Category: Books

Michael Pollan writes in his book, In Defense of Food that “we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be intimidated by studies of new reports or especially food labeling. Humans can thrive on all sorts of diets. Some live healthy lives on nothing but cattle or seafood. In fact, he says, there’s only one diet that has consistently proved hazardous to our health.”

It’s actually, you know, people who have done the sort of ethnographic research around food have found this astonishing array of different traditional diets on which people have been extremely healthy. But there is one diet that it appears that we are poorly adapted to, and that is what we call the western diet.

And this diet makes people fat. It makes them diabetic. It gives them heart disease. It gives them an assortment of cancers. It’s just very toxic to our bodies.

Some of his rules for eating healthy are:

…don’t eat anything that doesn’t rot, don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize, don’t eat anything that has an unfamiliar, unpronounceable name, don’t eat anything with high fructose corn syrup, don’t eat food that features health claims on their labels.

The following interview on the radio show with a Nutrition Expert helps reinforce Pollan’s claims.

I caught a very interesting lecture by Stephen Pinker author of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature on CSPAN this weekend. Pinker discussed some of the interesting or in his words crazy aspects of our language. Such as why we use terms like underground and underwater when we mean surrounded by ground or water. He also delved into his theories as to why we use profanity. He says that when we use profanity, it triggers a unique part of our brain. And his research determined there are 34 words in the english language for feces.