placenta does not belong in your hair

17th May 2009

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I’m enjoying Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food. p.141

“For the medical community too, scientific theories about diet nourish business as usual. New theories beget new drugs to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol; new treatments and procedures to ameliorate chronic disease; and new diets organized around each new theory’s elevation of one class of nutrient and demotion of another. Much lip service is paid to the importance of prevention, but the health care industry, being an industry, stands to profit more handsomely from new drugs and procedures to treat chronic diseases than it does from wholesale change in the way epople eat. Cynical? Perhaps. You could argue that the medical community’s willingness to treat the broad contours of the Western diet as a given is a reflection of its realism rather than its greed.

Still, medicalizing the whole problem of the Western diet instead of working to overturn it (whether at the level of the patient or politics) is exactly what you’d expect from a health care community that is sympathetic to nutritionism as a matter of temperament, philosophy, and economics. You would not expect such a medical community to be sensitive to the cultural or ecological dimensions of the food problem -and it isn’t. We’ll know this has changed when doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals.”