[reflexive]

Pollan's famous "maxim" manages to be condescending, unhelpful and inaccurate - all at the same time.

Eat food: duh

Not too much: again, thanks?

Mostly plants: Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet.

Pollan is the prototypical Bay-Area insufferable foodie. His documentary was a cringe-fest of pseudo-spiritual fawning.

Rene Girard talks about how food has become a new status symbol as people compete for bragging rights about how good they eat; Pollan is their patron saint.

[tinbucket]

Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet.

You jump pretty readily to a conclusion that isn't in what's said. "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.

You can eat nothing but potatoes, which are filled with starch, but a diet filled with plants is much more likely to involve a rich variety of very healthy foods. Some of these foods would be things like spinach, kale, carrots, beetroot, beans, sweet potatoes, blueberries, apples, bananas, strawberries, buckwheat, avocados, courgettes, onions and peppers.

There's definitely starch and sugars in these, but you'd be hard pressed to eat them to anything like a toxic degree. To get them to a toxic degree, you'd need to eat processed food in quantity, which isn't what the maxim, which is undoubtably glib, is suggesting you do.

I agree with your comment about food being used as yet another status symbol, and I generally find that a particularly unpleasant and tiresome way to treat something as essential as eating. I'd disagree that Pollan is the patron saint of foodies, though. He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies. He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group.

Out of interest, what would you recommend as a good, healthful diet? As you can probably guess from my reply, I think Pollan's maxim, which is certainly glib, offers a good working basis for a healthy diet.

[dualogy]

> "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.

That's some meme. Which ones exactly? The most nutrient-dense foods (per gram / per kcal) available to us are livers, other organs, eggs and ruminant meat --- even before accounting for the latters' vastly superior digestability and bio-availability, and even before accounting for the formers' countless antinutrients. Fresh not processed/salted/cured/etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxqGa1PQc8

The widespread micro-nutrient-power fantasies about vegetation come mostly from back when they discovered ascorbic acid (aka "vitamin C") and how meat doesn't have it but plants do. Quite the feast for marketers! By the time they found out we don't need ascorbic acid per-se, just generally "a sufficient source of ascorbate" (which fresh meat is but preserved isn't --- hence the frequent scurvy back in the day with the 'limeys'/sailors/arctic explorers who insisted on their biscuits and canned meats rather than the game/fish around them), nobody cared for such pesky details..

[tinbucket]

At no point did I state that any of the foods you mentioned were nutrient poor -- I just said that some plants are among the most nutrient dense foods available. This can be true without dismissing other foods as nutrient poor. That even fits in with Pollan's maxim, which simply states most of the food you eat should be plants.

Since you asked, here are some nutrient rich plants from memory: kale, spinach, blueberries, garlic, lead, raspberries, asparagus, lentils.

All of these make great additions to any diet, aren't loaded with toxic levels of sugar and starch. They go great with liver, eggs, fish, or meat. I don't really understand where your hostility comes from, or why you simultaneously try to downplay the nutrients available in plants as some kind of conspiracy against other forms of food.

[reflexive]

> I just said that some plants are among the most nutrient dense foods available.

To be honest, that's not what you said. You clearly stated that the most nutrient rich foods are plants, which is false.

> "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.

[reflexive]

"Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.

Yet the ones he recommends for us to eat -- grains -- are toxic and not suitable for human digestion.

He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies.

Vegans are precisely the people who ascribe a lofty moral status to their dietary choices, in my observation.

He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group.

I don't share that experience; the discourse of paleo and keto, in my perception, is people seeking personal results in their health. Keto people may "brag" about the results they've gotten, but not their high moral status, like vegans, or how people who disagree with them are to blame for all the world's problems, like vegans.

[matt4077]

You're wilfully misrepresenting Pollan's argument. He gives specific definitions of "food", "not too much", and "plants" that directly address your objections. And the fact that these recommendations are somewhat generic is exactly his point: don't listen to the latest fad specifying the exact relation of n-3 to n-6 fatty acids, but concentrate on heuristics that have remained unchanged for 60 years+.

[reflexive]

> You're wilfully misrepresenting Pollan's argument.

I'm not. His argument is very simply that we should eat less meat and more grains. From TFA:

it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat.

most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains

Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores

All of this is garbage. Grains (eaten to the scale we do in the industrialized world, which is as the bulk of our calories) are poison. Yes, he does say a few things that are not false, such as "eating leaves is good". However I think you'd get better dietary advice by saying "eat things that begin with letter S".

[riffraff]

do you really interpret "mostly plants" as "eat a lot of potatoes and raisins" ?

"Eat fruit and vegetables" has been the suggestion every doctor I've seen gives, and until now I assumed everyone interpreted that to also include leafy greens and legumes.

[proteinbased]

Depends on your interpretation of plants. Legumes do contain a fair share of protein.

[tracker1]

But they don't contain a lot of the fats/acids that come from meat that are hard for the body to synthesize/metabolize. I'm not saying only eat meat/fish, but there's more than just protein.

[proteinbased]

I did not claim that legumes are some kind of wonder food with the ideal balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Of course you need to eat different kinds of vegetables/fruit/plants. As for fats, nuts are a good choice. But you can also buy all kinds of oils, if you are afraid that an all vegetable diet will leave you with too little of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils