In Defense of Food

"Interestingly, Pollan takes the science of food and shows where it’s been misapplied. So there’s been a lot of science around nutrition that is very bad science. It’s the opposite of the Leibniz thing; it’s effectively mysticism cased in the veneer of scientific work. Pollan takes a very pragmatic view, which he sums up in one sentence: ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants’. He says we should be careful of any processed product which makes nutritional claims, because people will have taken chemicals out of other foods without understanding how complex real food is – food we’ve evolved for millions of years to eat. I read this book three years after we opened Leon, and it brought together everything we’d been thinking in a very succinct and clear way. I try not to eat anything that’s been invented in the last thousand years. In that time, we’ve invented fats that don’t exist in nature, additives we don’t need, and, possibly worst of all, we’ve refined sugar. Our bodies treat sugar as a rare energy source that should be wolfed down at the slightest opportunity, but now it’s everywhere. If you look at the causes of ill health, they’re almost always recent inventions. Eat what’s real. Eat real food."