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This article form the New York Times and written by Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, has got to be the most insightful, yet concise, explanation of our country’s dysfunctional relationship with food. Print the article out and spend some time with it. It’s a masterpiece. Instead of giving people my same old tired series of lectures, I am just going to point them to this article. Fantastic! (found via iwillteachyoutoberich)

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.