In Defense of Food

course when it comes to food, culture is another word for mom, the figure who typically passes on the food ways of the group—food ways that endured, by the way, only because they tended to keep people healthy.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

Here are a couple more: What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims.

“Eat less” is easier said than done, however, particularly in a culture of cheap and abundant calories with no deeply rooted set of rules to curb overeating. But other cultures do have such rules and we can try to emulate them.

In the same way that foods are more than the sum of their nutrient parts, dietary patterns seem to be more than the sum of the foods that comprise them

DON’T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET. In

REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM

healthier than people eating a contemporary Western diet. This