March 3, 2010
"[…] when researchers extract a single food from a diet of proven value, it usually fails to adequately explain why the people living on that diet live longer or have lower rates of heart disease or cancer than people eating a modern Western diet. The whole of a dietary pattern is evidently greater than the sum of its parts. [emphasis added]"

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, page 178. Penguin Books.

10:00am  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/423867600/michael-pollan-food-proven
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FILED UNDER: diet michael pollan health Western diet book 
March 1, 2010
"Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hormones still a “whole food”? I’m not so sure. The steer has itself been raised on a Western diet, and that diet has rendered its meat substantially different -in the type and amount of fat in it as well as its vitamin content- from the beef our ancestors ate. The steer’s industrial upbringing has also rendered its meat so cheap that we’re likely to eat more of it more often than our ancestors ever would have."

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, page 143. Penguin Books.

10:00am  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/419561684/michael-pollan-steer
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FILED UNDER: Diet Health michael pollan food book meat 
February 28, 2010
"Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West -recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle that it is to change the way that civilization eats."

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, page 136. Penguin Books.

10:00am  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/417255228/pollan-diabetes
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FILED UNDER: Diabetes Disease Health Capitalism Marketing Book Micha Diet 
February 27, 2010
"Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into new business opportunities: diet pills, heart bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But though fast food may be good business for the health care industry, the cost to society -an estimated $250 billion a year in diet-related health care costs and rising rapidly- cannot be sustained indefinitely."

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, pages 135-136. Penguin Books.

10:00am  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/415077495/pollan-capitalism-adaptive
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FILED UNDER: michael pollan health book capitalism diet disease business 
February 24, 2010
"So here, then, is the first momentous change in the Western diet that may explain why it makes some people sick: Supplanting tested relationships to the whole foods with which we coevolved over many thousands of years, it asks our bodies now to relate to, and deal with, a very small handful of efficiently delivered nutrients that have been torn from their food context. Our ancient evolutionary relationship with the seeds of grasses and fruit of plants have given way, abruptly, to a rocky mariage with glucose and fructose."

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, page 114. Penguin Books.

6:01pm  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/409308696/so-here-then-is-the-first-momentous-change-in
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FILED UNDER: michael pollan health diet Western diet book evolution human 
"The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them."

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, page 100. Penguin Books.

8:30am  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/408687699/western-diet-fails
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FILED UNDER: book michael pollan diet health Western diet human 
February 23, 2010
"The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful traditional diets, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living in the 1950s on the island of Crete -people who in many respects led lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and more fish that meat. But they also did more physical labor. As followers of the Greek Orthodox church, they fasted frequently. They ate lots of wild green-weeds. And perhaps most significant, they ate far fewer total calories than we do."

— Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Paperback edition, page 70. Penguin Books.

9:28am  |   URL: http://blog.upbeat.fr/post/406672458/med-diet-fallacy
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FILED UNDER: Reading Book Books Nutrition Health Diet Michael Pollan Crete Mediterannean Diet 
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