Me and food: we have a on-again/off-again relationship. Which is not to say I ever dislike food; to the contrary, I love food, and usually can’t get enough. Which is where the problem always lies: like two red-hot lovers, food and I are engaged in a perpetual cycle of violence, disengagement, renewal, and sex. (“Get away from me, you bastard!” “But I love you!” “SHUT UP!” “I hit you because I LOVE you!” “I can’t be without you.” “Let’s make out.”) Like Bobby and Whitney.

Why the cycle? Because my tongue craves the wrong things: ice cream, fluffy pastries, freedom fries, Doritos™, Pepsi™, cake, pie, ice cream cake, freedom pie, deep fried ice cream, Pepsi™ Doritos™. Etc. And as a result, my will-power ebbs and flows. When I’m good, I follow the advice of nutrionists; when bad, I eat whatever my lust tells me to.

However, I’m beginning to now think that even when I’m “good,” I’m not so good–that even when I was a vegetarian, my diet was far from healthy. When I dropped 40 lbs. back in ‘02, I ate a lot of protein bars and breakfast cereal and diet soda. Healthy? Probably not, but instead, simply calorie deficient (also, I ran a LOT). Oh, I ate a lot of low-fat foods… but as I’ve come to discover, these are rarely healthy for you. DAMN YOU FOOD MARKETERS!!!

So what’s my point? I feel like over the past few months my eyes have been opened to a new way of eating that contradicts past habits and current conventional wisdom. I’ve watched my diet carefully for a long time, and for a while fully bought into the health claims of manufactured foods that touted themselves as this or that (I’m lookin at you, highly processed fat-free all-natural vegetarian packaged foodstuff!) But now the paradigm has changed.

The eye opening has happened in two parts: first, I decided to start a new fitness plan that eschewed carbohydrates for the first month (working them back in later). What a change. This forced me to eat in a way I hadn’t eaten since… well, honestly, never. For breakfast, usually an egg scramble with some turkey and mushrooms. For lunch, a spinach salad with red peppers, broccoli, celery, olives, and blue cheese. For dinner, a grilled chicken breast with asparagus, onion, cucumbers, and tomatoes. (For example.) And it felt GREAT — I felt stronger than I ever had on previous plans, and the occassional acne breakouts I’ve had since puberty stopped. (Seriously.) I haven’t craved sugar since, which is super weird.

Then Dina picked up In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan’s follow-up to this bestselling Omnivore’s Dilemma (which I haven’t yet read). This book validated many of the food choices I had recently made, and explained further why I felt such an uptick in health as a result. The thesis of the book comes straight from his previous book: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This seems obvious on its face, but is harder to do in practice, given the large amounts of processed food and oversized portions that permeates our grocery stores and restaurants, particularly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (which I’ve come to regard as the devil), and processed flours and grains.

Implicit in his thesis was a move to a whole foods diet–to paraphrase, eating “what your great-grandmother ate”–and away from the fake, gutted, processed, manufactured “food” that’s been marketed to us for the past 50 or 60 years. How to do this? He offers a few simple guidelines: shop on the edges of your grocery store (meat, produce, dairy); go to your local farmer’s market; avoid packaged foods; don’t buy foods made of ingredients you don’t recognize; etc. Pollan also warns against foods that market themselves as health foods (“7-Up — natural and fat free!”), and argues that normal fats (yes, animal fats even) are good, and part of a normal, moderate diet, but fake fats (trans fats, margarine) are never good. Worst of all are the highly refined sugars and flours that are in everything — Cheerios, white bread, barbeque sauce, juice, peanut butter, and other sorts of seemingly inocuous foodstuffs. These are so quickly processed by our bodies that what we can’t immediately burn is stored as fat, and thus arguably responsible for the obesity epeidemic the U.S. is currently experiencing. So, fat doesn’t necessarily make you fat. Sugar and other refined carbs do. Way to go, low-fat diet revolution.

Lastly, Pollan takes nutrionial science to task for its focus on micronutrients–ignoring the wide-ranging diets of the human population at large, and instead prescribing narrow dietary guidelines based on on those nutrients themselves (hence, fortified Wonderbread), rather than on a more holistic diet containing foods that might naturally contain those nutrients.

In short, this is a very good book, a quick read, and highly recommended if you’re at all interested in nutrition, food marketing, or food politics. If you’re a vegetarian or a carnivore, there’s something to be learned, and the book doesn’t advocate any particular dietary choice, other than eat stuff that’s natural and make moderate choices. Wise advice.