Quotes About Nutrition

In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent).

This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald's with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the food industry energetically pursues them both at the same time.

At least until we learn to eat more slowly and attend more closely to the information of our senses, it might help to work on altering the external clues we rely on in eating on the theory that it's probably better to manipulate ourselves than to allow marketers to manipulate us.

If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.)

To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost—to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken.

DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE. No, a desk is not a table.

The problem starts with the nutrient. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.

What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE A) UNFAMILIAR, B) UNPRONOUNCEABLE, C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER, OR THAT INCLUDE D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS.

EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES.

People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets.

EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.

BE THE KIND OF PERSON WHO TAKES SUPPLEMENTS

EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. OR THE GREEKS.

The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.

REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM

When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms—about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it's possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and health).

DON'T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET.

The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

PAY MORE, EAT LESS.