A Quote by Michael Pollan
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.
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The vast preponderance of evidence in modern epidemiology shows that those who eat more whole plant foods and fewer animal products and processed foods have lower rates of chronic disease and longer lifespans.
A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products.
There are about 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals known . . In spite of this large quantity of information, it is but a tiny fraction of the diversity that [according to the theory] actually lived in the past. There are well over a million species living today and . . [it is] possible to predict how many species ought to be in our fossil record. That number is at least 100 times the number we have found.
As a chef and father, it kills me that children are fed processed foods, fast food clones, foods loaded with preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup.
The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible (“whole” foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein.
Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go.... We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods.
You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.
If there's foods I don't like, like kale, it doesn't mean that I'm not efficient in my diet; it just means I can eat broccoli and other green vegetables. That's what people don't understand, is that as long as you're having a variety of foods in your diet, you don't have to have the food of the week that's everyone going crazy about.
Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
GMOs are found in nearly 80% of processed food in the United States. Currently, up to 92% of U.S. corn is consumed what are you eating GMO with zoe lister-jonesgenetically engineered, as are 94% of soybeans and 94% of cotton. In short, they are everywhere.
Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.
A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area's biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species.
It's hard to escape bullies that come in many shapes and forms. The processed food industry, corrupt religious organizations, and celebrity worship culture are just a few that we deal with in modern times.
I think a strict vegetarian diet acts as a good cleansing program for people who come from a diet heavy in animal foods and processed foods. But for some people, when it goes on too long it seems to backfire.
When farming became a corporate venture, and the distribution of food became corporate, the variety of foods that were considered good diminished greatly. I know that there's a lot of misconception about this, that people think we have more food variety than ever before, but, in fact, if you read any of the studies, you'll find we have fewer foods than before.
Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.
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