Food and Non-Food

In this climate of so-called "functional foods" -which supposedly offer "added health benefits" thanks to the processed foods industry's ingenuity-, it is refreshing that someone raises his voice, and points out to the core of the problem:

Why since the eighties have we become more overweight, more allergic, more sick?

Michael Pollan gives us an answer, with his upcoming book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, due this January 1st. Here is an introduction to it. The idea that Pollan develops throughout this book, is that: There has been food (and beverages) -read: Real food/ whole foods-, and ever increasingly since the age of Nutritionism (80s), foodlike substances -read: processed foods, functional foods in packages, techno-foods, franken-foods and beverages, whatever food technologists have invented-.

In fact, these newer "fake foods" have come to make up more than half of our daily calories. Chronic diseases have reached the epidemic level. Schools list more and more kids with severe allergies, etc. Is this mere coincidence?
We don't think so: It literally took decades for the truth about transfats to be told to the public. These man-made fats were first marketed as healthier than the real thing -read butter, lard, chicken fat, etc.-, and although a bunch of skeptical scientists have been showing since the 70s that transfats were actually causing cancer, it took FDA over 30 years to ask manufacturers to list transfats on labels.
How about all these new foodlike substances with outrageous health claims? Look at the full spectrum from refined flours, nonfat milk -always processed to powder, then reconstituted, which means oxidized milk-, dried eggs -read: oxidized eggs-, all the way to the latest fabricated foodlike ingredients we mentioned in our previous post.
All for the juicy "functional foods" business. All at our health's expense.