Description
Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it.  So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it—in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone—is not really eating.  Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances”—no longer the products of nature but of food science.  Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy.  In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion.  The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simply but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.  By urging us once again to eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach—what he calls nutritionism—and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food.

Level: Intermediate
ISBN: 1594201455
ISBN-13: 9781594201455
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Pub. date: 2008

Content
Introduction: An Eater’s Manifesto
Part I. The Age of Nutritionism
One. From Foods to Nutrients
Two. Nutritionism Defined
Three. Nutritionism Comes to Market
Four. Food Science’s Golden Age
Five. The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis
Six. Eat Right, Get Better
Seven. Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Eight. The Proof in the Low-Fat Pudding
Nine.Bad Science
Ten. Nutritionism’s Children
Part II. The Western Diet and The Diseases of Civilization
One. The Aborigine in All of Us
Two. The Elephant in the Room
Three. The Industrialization of Eating: What We Do Know
1) From Whole Foods to Refined
2) From Complexity to Simplicity
3) From Quality to Quantity
4) From Leaves to Seeds
5) From Food Culture to Food Science
Part iII. Getting Over Nutritionism
One. Escape from the Western Diet
Two. Eat Food: Food Defined
Three. Mostly Plants; What to Eat
Four. Not Too Much: How to Eat

Book author
Michael Pollan is the author of three previous books: Second Nature, A Place of My Own, and The Botany of Desire, a New York Times bestseller that was named a best book of the year by Borders, Amazon, and the American Booksellers Association. Pollan is a longtime contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and teaches journalism at Berkeley.

Dietetic professionals
CPE Level: 2
Suggested Commission on Dietetic Registration Learning Need Codes: It is the sole responsibility of the dietetic professional to determine the learning need code met by a course. numedix.com provides the following "suggested" codes, but the professional can deviate from them if they feel another need is met.
4000 Wellness and public health
4010 Community intervention, monitoring, and evaluation
4040 Disease prevention
4050 Epidemiology
4110 Vegetarianism
7210 Sales, merchandising
8000 Food Service Systems and Culinary arts
8015 Cultural/ethnic food and culinary practices
8018 Environmental, agricultural and technologic influences on food systems
8040 Food safety, HACCP and sanitation
8050 Food distribution and service
8060 Culinary skills and techniques
8070 Food production, quantity purchasing
8080 Food styling and food presentation
8090 Menu planning and development, nutrient analysis
8100 Food and recipe development and modification
8120 Sales, merchandising