10% Human

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
© 2015 Alanna Collen
336 pages

Walt Whitman wasn't thinking of bacteria when he mused -- "I am large, I contain multitudes" -- but Alanna Collen could have gotten away with quoting him. She opens her book with the bombshell that ninenty percent of the 'cells' in our bodies are actually independent mcirobes, living their own little lives, and devotes the rest of it to exploring what effect that has on our health.  We are less discrete, self-contained individuals, and closer to mobile ecosystems,  in which microbes are an integral part and not just germy villains.  Microbes are not only essential parts of the human body -- slimy oil that keeps the body's engine running smoothly,  aiding in digestion and manufacturing essential elements like Vitamin B12. In some cases, like our own cells' mitochrondia, we've even adopted microbes into the family.  But there's more to the story of microbes and health, and Collen credits our overzealous germaphobia with many modern diseases.

Semmelweis did humanity and medicine a great favor when he realized the cause of childbed sickness was sloppy sanitation, but we may have taken his prescription too far in treating all microbes as 'germs' to be eradicated.  As mentioned, many are necessary to our bodily functions: babies receive helpful bacteria with their mothers' very milk.   Animal testing has indicated that bacterial species can have intense effects on their host: mice have changed personalities when their respective strains were switched, becoming more outgoing or more reserved; similar effects were observed in populations of lean and chubby mice.  That last is especially of note to an increasingly overweight global population, but there are no easy answers. (While some microbe species allow for the uber-efficient metabolization of food, stealthily increasing our caloric  intake, others produce byproducts that put fat cells on overdrive.)  The fact that our bodies contain many different types of bacteria is important, because they compete with one another. When we disrupt the balance of power with erratic courses of antibiotics, or abruptly and dramatically alter our diets,  nasty strains can dominate to our detriment. Collen attributes a number of 'western' or modern diseases to microbial havocincluding allergies and autism.  The section on autism has fantastic human interest: after one four-year old boy suddenly developed it after an ear inefection, his mother devoted herself to research, research the boy's sister continued decades lafter when she grew up and went to grad school.

10% Human is one of the more engaging pieces of biology writing I've ever read, and immensely importance from a personal and public health perspective.  Collen's' writing is very personable, never intimidating. She even sneaks in the tiniest bit of toilet humor when she refers to 'transpoosion', or transferring one person's fecal bacteria to another person's intestines to rebuild a ravaged microbial pool. (The  body has a bacterial backup in the appendix, but sometimes reinforcements are necessary.)  It should be obvious after a half-century of mass dieting and treadmill running than the simplistic calories in vs calories consumed model isn't adequate for explaining our weight woes, and here I suspect Collen will find a lot of appeal for people.  For me,  10% Human reminds me yet again of how we are not static creatures, built of DNA legos, but dynamic creatures -- constantly being remade, not only by our experience, but by the guests in our innards.

Related:

• Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine; Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Richard Wrangham
• "How Gut Bugs Make you Sick or Well", Time article from 2012 which mentions the mother-daughter research team. 

Salt, Sugar, Fat

Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
© 2013 Michael Moss
480 pages

Between the fresh produce, meat, and dairy sections that ring the perimeter of the average supermarket,  millions of unique foodstuffs are offered and advertised. But their apparent variety is a lie, for the bulk of these food products are nothing more than combinations of  three additives: salt, sugar, and fat. In this book named after the unholy trinity,  author Michael Moss  offers a history of how these additives came to dominate so much of the American, and now global, diet, one which also examines the nutritional consequences of each. Its combination of dietary science, history, marketing, and politics signals out a few products in particular (Lunchables take a beating) and pose the question: if the creators of these products avoid eating them, why shouldn’t we?

I developed an avid interest in this topic after my doctor urged me to reduce my salt intake, a bit of advice that led to me avoiding supermarket interiors in general, preparing most of my meals from fresh produce and meat. Avoiding salt meant avoiding almost everything else, from obvious junk food like potato chips to ‘health’ food like cereal and canned vegetables.  I started losing four pounds a week, eventually a little over 120 after four months. The lesson that processed foods are a health catastrophe, evidenced in the book, needs no further development for me, but Salt, Sugar, and Fat was doubly interesting for given so much attention to how these foods were marketed. Although companies like Coca-Cola whine about consumer choice when government entities attempt to regulate them with a view towards improving the public’s health, their self-serving defense of free choice is given the lie by their deliberate attempts to cultivate cravings for their specific products,  both through advertising saturation and by adding ingredients which light up the pleasure centers of our brain and compel us to see more, even at our own demise. Can a nicotine addict really say his continuing purchase of cigarettes is one made freely?  The 20th century has turned this trio of elements, each healthy in the right proportions, into narcotics. (Fittingly, many of the food companies featured in the book are owned by a tobacco company, Phillip Morris.)

But these companies -- General Mills,, Kraft, Pepsi, and others -- depend on these additives for more than enticing customers to come back again and again.  They need food that can stay on the shelves for weeks and months, surviving trips across the  globe on ship and truck,  and taste and feel exactly the same way time after time.  That means preservatives like salt and sugars, and it also means denaturing the foods so they don’t go and rot, and then applying more stable fat to make sure no taste is lost.  Salt, sugar, and fat not only alter the taste of foods: they change their appearances and how they feel in our mouths. Moss is given the opportunity to try name-brand products offered without the additives, and never records a positive experience: one might as well be eating soggy cardboard for all the pleasures these ‘foods’ bring.   In the light of such experiences, one can’t help but agree with Michael Pollan, who refuses to call things like Cheez-Its  food, and who instead refers to them as edible, food-like products.   If these items taste so abhorrent without the inclusion of ingredients harmful to our health in these amounts, why exactly are we eating them?


While the  aggressive marketing of these goods and their physically addicting nature is largely to blame, it helps that they’re convenient and  cheap, far cheaper than ‘real’ food.  Although on the whole Salt, Sugar, and Fat is a robust book, it misses a step when Moss tries to work out the solution: he never mentions the subsidies that allow additives like high-fructose corn syrup (featured in the Sugar section) to be so cheap on the shelves to the consumer, and thus more enticing to parents with a tight budget than bunches of red-leaf lettuce and broccoli. Considering that Moss spends time demonstrating how parts of the national government are at odds with one another -- one urging us to consume more of the same product to help "American farmers", while another urges us to consume less for health reasons -- it would have fitted in there nicely. Another answer to the mystery of our eating trash is the magic of branding: Naomi Klein's excellent No Logo demonstrated how certain companies have gotten rich not by producing quality products, but by effectively mystifying people, by associating their products with good feelings, popularity, or wealth, and the importance of brand loyalty pops up several times through this text.

Salt, Sugar, and Fat  makes a powerful case against processed foods, one which those with an interest in health (or marketing) will find fascinating.


Related:
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
Why We Get Sick, Nesse and Williams
American Mania: When More Isn't Enough, Peter Whybrow
No Logo, Naomi Klein
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Mmm, dopamine!

Why We Get Fat

Why We Get Fat: and What To Do About It
© 2011, 2012 Gary Taubes
267 pages

The secret of weight, we are told, is as simple as physics, as the laws of thermodynamics. If we take in more energy in eating than we expend in exercise, we gain weight. If we use more energy than we eat, we lose weight. Hence the constant advice to those concerned about their bellies is to eat less and exercise more. Simple, right? ...then why doesn't it work?  Why do millions of people go on diets every January and struggle so mightily to do make any progress? And how can there be so many societies in history and at present where obesity is linked not to abundance, but to poverty? How can obesity and malnutrition exist in the same family at the same time?  Gary Taubes has an answer, one which explains in full the link between obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiac problems while turning everything you think you know about diet on its head.

            Insulin is the key. Taubes writes like a volleyball player, delivering his argument with a bump, a set, and finally the spike. He begins by dismantling conventional explanations about weight control, pointing out that even studies done by institutions which dearly wanted to demonstrate an incontrovertible link between exercise and diet and weight loss have failed to do so. He then prepares the reader by pointing out that we already know that fat is managed substantially by hormones, pointing out the role estrogen plays in shifting body fat around at the onset of puberty. He also points out the way we observe fat utilized in other animals: is a Jersey cow lean because it eats lighter and runs laps around its field? Hardly. Jersey cows are bred as milk cows because their hormones prioritize turning food into milk, and Angus cows are bred as beef because their hormones emphasis turning food into fat and muscle. Calories and exercise have nothing to do with it – not in cows, not in rats, and not in humans.

            In humans, insulin is the chief hormone that manages fat. We’ve known this for decades, but somehow in the WW2 period the United States lost sight of the consequences. Essentially, when insulin is present in the bloodstream, we accumulate fat, and can’t get rid of it. When insulin is absent, our bodies are free to convert fat into fuel. To avoid gaining weight, then, we must avoid foods which stimulate the secretion of insulin, particularly carbohydrates and sugar. No carbs means no grain, no corn, and no rice. The idea of going “carbless” may strike modern readers as positively abnormal, but in truth the diet we’re “used” to is the strange one from the perspective of natural history. Humans evolved eating meat, fruit, and the occasional greens –  our dependence on grains is relatively recent, historically speaking. That dependence is one promoted by the idea which currently holds sway over dietary belief in America, that carbs are good and fat is bad: in most supermarkets, low-fat brands are the only option available. Not only is our love affair with carbohydrates fattening us up, says Taubes, but we've declared anathema a vital part of our diet.  We’re supposed to be eating fat, he says. The more fat in our diet, the more efficiently our bodies run -- and there's nothing to the idea that fatty diets lead to exercise, studies indicate.Here he and Michael Pollan concur.

The effective way to losing weight, then, is to avoid carbohydrates and eat heartily the diet of our ancestors – meat and greens. Fruit is more problematic because modern stocks have been bred to be far more sugary than their antecedents. This approach has been advocated by others; the famous Atkins Diet is based on it, for instance, and it’s very similar to the “Paleo” diet which is now gaining in popularity.  Why is there a link between obesity and poverty? Because poor societies rely on cheap foodstuffs – carbohydrate-rich foodstuff like bread and rice. Why is the Fast Food nation an obese nation?  Because carbohydrates are the appetizer, main course, dessert, and drink under the golden arches.

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Why We Get Fat is a book of tremendous importance. In the United States today, diets low in fat are emphasized even as sugary sodas are sold in the public schools. Little wonder that despite the prolonged ad campaigns of the past decades,  obesity and its related diseases continue to become worse. Not only are we missing the point, but our attempts to address the problem only exacerbate it. Consider diabetes, a disease defined by our bodies’ inability to manage its blood sugar. The dominant form (Type 2) of diabetes is caused by our bodies becoming resistant to insulin: that is, it is less effective at moving sugar out of the bloodstream and into cells. Thus, our bodies have to produce more of it to do the job, and naturally the body becomes even more resistant to insulin, rather like we build a tolerance for alcohol. When the body’s demand for insulin product exceeds its ability to do so, we recognize diabetes…but our solution is to inject more insulin into the bloodstream.  This is a ‘solution’ that guarantees the problem will never be addressed at its root.  The lesson of Why We Get Fat is that we become insulin-resistant because our diet demands we produce an abnormal amount of the hormone. Change the diet to minimize insulin demand, and our bodies won’t develop that resistance.If that weren't enough, Taubes also pins the blame for high blood pressure and heart disease on it, though the latter is only a correlation.


Taubes has written two books in this vein; Good Calories, Bad Calories and this, Why We Get Fat. As I understand it, Good Calories, Bad Calories is the more substantial of the two, while Why We Get Fat is intended for a larger audience (har har) and emphasizes more application of the research. While Taubes doesn't promote a specific diet, the appendix does list various others (like Atkins) and provides general guidelines to eating. I've been doing my homework on Taubes' work for the last few months, since I first heard him in an extended interview on EconTalk, and I believe Why We Get Fat may be one of the most significant books I have ever read. Definitely recommended. 

Related:

• Interview with Gary Taubes on EconTalk: how I found Taubes in the first place. 
• Good Calories, Bad Calories; Gary Taubes
• In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
• Wheat Belly, William Davis

Why We Get Sick

Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine
© 1994 Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
290 pages

Years ago I read an exceptional book on evolution by David Sloan Wilson. I say exceptional because it advocated for freeing evolution from being mere natural history: instead, Wilson argued that we should use it to understand all matters biological, including medicine. He used as his example the case of morning sickness in pregnancies, revealing research that illustrated that far from being a problem to be solved, morning sickness is an adaptive behavior which protects fetuses from foods that might be toxic to them in their highly vulnerable state. This application of evolution floored me, and so you can imagine my delight to discover an entire book on the subject, Why We Get Sick.

For the most part, Why We Get Sick fulfills my anticipation, though its authors are writing mostly to introduce the concept of evolution-informed medicine to the public. Though they share the insights that research with this focus have revealed already,  in any more instances they can only offer speculation, as Darwinian medicine is still quite new. The book covers general health, and explains the science of injuries, nutrition, and sickness. They establish early on that the Darwinian model can help us understand a given disease's ultimate root, and avoid prolonging it in our clumsy efforts to dispels the symptoms. Often symptoms of a disease are actually the products of our own immune system, and if we disrupt those defenses the disease itself is given free reign. Fevers, for instance, are one of our body's ways of disrupting an infection. It doesn't matter to our genes if it makes us uncomfortable: they're more concerned with killing the invaders. But the invaders have their own defenses, and they adapt a lot more quickly than we do -- another reason some diseases to be here to stay, like the flu. The existence of multiple flu strains and our constant attempts to find new ways to kill them are evolution in action, the ongoing biological arms race.  Other physical ailments are hangovers of evolution, like our back problems and heel spurs;  walking upright on two feet is something our bodies are still getting used to. We haven't even started adapting to novel environments, another element of disease: we have bodies accustomed to hardship now living in a world of abundant, cheap food and easy living. Little wonder we struggle with obesity and problems of physical inactivity. And then there are the genetic diseases and strangely adaptive byproducts of mental illnesses...

Why We Get Sick is compact, dense, and brimming with information: the authors are writing to introduce people to the viewpoint,  so there's lot of enticing speculation. If one section doesn't catch your interest, rest assured another will. I for one am quite excited about this novel approach to medicine, and if health or evolution are of any interest to you, this intersection of the two should prove fascinating.

Related:

• American Mania: When More Isn't Enough, Peter Whybrow
• Evolution for Everyone, David Sloan Wilson 
• NPR news article on the "paleo diet" and Darwinian medicine

Catching Fire

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
 © 2009 Richard Wrangham
309 pages

Cooking has created a great many fantastic dish throughout the centuries, but Richard Wrangham holds that the culinary art's greatest triumph is us -- humanity, for the advent of cooking substantially altered our biological and cultural revolution. Not only did it give us smaller guts and smaller mouths, but Wrangham also believes the cooking process set the stage for the sexual division of labor and largely monogamous pair-bonds. Although the biological claim is safer,  both are fascinating to consider, for if they are true then a 'natural' diet for human beings is one which is cooked. Additionally, if this is the case then a cultural adaption has manipulated biology, and in a profound way.

The genius of cooking is that it allows us to maximize the potential calorie intake of a given foodproduct. Raw food is tough; herbivorous animals in particular spend their entire day grazing and chewing. Their intestines must work throughout the day, and often into the night, breaking down ingested food into the fuel the body so desperately needs. But all that work takes energy itself. Meat eaters have an easier time of it,  but muscle tissue is resilient; thick, tough, and tightly connected. At the outset, Wrangham establishes that the ease of digestion is fundamentally important, citing cases in which two sets of animals were given identical amounts of the same food; rats, for instance, given a set number of food pellets.  Each group's calorie count was identical, but one group had "soft" pellets, or pellets in which air had been inserted. The group eating soft pellets put on muscle mass far more quickly than the group chewing on hard pellets; in fact, the soft-pellet group became obese. In processing and cooking food -- grinding seeds, tenderizing meat by pounding it with rocks, and then heating items -- we greatly reduce the amount of work our bodies must do to digest them.  The more processed they are, the more efficiently we can take in the calories...and while easy calories have become a problem to us now, in the days prior to agriculture it was a godsend.

Cooking not only gave us a competitive edge, it altered our physiology. We no longer needed huge teeth for grinding raw muscle, nor expansive intestines for long-term digestion...and when those became smaller, we had more energy to invest in brains. Although Wrangham doesn't speculate on the result of increased intelligence and leisure time, one can assume the combination had a dramatic effect on human culture.  Fundamentally, the author contends that the division of labor roles could have never transpired without cooking. Raw food requires so much time to chew and digest that men wouldn't have been able to spend their days hunting (or lounging around, as the case might be) if they could not have come back to the tribe camp with a cooked meal waiting for them.  Since women, the gatherers, provided the economic foundation of the tribe -- supplying food if and when the men failed to deliver -- one might think this gave them the power. Instead, cooking became a liability. Women tending food at a fire needed to protect it, lest the food be stolen.  Wrangham believes that pair bonds arose for this reason: women provided the food, and men protected it.  Although this is more of a stretch than the biological claims, requiring more inference on our part,  it offers a count to the usual sex-driven conception of pair bonds. Time and again Wrangham documents tribes that don't seem to care if married women sleep with other men...but woe betide them if they cook for other men.

Wrangham ends by chastising nutritionists for missing the point about food, and particularly for believing every food delivers a set amount of calories or nutrients, when that amount greatly varies depending on how the food has been processed and cooked. Given the obesity epidemic, the relationship between processing and calories is certainly one worth our consideration...and Wrangham's work is wide open to lay readers, so dig in.

Related:
ScienceFriday interview with Richard Wrangham regarding Catching Fire
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal
© 2001 Eric Schlosser
362 pages

I underestimated Fast Food Nation. I'd expected a heated attack on the subject from a nutritional standpoint, but Eric Schlosser's history and overview of fast food's origins and impact is far more substantial than I had ever anticipated. The United States doesn't have a national cuisine of its own, but it has been most successful in exporting an approach to food across the world. The global presence of the McDonald's corporation has allowed American values to conquer the world in a way no military effort could ever rival. Such conquest is not to our benefit, as Schlosser's work bears out.

After beginning with the history of how fast food evolved, supported by the United States' auto culture and beginning with "drive-in" restaurants, he then charts the industry's rocketing success. The key behind every chain's success story is efficiency: applying the mindset of the factory to the restaurant. This means assembly-line preparation, the standardization of portions, a dependence on pre-processed food ("meat" arrives at these stores dessicated, in vacuum bags, and requires the addition of water to resemble ground beef again), amd immediate access to huge quantities of cheap foodstuffs just to start. (They're cheap for a reason:  standards at slaughterhouses and feedlots tend toward the horrific.) A hostile attitude toward labor also seems to be a key component: jobs are broken down into a series of mindless tasks which require little training, and a worker with little training also has little power. Wages are kept depressed to ensure maximum profits, and thus there's little wonder that these places are staffed by people with few alternatives, like teenagers. That the national chains aren't keen to provide sick leave, medical insurance, or vacation days goes without saying. There are, however, exceptions to the exploitative tendency, most notably in Schlosser's account the In-and-Out company. The same abuse of labor occurs in the chains' principle suppliers; Schlosser writes that Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) would be distressed to learn how little had changed since his 19th century  expose of the food industry's labor and health conditions.

Even more impressive is the widespread influence of these fast food chains. Schlosser attributes their ever-increasing demand for food, and their success in selling it, to the growth of the power of agribusiness. The fast food chains were such rewarding customers that their suppliers were able to establish a hegemony over the markets for beef, potatoes, and so on. As the chain stores destroyed smaller restaurants, so did their suppliers-- the corporate farms -- destroy smaller, private farms.  Economic power goes hand in hand with political corruption, which Schlosser also covers. More insidious is the growth of food-related advertising. I should think that food is so important that it doesn't need advertising, but fast food apparently needs it -- and is aggressive about spreading the work.  The chains anchor their future success in their ability to turn children into loyal, lifelong consumers,  and the growing financial weaknesses of cities and suburban municipalities offers them a new market:  advertising in the schools!  When the brands work together, combining products (toy companies and restaurants, for instance, or McDonalds in WalMart), their profits become even greater. We might applaud such  cleverness were  it not for their abusive labor policies, negligent heath standards, and political opportunism.

Fast Food Nation is an impressive work, revealing the ways that the industry affects the lives of every American, even those of us who avoid it for health or other reasons. Schlosser's coverage is extensive -- exploring nearly every facet of these businesses, from their origins to their supply lines, business practices, and labor policies.  It is both thorough and pointed, and prompts readers to consider -- what is the true cost of the 'value meal'?

Highly recommended to Americans.

Related:
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
Sugar: the Bitter Truth
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin

In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
© 2009 Michael Pollan
256 pages

Michael Pollan's seminal work, The Omnivore's Dilemma, established that there's no such thing as a free, or even a cheap, lunch.  The low-cost processed foods that the American diet takes for granted exact their price in other ways. The abundance of food in the developed world has coincided, not accidentally, with a decline in its quality - - and so, curiously, while most of us can take the availability of food for granted, we can no longer take for granted that it is in fact food. Food has lost its meaning in the American mind, Pollan asserts here, and science and technology are to blame.

Pollan sees food as having fallen to the twofold assault of industrial agricultural and and ideological which he calls "nutritionism", which reduces food to nothing more than a carrier of nutrients. In his view, this misses the forest for a few twigs on a tree and ignores relationships between different food in traditional diets and the interplay of nutrients and body chemistry. Further, he believes that industrial agriculture  creates not food, but products resembling food -- and that nutritionism aids and abets this, creating a situation in which people are "overfed and undernourished".

In Defense of Food presents a problem for me. On the one hand, there are significant ideas worthy of consideration in here -- people do overly fixate on the value of one nutrient or another, industrial agriculture does sacrifice quality for quantity, and yes, the constant pattern of nutritional fixation does dovetail perfectly with relentless advertising-driven consumerism. Pollan's "food rules" make sense, like "Don't eat anything that doesn't look like food".  That is, if you want cheese, eat cheese -- not puffs of god-knows-what covered in orange powder.

The great problem for me is the anti-scientific attitude that develops from his attack on "nutritionism", an ideology which Pollan sees as being the spawn of scientists, journalists, and advertisers.  While scientists are just as human and potentially self-serving as anyone else, they attract the bulk of Pollan's ire. He mocks the fact that a half-century of nutritional advice has seen Americans grow not healthier, but fatter -- as if obesity and nutritional disorders were caused not by the popularity of fast food or a society dominated by cars, but by the fact that people followed the advice of a government study and got themselves fat by trying to stick to low-fat diets. A spirit of petty resentment pervades the book, as if Pollan is insulted that scientists would dare get their grubby lab gloves over his food. Those of us who are interested in science know all too well that the media does a horrible job at attempting scientific journalism, being irresponsible and ignorant of the subject --  leaving no room for nuance and pitching stories in such a way as to grab headlines. (PhD Comics did a GREAT comic on this.)  Pollan mentions the hype over resveratol, for instance, a compound found in many foods of the French diet which has been linked to health and longevity. While Pollan uses this as an example of nutritional fixation, I recently read an interview with the scientist whose work prompted the media frenzy (in Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Future), and he was dismayed by the way the media failed to understand that the variable he was studying was only one factor of many.  Here it is Pollan, not the scientist, who is overemphasizing the work.

In Defense of Food may be worth considering if you are just starting to become conscious or mindful about the foods you eat, but given Pollan's bias I can't earnestly recommend it to you. Given the importance of food, I'm sure there are superior books out there on the subject.

Beginning Runner's Handbook

The Beginning Runner's Handbook: The Proven 13-Week Walk-Run Program
© 1999 Ian MacNeill
168 pages

As mentioned prior, I committed myself to an active lifestyle back in late August or early September, and began  a daily habit of exercise, choosing to go for brisk walks in the morning and evening.  I've been increasing the length and intensity of my 'walk-outs' steadily until this week, so my legs have been growing in strength and I'm so filled with energy that I wish to RUN -- but I can't. I've had to cut back a bit on my mileage because of runner's knee: my joints simply aren't ready for the intensity of running. Even so, I keep thinking about it and as a way of preparing myself and running vicariously, I decideded to check out The Beginning Runner's Handbook, a thorough guide that includes a transition plan for walkers to condition themselves into becoming runners.

The Handbook reminded me in part of the Complete Guide to Walking in that it stressed the need for the exercise, the ease of taking up running, and devoted sections to gear, stretches, and so on. However,  its chapter on nutrition is more thorough than the Guide to Walking, and it contains information on common running injuries, their treatment, and their prevention. MacNeill also encourages cross-training, along with strength training, but the Runners' Handbook isn't written as much toward a goal of "total body fitness" as the Guide to the Walking. MacNeill's strength-training exercises mostly target those muscles used in running, and cross-training is introduced as a way to keep active during running rest periods or injuries.  Because running is a more intensive activity than walking,  his schedule reccommends running three times a week and using the other days to rest and cross-training.

Altogether, a strong introduction to the subject. For those interested, I would reccommend both the Complete Guide to Walking and this Handbook: the walking guide is more thorough for fitness overall, but the running handbook is more detailed in nutrition needs and medical care.  Unfortunately, I can't evaluate the program just yet, but it has received high praise on Amazon.

The Omnivore's Dilemma
© 2007 Michael Pollan
450 pages

What to eat, what to eat? Between our robust physiologies and intelligent, creative minds, there's little on Earth that we human beings cannot eat or somehow convert into food. The entire planet is one big smörgåsbord  for H. sapiens, but such a plethora of choices overwhelms our hunter-gatherer instincts. We are no longer creatures of the plains, but of the cities: a relative few grow food for the masses, and they can do so only by being highly efficient. Such efficiency allows for cheap food, but in Michael Pollan's eyes there's no such thing as a free lunch. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan digs into four possible meals of the modern era to find out what it means -- and costs -- to eat in the 21st century. On the menu: fast food from McDonalds, an organic supper from WholeFoods,  a hearty banquet at a local farm, and a meal foraged from the wild.

Pollan begins with the most typical American cuisine: fast food from McDonalds, which despite being advertised as beef and potatoes, contains an awful lot of corn. Corn allows cattle companies to raise their beef to market quickly and efficiently, and it's also processed into virtually every food staple sold in American market. Efficiency is the watchword for industrial agriculture, which feeds its corn to cattle and pigs on vast feedlots, which are a far cry from bucolic images of cattle lowing out on the plains. Efficiency's allure has not been lost on organic business, which -- while decrying pesticides and other 'necessary evils' of big agriculture -- is forced to pursue the same basic business model, as Pollan finds out when he follows the ingredients of his WholeFoods-purchased meal from the farm to his plate.  His organic chicken ("Rosie") may be a free-range animal, but her living conditions are roughly the same as KFC's birdies.  From here, Pollans goes off the grid and into a family farm, one which takes an entirely different approach to producing food.  Polyface Farm, in fact, does not produce food: it grows it. It cultivates it. Instead of using fossil fuels to process food, Polyface's owner simply manages nature,  putting ecology to work for him. Why fill animals with antibiotics when you can have chickens peck through cow manure and eat the bugs which would cause sickness later on? Finally, Pollan leaves the farm for the wild, gathering mushrooms and hunting for boar to create an authentically human meal, with every ingredient on the plate made by his own hands.

The great theme of Omnivore's Dilemma is awareness -- food mindfulness, if you will. We can buy cheap food and enjoy foods out of season, but at cost:  beef is so cheap because it's raised on heavily-subsidized corn, and has been since the 1970s when Nixon decided to take food off the political-issues menu. But that same subsidization encourages farmers to drive themselves into financial ruin by planting more and more corn (and seeing increasingly marginal returns for their investment). It's not a sustainable system, but taxpayers cover the gap.  Although Pollans never mentions it, there's a similarity between the birth of agriculture thousands of years ago and the growth of corn-based agriculture only a few decades ago: both allow us to feed many more people cheaply, but at the expense of quality. Uncivilized hunter-gatherers enjoyed a diet far more varied and healthy than that of the medieval peasant and possibly even ourselves.  The quantity-quality dichotomy divides the book's four chapters into two portions:  the first two meals use society's industrial infrastructure, while the latter focus on on the quality of food rather than increasing profit. At one point the owner of Polyface farm notes that while he could add more cattle to his farm, it would throw off the ecological balance he cultivates.   He thus spurns economic growth for sustainability, a philosophy I wish more businesses, people, and governments shared. Growth without sustainability is nothing more than a market bubble waiting to be popped. Pollan's last story (the boar-hunt) takes a completely different tack, focusing on the morality of eating animals and the meaning that can be found in gathering one's own food, and thus in interacting with the world in which we live instead of passively consuming foodstuffs.

Dilemma will raise difficult questions for virtually everyone who reads it, unless they live on a farm like Polyface,  and the issues are varied. Yes, we can dine cheaply -- but only if we do not take into account the nutritional, moral, political, and societal costs. Those who try to buy to satisfy their conscience and palate both by moving to organic don't get off as easily as they might think. Judging from the book,  the ideal foodsource is local, natural, and sustainable -- but  the majority of us do not have the luxury of being able to buy or eat responsibly-produced food from places like Polyface farms, either out of location or finances. As much as I would like to see feedlots give way to the Polyface approach, I think this is as realistic as hoping for the return of Mom and Pop general stores on Main Street in a world dominated by big boxes. As hideous and artificial as those box stores are, they're simply more economically competitive and will continue to increasingly dominate our society without the appropriate legislation. The solitary reader need not despair, however:  while society at large may continue to go its processed-food way, those who read this or a similar book can be provoked to change our lives and our culinary habits -- and just as I have decided to avoid Wal-Mart and buy from local businesses, I can decide to avoid processed food in favor of items from the farmer's market whenever possible.

Given the questions Dilemma raises, I highly recommend it -- though I would prefer more substantial evidence (like raw data on what percentage of cattle are raised on feedlots) to back up his anecdotal conclusions.