In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan (4.5 stars)

I think this is the best food-related book I have ever read. The advice is distilled by the author into:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pollan writes very well, and the book is the perfect length to be informative but not boring. He explains the rise of nutritionism - treating food as the sum of its currently known parts, the dangers of this approach, and how it has changed the western diet:

Milk through this lens is reduced to a suspension of protein, lactose, fats, and calcium in water, when it is entirely possible that the benefits, or for that matter the hazards, of drinking milk owe to entirely other factors (growth hormones?) or relationships between factors (fat-soluble vitamins and saturated fat?) that have been overlooked...The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another: Liebig missed the vitamins and amino acids, and his successors missed the omega-3s...

The 'Lipid Hypothesis' is one of the great failings of nutritional science, and has fundamentally changed the food landscape. Is there anything in the supermarket these days that isn't low fat? How bout this bombshell:

The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the diet will reduce the risk is slim to nil.

I was fascinated by this book, and the advice rings true. To summarise:

• Avoid foods that: include ingredients with unfamiliar/unpronounceable names, have more than five ingredients, or contain high fructose corn syrup. From our experience in the US it is extremely difficult to avoid the evil corn syrup in American supermarkets, it is in pretty much everything. Pollan uses the example of Sara Lee 'bread' as something to avoid - we called it 'cake bread'.
  
• If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise it as food, don't eat it.
  
• Avoid food products that make health claims. The FDA in the US allows 'qualified' health claims on packaging, read 'lies'.
  
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Leaves are better than seeds because seeds are high energy storage mechanisms.
  
• You are what you eat eats too. Chicken, pigs and cows all grow quicker when fed grains, but are healthier when eating grass. Roo is good for you because it is wild, and hence eats a diverse diet of plants. Wild plants have to defend themselves without pesticides, so have higher quantities of antioxidants and other goodies than farmed plants.
  
• Eat like an omnivore. The more diverse your diet is, the better chance you have of covering all the nutritional bases.
  

There is plenty more advice, this is just some of it. I don't have the knowledge to critique it for scientific accuracy, but I don't think anyone will be harmed by following this advice.

I'm also going to read the "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

4.5 stars.