the government is actually looking out for the greater good and the health of its citizens. It’s no wonder sickness and disease has been on the rise for the last 20-30 years especially.

• “By the 1960’s or so it had become all but impossible to sustain traditional ways of eating in the face of the industrialization of our food. If you wanted to eat produce grown without synthetic chemicals or meat raised on pasture without pharmaceuticals, you were out of luck. The supermarket had become the only place to buy food, and real food was rapidly disappearing from its shelves, to be replaced by the modern cornucopia of highly processed foodlike products.”

Unfortunately for us growing up, we had no other choice, but thankfully today we are more informed-at least those of us who have ears to hear-and we can go to the local farmer’s market, we can buy organic and grass-fed beef, etc. We have a choice to make and we need to step it up not only for ourselves, but for our children’s future.

• “In the years following the 1977 Dietary Goals and the 1982 National Academy of Sciences report on diet and cancer, the food industry, armed with its regulatory absolution, set about reengineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and fewer of the bad. A golden age for food science dawned. Hyphens sprouted like dandelions in the supermarket aisles: low-fat, no-cholesterol, high-fiber. Ingredient labels on formerly two- or three-ingredient foods such as mayonnaise and bread and yogurt ballooned with lengthy lists of new additives-what in a more benighted age would have been called adulterants.”

Food scientists began to separate the nutrients and dismissed the fact that foods have many parts, macro and micronutrients that all work together. Our bodies know how to process and use these when they are together in the form of a fruit or vegetable, but you separate out one nutrient and it becomes a foreign language to the body.

The latter part of the quote is something my husband has talked about for a while now, the fact that bread, something we both consumed heavily growing up, takes 2 or more weeks to go bad now. When we were growing up it was a matter of days and mold would be starting to form on the bread. My parents, who think I’m a little coo-coo with all this health stuff, have always made the argument that I ate all this stuff growing up…but here’s the proof and since 1977 it has gotten worse and worse over the years. More and more adulterants or food additives have been formulated and injected into any and every food you can think of. It’s no wonder the bread takes longer to go bad.

• “The fate and supermarket sales of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather while the processed foods simply get reformulated and differently supplemented.”

You know how you see on the packaging that a food is enriched or fortified with say vitamin B for instance. This is the food scientists way of making our food ‘good’ for us and making us believe that we are eating ‘healthy.’ These are synthetic, chemical foods and vitamins and our body does not recognize them. Studies have even come out that taking these synthetic vitamins are harmful to our health and can cause more harm than good.

• “Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as a stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound ‘whole-grain goodness’ to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.’

Yes, the government and the powers that be have made it easier to make health claims on cereals than on whole foods. Need I say more? I think I will stop here and let you chew on this for a while. It can be a little overwhelming and frustrating and can make you down right angry actually once you know the truth. But once you know the truth, it’s up to you to make a choice and make a change. Don’t just put it to the back burner and forget about it. Be the change you want to see. If you haven’t already, won’t you join me?