Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
People have been dealing with health long before there was science, certainly before nutrition science. We're constantly reading about scientific studies that support old wives' tales.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Traditional knowledge about health often predates scientific understanding.
Michael Pollan's quote emphasizes that human beings have relied on traditional health practices long before the advent of modern science, particularly nutrition science. It suggests that many insights found in folklore or old wives' tales have been validated by contemporary scientific research, highlighting the value of ancestral wisdom in our understanding of health and nutrition.
Themes
HealthNutritionScienceTraditionWisdom
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of traditional knowledge at a health conference.
More from Michael Pollan
All quotes →You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.
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There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day.
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Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.
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[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
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He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
Michael PollanRead
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