<story><title>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)</title><url>http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>problems</author><text>Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like &amp;quot;avoid ingredients you can&amp;#x27;t pronounce&amp;quot; and a lot of &amp;quot;avoid processed anything&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;While I&amp;#x27;m sure there&amp;#x27;s some arguable benefits to these things, I think it&amp;#x27;s paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being &amp;quot;processed&amp;quot;. What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I just have no sense for quality, but I&amp;#x27;ve tried paying double for &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; products and similar - only to be repeatedly disappointed with products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker - I&amp;#x27;ll never buy them again, it just doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense to pay more for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)</title><url>http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ericdykstra</author><text>This is a great article, and should be widely read beyond that piece of succinct eating advice. For example, this is a great paragraph:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature’s senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that’s one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.&lt;p&gt;In fact, I recently read a book, &lt;i&gt;The Dorito Effect&lt;/i&gt; which goes into this in much, much more detail, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. I bought it thinking it would be a light read, based on the title and cover, but it was more engaging, better researched, and more informative than I expected.</text></comment>