Michael Pollan

Avoiding “ultra-processed foods” is like trying to stay healthy by avoiding ultra-processed uranium — excellent idea, but not enough. Michael Pollan offers [1] guidelines: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” This doesn’t talk about avoiding anything, instead chasing after known good things — food. Carrots. Steak. Wheat. Things you see in a children’s book labelled “food.” If it grows in the sun and the rain then it’s food. Thinking in terms of “ultra-processed” still leaves you captive to industry. Buy some rice and beans and forget about it. 1. https://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/

I really liked this. It reminds me of Michael Pollan's book A Place of My Own The Architecture of Daydreams - https://michaelpollan.com/books/a-place-of-my-own/ Michael goes into great detail on building his own office space. It was really cool to read all the details. It also reminds me of a Tom Silva quote, "The money is in the details."

It’s still a fantastic step in the right direction, giving medical practitioners the flexibility to explore new medicines for treatment. I know my perception of these substances changed after reading How to Change your mind by Michael Pollan: https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/

You don't need to read a book. I think you can get away with three steps: 1) This maxim from Michael Pollan: "Eat food [1]. Mostly plants. Not too much." (I personally follow an adjusted version of this: "Eat food. Only plants. Not too much.") 2) Review daily nutrient requirements to ensure your diet is providing you with adequate macro (protein, carbs, fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals). 3) A few months after adopting your new diet, get a high quality blood test that covers markers like iron, B12, etc., and make any required adjustments to what you're eating. 1: "Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize." https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

It's unfortunate that the article doesn't mention the great villain of sleep debt, caffeine. The substance we use to wake up is the one taking away our deep sleep. https://michaelpollan.com/books/caffeine-how-coffee-and-tea-created-th…

I'd recommend reading Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" which covers the topic well. In short, "set and setting" is critically important. https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/

This is a fantastic book. If anyone is interested in exploring the therapeutic uses of psilocybin in a safe, controlled setting, one of my best friends runs the Atman Retreat (recommended here by Pollan: https://michaelpollan.com/resources/psychedelics-resources/) Edit to add link: https://atmanretreat.com/

I’ve read most of them. There be dragons. There’s an entire landscape of conflicting information backed by conflicting scientific studies. You’ll go mad trying to find an objective answer. But I’d recommend Food Rules by Michael Pollan. Honestly, you can get the summary in the first paragraph below: “Eat [real, unprocessed] food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/ I’d also recommend anything by Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I feel like she does not have an agenda and is putting out best-effort evidence.

I would recommend reading Michael Pollan's book, "How to Change Your Mind" https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/ He explores the new and old science behind Psychedelics and their ability to cure depression, addiction and other aliments of the mind. Another active study in this field; Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) https://maps.org/

Michael Pollan has a great essay on this: Why mow? The case against lawns. https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/why-mow-the-case-against-la…

Fascinating 2002 article that goes into a great deal of detail about CAFOs: https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/

Best of luck with your depression. I'm sorry to hear you are suffering. NPR today had a piece on deep brain stimulation as a treatment for depression. Very preliminary research and very invasive but something is better than nothing. [0] Also, Michael Pollan's latest book on psychedelics is very interesting and has a specific chapter about using psychedelics to treat depression. It might be interesting to you. [1] 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/29/671866099/scienti… 1. https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/

My favorite guidance is Pollan's, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."[0] Another piece of guidance I like is this (paraphrased): Eat absolutely anything you want. But make it all yourself. If you want cookies and cake and ice cream, great! Buy flour and sugar and butter and chocolate and milk and cream, and make them yourself.[1] Now, these don't directly address your point about conflicting research. They give reasonable heuristics that work well, though. Now, clearly you can come up with pathological examples that follow the advice above - any of us could come up with dozens that are reasonable. But being precise and 100% correct is not the point of a heuristic. [0] https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/ [1] Paraphrased from an interview in Cooked. The 4-part series was produced for Netflix.

Minor correction, the name is Michael Pollan If you'd like an introduction to his work I'd recommend his post on planting the opium poppy, I really enjoyed it. https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/

The dose makes the poison with sugar as with anything else. That being said, I think most people encounter sugar at doses that are clearly poisonous to their bodies: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/is-sugar-really-bad-for-you-i… (see the section: Why is it a problem to have too much sugar?) However, I get your point. I think the conflicting (and often industry driven) public health messages we've gotten at least over my lifetime and probably for decades before have made people dubious of new health/health harm claims around whole classes of foods. For me, I like to follow Michael Pollans advice of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." http://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

Or the subsidies that hide the facts. Beef is very expensive in the sense of TCO, but not that expensive at the grocery store. See: http://michaelpollan.com/profiles/the-high-price-of-cheap-food-mealpol… for a good read on the matter. a snip: "The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket,” replies Pollan, “but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic."

Maybe the idea should be better stated if it's so easily misunderstood. I believe this is the origin of that phrase: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eating-wisely/ And, well, I don't really know what was meant by it. It decries Twinkies and Vitamin Water, but it also decries yogurt just because it's in a tube. Does shape matter for yogurt? He exalts fresh produce as the pinnacle of health, yet my great-great-great grandmother would have had extremely limited access to it for most of the year, and probably would not recognize most of the stuff I'm able to buy in the store. It's not a straw man when you legitimately don't understand what was intended.

The real problem is that all oranges are clones - genetically identical. That means anything that can overcome one orange tree can overcome them all. Shuffling genes around will just delay the next killer. It will be interesting to see if they can come up with a way to cause sexual reproduction to happen again. The resulting genetic diversity will make oranges less of a target. Somewhat related is how they and much other modern agriculture is done - huge fields of exactly the same species only - a monoculture. This too makes it easy for invaders. The fix of multiple species being grown together is often shown to work, but makes the farming and harvesting considerably more complicated and expensive. Recommended reading is Michael Pollan whose books and articles about food are great http://michaelpollan.com/articles/

The Michael Pollan quote is actually: "Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these." All those foods that you mentioned, a 19th century mom would recognize as food. Just not her kind of food. From here: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/ (and his books of course)

The source of this slogan: http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php Great book. Really informative read, and very convincing.

The fine article mentions Michael Pollan, whose book Cooked [0] was recently given to me. The chapter on the history of wheat is great. Pollan says that humans have been trying to make their bread whiter as long as we've been making bread. But we didn't get really good at it until the roller mill was invented in the mid-1800's. In the olden days every community had a flour mill, because milled flour only lasted 2 weeks before it became stale. At first the white flour was a modern miracle: perfectly airy/fluffy bread, flour able to be stored, transported and shipped long distances, etc. Then degenerative diseases started appearing. Fortification started around 1940's / 1950's, after the Army noticed the recruits for WWII weren't nearly as healthy as in decades past. The joke of fortification is that they only replace some of what was removed by turning wheat into white flour. Haven't finished the article yet, but it's great. Besides the widespread fortification and consumption of white flour, what other science-mistakes have become endemic? edit: [0] https://michaelpollan.com/books/cooked/

No. It hasn't always been this way. Interest in psychedelics (on HN and on many other forums, media outlets, and society in general) was rekindled at the start of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance, when very positive results of new research in psychedelics was announced. Michael Pollan's "Trip Treatment" article[1] was one of the first to make mainstream readers aware this was going on. After that the floodgates opened as more and more positive research results were announced. HN, like many other news aggregators, discussion forums, and social media outlets followed this trend, and psychedelic users started coming out of the closet... leading to more interest and more coverage. Then microdosing psychedelics started to become trendy, and it seems a lot of people in tech got in to that as well. So now it seems we have a situation where quite a few people on HN are interested in this subject. But, no, it wasn't always like this, and HN used to be much more narrowly focused on tech and startups than it is now. [1] - https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-trip-treatment/

There's tons of evidence available online, but a big problem is a lack of agreement on what constitutes "credible evidence". There is a fairly significant amount of clinical evidence available (despite it being effectively banned from study for decades), but the vast majority of evidence available is anecdotal reports from users. It should be noted that while it's true that this class of evidence lacks a "proper" (standards double blind placebo-controlled, etc) approach, it does not logically follow that it is therefore incorrect. As for where to point skeptical-minded people, I agree with others that Sam Harris is one of the better resources. Here is an article on his recent 5g "heroic dose" mushroom trip: https://thethirdwave.co/neuroscientist-sam-harris-reports-on-his-heroi… > “There’s no denying that there were parts of the experience that felt like an encounter with something other than my own mind,” Harris says, something that guided him “across the landscape of mind.” Many trippers, Harris notes, interpret this something as god or a universal consciousness. Harris suspends judgment. “My day job is not to be fooled by spurious ideas passed down from our ignorant ancestors, so I’m very slow to make claims about what I think is going on here,” he says. “I’m just reporting the character of the experience.” In the end, Harris says, “I thought of this as the mushroom itself.” > Thus Harris captures the magic and intrigue of psychedelics: the…

As a Chinese person born in America, you're absolutely right. If you don't cook, it's difficult to eat reasonably / "normally" in this country, even if you have money. You kind of have to pick your poison: salt, sugar, unnatural fats, etc. At least I grew up on the east coast and my parents cooked. Anecdotally, I'm shocked by what my acquaintances from the midwest eat, and the consequences really start to show up when people reach their 30's (although there are signs earlier) I read Michael Pollan's books (Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.) 10-15 years ago and they opened my eyes to how broken this country is in terms of food. https://michaelpollan.com/books/ It's funny he is considered "liberal" here but it's just common sense in the rest of the world. The thesis is actually "conservative": eat things that your grandmother would consider food. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it. Did your grandmother (or great grandmother) cook with high-fructose corn syrup? Or processed oils / margarine?

You might want to look into "The Lifestyle Cure" which has a fairly high cure rate for depression using a combination of omega-3s, sunlight & vitamin D, exercise, social interactions, mental habits to avoid negative ruminations, and improved sleep: https://tlc.ku.edu/ From the author: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)" Dr. Ilardi has written a self-help book based on the elements of TLC, "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs". The book has an example of a guy who suffered depression for about forty years and within a few weeks moved beyond depression following this approach (much to his own surprise). In another comment to this topic I mention this book and various other resources: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134266.Out_of_the_Nightmare ""Out of the Nightmare" presents a no-fault theory about depression and suicide. It argues that we should not blame the victim, the family, the caregivers, or society in general. It provides a detailed analysis of each of the barriers that stand between suicidal pain and recovery, and provides those who suffer from depression with hundreds of resources to find their way out of the nightmare. Recovery from depression is decomposed into recovery from envy, shame, self-pity, grandiosity, fear, stigma, prejudice, and the vicious circles of suicidal pain. The book helps sufferers…

Soylent and Juicero Rather surprised that nobody, as yet, has made a connection between Soylent and Juicero. * 1st: Juicing & Nutrition - There’s very little evidence that liquid food / juicing has any benefits for most adults. Most nutritionists worth their salt will advise against juicing. Juicero (and other juice makers) take perfectly good,healthy, nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables and make them less healthy. Ditto for Soylent. Crushing natural foods (vegetables, fruits, any other in their natural form) together to seek out their nutrients, and reconstituting them in powder/liquid form is, by any other fancy name, a juice. “The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin. When your body can no longer keep up with your need for insulin, Type 2 diabetes can develop.” [1] - I wonder if people who see the benefits of Soylent/juicing have read Michael Pollan or Marion Nestle. See [1], [2], [3] * 2nd: Silicon Valley and investments Both Soylent and Juicero are funded by marquee investors. Here’s a brief list for Juicero (Total $118M raised) [4] GV (nee Google Ventures) KPCB Abstract Campbell Soup Thrive Capital Here’s for Soylent (Total…

Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. It's not exactly correct, but it's a pretty good first approximation. As simplified heuristics go, it's much better than: It is not how many calories you eat, it is where they come from. If only because we don't actually understand the where & mechanisms very rigorously (notwithstanding all the violent handwaving surrounding many flavor-of-the-decade diet proponents) About the best we can do with current science is (a better worded version of): How many calories you consume is important, and so is the nature of those calories, and when you consume them. Also something in there about calories being reductive, and other things matter. In fact you can (and man do) do much worse for advice than Michael Pollans' summary: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.[1]" - but "food" is doing extra work here and human health is not the only consideration. 1 -http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/

The insight is that you are afraid of the something which is vital to you, is also incomprehensible. This isn't a particularly deep insight, lots of people are, but one of the interesting things about Soylent is that if you eat a 'normal' diet (which is to say one recommended as a 'healthy diet' by the FDA) you ingest all of the same chemicals in much the same ratios. If you were pathologically afraid of the unknown (and some folks are) then you would first sterilize some soil, then put it into a garden with an isolation layer and drainage system, then populate it with a soil biome that you had previously done DNA analysis on to insure you understood which bacteria and fungi were present, and then you would water only with distilled water, plants that you had also sequenced which allowed you to ascertain the lack of tampering with their genome, and fertilizer from fish or chicken for which you controlled all of their consumption. You wouldn't really do that, because you've grown up and seen people all around you eating stuff. And long before you could reason about these things you got hungry, ate, and got full, and it hasn't hurt you to do so and you continued on your path. The current things you "trust your health" to have, especially if you buy any packaged food, been engineered in ways that are way more extreme than what has happened to Soylent in order to make you buy more of them. The book "In Defense of Food" [1] by Michael Pollan goes into great detail about the…

"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." Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/

I believe there are religious exceptions allowed. See Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind.” Book: https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/ Documentary based on book: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21062540/