And what not to eat

Raw cougar. Seems a Washington deer hunter dined on feline sashimi platter last fall and came down with a case of trichinosis. The story in the Seattle P-I doesn't go into much detail about whether feast was an al fresco bid to ward off starvation, an drunken hunting lodge dare, or a holiday buffet. It would appear that the hunter acted alone.

So cook your cougar, y'all (try the green chili).

What to eat

For a while now, I've been working my way through Marian Nestle's What to Eat, a 636-page examination of what's in your grocery store, aisle by aisle. Nestle looks closely at the relationships between the food industry, government dietary regulations, and dietary recommendations. It's a great read, but slow going, at least for me. Along comes Michael Pollan with an essay in last Sunday's NYT Magazine that essentially covers the same ground in many fewer words (there are 177,825 in Nestle's book). Here's how Pollan's essay opens:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

We spend a lot of time poring over the details of what's in our food. I like Pollan's idea that most of the stuff we eat isn't really food. The food pyramid, macronutrient diets, mono-/poly-/un-saturated fats, omega-3s, anti-oxidants. No wonder my patients (and my colleagues) are confused. I'm going to start giving much simpler advice to my patients who ask about diet: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

We'll see how that goes.