Seattle Times article by Rebecca Morris, April 14, 2008

Pinning her hopes for weight loss and health on "real-food" philosophy of "In Defense of Food"
By Rebecca Morris
Special to The Seattle Times

It was a cascade of oozing chocolate. I thought of tilting my head under the waterfall and opening my mouth, as if I were drinking from a kitchen faucet.
This Sunday brunch was, metaphorically speaking, my last supper. There was the chocolate fountain with marshmallows and fruit for dipping. There were oysters, cheesecakes, eggs Benedict, pounds of bacon and sausages, rooms of pastries and bowls of white fluff (we didn't know what that was but ate it anyway).
The buffet mirrored my own years of excess. I had not been paying attention to the toll eating and weight were taking on my health. That day — Feb. 17 — I had just finished reading Michael Pollan's best-seller "In Defense of Food" and made a vow to eat real food for one year.
Goodbye Ben and Jerry, Sara Lee and frozen pizza. Hello blueberries, arugula and wild fish.
Pollan says the processed and refined stuff most of us eat isn't food but rather "edible foodlike substances." His manifesto: eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.
Also, don't eat food your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, avoid foods with more than five ingredients or with ingredients you can't pronounce, and stay away from food products that make health claims.
In other words, as 93-year-old fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne says, "If man makes it, spit it out."
After 45 years of dieting — everything from Weight Watchers (numerous times) to Optifast, calorie-counting, prescription "uppers," cognitive therapy, hypnosis, and yes, exercise — I am ready for a new way of living.
At least three times I have lost 50 pounds or more. But each time I return to old habits, eating sweets (especially) when I am happy, sad, worried, fearful, optimistic, busy, bored, lonely or even in love. I learned young to cope and calm myself with food.
I am tired of being tired, would like to have more energy, and hope to lessen my arthritis and sciatica. My original goal was to lose 100 pounds while eating real food for one year. I have sliced that to 80 pounds; the weight doesn't fall off as it did when I was younger.
I went to the guru himself, Michael Pollan. Interviewed by phone from Berkeley, Calif., where he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, Pollan says while there is no guarantee that eating healthfully will prevent heart disease, cancer or other diseases, he calls the research "striking."
"What we know about food that is highly processed is that it is responsible for diet- related diseases," Pollan says. "There is evidence that you can roll back diseases."
As every reader of his books must wonder, what does Pollan eat? Since 1998, when he met farmers in Idaho who refused to eat their own potatoes because of pesticides, Pollan and his family do a lot less shopping in grocery stores and more in farmer's markets.
Pollan does embrace comfort foods; they're just a little different from yours and mine. "My greatest weakness is bread. And I like pasta," he admits, "whole-grain pasta." But what if your ancestors — like mine — didn't come from Italy? "It doesn't literally have to be your great-grandmother," he explains. "It can be what someone's grandmother ate 75 to 100 years ago." (Thank goodness, because otherwise I would be eating haggis and little else.)
In restaurants, he orders seafood or vegetarian dishes. He'll eat a pizza if the crust is made with whole-wheat flour. For a snack he'll have a handful of dates and almonds.
He calls junk food and desserts "weekend food." "They're for banquets, holidays, special occasions," he says, not every day.
Beware "novelties" aisle
Others are on the real-food bandwagon. In her memoir "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes about her family moving to a family farm in Virginia to grow their own food and support local farmers. Others are planting gardens and trying to eat locally. Unfortunately, my studio apartment doesn't even have a windowsill where I can grow an herb. So mine will be the urban attempt at eating real food, dependent on chain grocery stores, Whole Foods and farmers markets.
I have spent decades calculating calories and fat grams on food labels. But deciphering the other ingredients can give you a headache worse than, well, than any ice-cream brain freeze.
For example, Oroweat Whole Grain & Flax bread with Omega 3. Sounds super-healthy. But it contains 30 ingredients, with high-fructose corn syrup listed second. I looked at frozen low-fat meals: Lean Cuisine's salmon with basil has 17 ingredients and South Beach Kung Pao chicken has 50, although counting becomes difficult because there are often ingredients within the ingredients. South Beach whole-wheat crackers, in handy 100-calorie snack packs, has 18 ingredients, including two kinds of syrups.
Pollan advises staying out of the middle of the supermarket where processed foods hog the center aisles. My favorite sign hangs above a frozen-food aisle in the middle of a Bellevue supermarket: "Frozen Novelties." I'm pretty sure God didn't make frozen novelties during his busy six days.
Real food — fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat and fish — is found on the periphery.
"What we know is that calories matter, but vitamins, minerals, how much saturated fat we eat matter, too," says Sallie Dacey, a Group Health family-practice physician at Northgate Medical Center. Dacey is 57, fit, slender and a swimmer, runner and walker who also does Pilates and uses an elliptical trainer. She has been my doctor for almost three years.
"Unprocessed food is better," she says. "There is more data coming in about its benefits."
She's not sure that we need to follow all of Pollan's advice. "The point is to pay attention." Her philosophy is confirmed by research that finds even a 10- or 20-pound weight loss for an obese person decreases the risk factors for serious disease.
"It's never too late"
How am I doing eating real food? The first few weeks went well. I lost 9 pounds and my blood pressure dropped significantly.
Then, my mother died; it wasn't unexpected, she was 97 years old. But within 24 hours of her death, I was consoling and distracting myself with ice cream (at least 37 ingredients) and pizza (who knows?). I stopped writing down what I was eating, and even stopped taking my supplements. I got sloppy and regained several pounds.
And here's another lesson: real life happens. Enthusiasm carried me in the early days of this dramatic new way of eating, but what I lean on now is my commitment to a healthy future. Even on the days that I slip into old habits.
While Dacey calls me at age 58 "relatively young," she says my weight and lack of exercise increase my risk of contracting heart disease, diabetes, stroke or certain cancers earlier than I might otherwise.
"It's never too late," she tells me. "We can improve our health almost to the end."
We'll find out. She'll be helping monitor my weight and health this year, as I learn what real food is, if it costs more to eat it, and how to find it and cook it.
For more on eating real food, on books I'm relying on, and to share recipes and your own efforts to eat healthy, see my blog, TrueFoods.blogspot.com.
Rebecca Morris has been a broadcast and print journalist for 34 years. She teaches journalism
at Bellevue Community College.