…But I Could Totally Whoop Michael Pollan’s Ass

So the lady let me borrow her borrowed copy of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.

For those of you not in the know (read: you don’t hang around enough white people), Michael Pollan is a journalist who has released three books about, well, food. Stop by Wikipedia for a general summary of the books, as well as a fascinating tidbit: Did you know that Michael Pollan is Michael J. Fox’s brother-in-law? If only Marty McFly could have lent Pollan the DeLorean for a little bit.

In Defense of Food basically tells us that people who eat a standard western diet are only getting gradually unhealthier, and that our lifespan these days has less to do with how we’re eating and more with medical advances that make diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc. more survivable conditions. (Since the lady has been battling health problems of her own without health insurance, the bit about spending more on food to spend less on health care down the line sounded particularly appealing.) Specifically, Pollan argues, the reductionist approach to healthy eating – attempting to identify the individual nutrients that have positive effects on the human body – is giving us margarine instead of butter (margarine -> trans fats -> heart disease) and Vitamin Whatever-enriched Wonder Bread. Whatever we’re eating these days, Pollan says, most of it isn’t food food.

If my cousins are reading this (that’s you, Ted): all that garbage your mom fed you is going to kill you. Do something about it.

 If you want to just hear his eating guidelines, they’ve got ‘em up in the T-Nation book review: his advice, succinctly put, boils down to: “Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants.”

I am a competitive athlete. As a BJJ player, I need to make sure that my body is optimally tuned to fight: I need muscle, and I need energy, but I need to make sure I’m as lean as possible to make weight, too. Because of this, my nutritional needs are substantially different from Pollan’s: as a fellow writer, I can assure you that if my job consisted of sitting on my ass in a bougie cafe for a couple hours a day and then going out to eat at Chez Panisse (they’re in his acknowledgements section, by the way), I’d probably eat like he did, too.

But as it turns out, a lot of his stuff seems to be perfectly compatible with the sports nutritionists that we see pop up every now and then in the world of combat sports. Honestly, when it comes down to it, the only major difference between “Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants.” and the eating philosophy of this blog is the “Not much” part. The nutritionists – and the nutritionism - that Pollan is beefing with are the ones who work to isolate the ingredients needed to live and process food to contain those for cheaper than it would be to make a simple whole food (vitamin-enriched Wonder Bread vs. a loaf of unremarkable whole wheat bread, for instance). He’s calling out the FDA, the assholes who decided that Twinkies were a good idea, the people who sell us stuff that looks like food but ends up killing us.

And you know what? That’s something that plenty of weightlifters, bodybuilders, and fighters have been saying Fuck You to for years. I can’t think of any remotely credible nutritionist who has recommended eating processed garbage. Whenever anyone asks “how do I get big?” the answer is always “eat more real food.” Yes, the local GNC and the bodybuilding enthusiast magazines are full of supplement ads, and even John Berardi can’t seem to resist plugging Surge (It’s the perfect post-workout drink! Don’t you know he designed it himself?), but at its heart, it’s about eating lots of real food – many of which are plants.

In the absence of rock-solid nutritional information (I think he compares nutritionists to early 1800s surgeons in an interview somewhere – interesting work, but you don’t want to leave your life in their hands quite yet), Pollan suggests that it’s probably a better idea to eat the way people have ate for hundreds of years, before factory farms and high-fructose corn syrup. It makes a certain intuitive sense, of course – if we have to take everything we read about nutrition in the papers with a gigantic grain of salt (we’re probably supposed to watch our sodium intake, too), why not revert to a diet that looks more like our grandparents’ or great-grandparents, who seemed to live a lifestyle less conducive to heart disease, cancer, and all kinds of other horrible afflictions we now just kind of consider “part of getting old”?

What Pollan doesn’t seem to pay much attention to is that there are millions of people out there who are currently fine-tuning their diets by listening to what their bodies tell them – that’s you, readers. (Yes, I said millions.) Pollan doesn’t like supplements – he says that while people who take supplements generally tend to be healthier and more educated than those who don’t, it’s usually not because of the supplements – but I can tell you that my fat ass jug of whey protein powder helps my body recover after a heavy workout because I can wake up the next morning and not hurt quite so much. Just because we’re not nutritionists doesn’t mean that we’re left helpless to figure out what’s good for our bodies – we just have to get used to listening to them, and that takes more physical effort than sitting around writing a book.

(Pollan, if you’re reading this, give me an email and we’ll figure out your next book. You can talk about how awesome Jiu Jitsu is.)

pat m.