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Michael Pollan, a journalist who has written extensively on the industrialized food industry and author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," recently published a pretty amazing article in the New York Times Magazine, where he discusses "nutritionism," or the ideology of nutrients in our food. More specifically, the article, entitled "Unhappy Meals," speaks to the issue of America's unhealthy diet. Why have we become estranged from Mother Earth and how she has always provided for us?

The following excerpt shows that this entry could easily have been placed in our "Money" section:

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we'd have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That's not what we're doing. Rather, we're turning to the health-care industry to help us ''adapt.'' Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It's gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it's working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society -- estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs -- is unsustainable.

Essentially, his argument is that "nutritionism" has only concentrated on discovering which individual nutrients are best for us, while totally ignoring how all the chemicals from "real" food interact. Take for instance, the example of all the chemicals you ingest when eating the spice, thyme:

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here's a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

He begins and ends the article with a very basic message: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Beautifully simple, right? He then lists eight steps you can take to get back to nature, or as he puts it in suggestion #1:

Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

This seminal article is so important, we have added it to our Essay section for future reference. Don't miss it!

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