That's about nutrition though, and this is about contamination from packaging. The article would still have been written if mac and cheese were an entirely untreated plant product.
Something that Michael Pollan advocates is avoiding processed foods. In the quote above, though counterintuitive, "food" as defined by Pollan does not include processed foods like boxed mac and cheese.
From the article the GP post linked:
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
Ok, but why? I'm sure leafy greens are objectively "better", but is eating Mac & Cheese once a week (for example) going to cause physical harm? Do I need to adopt a zero tolerance policy?
No, of course not. But let's not overlook the fact that there are people who eat that every other day and lots of people who eat nothing but processed food to the point that they find real food sort of gross and hard to cook, eat or digest. This is a Bad Thing.
He's saying that the advice you mention "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is not very relevant to the article, because even if you mainly eat plants, the kind of chemicals that the article talks about can still be present in them (from the process of packing, transporting them, etc -- plus of course all the crap they put on them to make their grow faster and bigger).
In other words, your advice is about "eat less processed food" while the article is about how all kinds of food (processed or not) can have those chemicals. Plants can still come wrapped in plastic, with labels attached, pass through conveyor belts, etc.
For that particular case, perhaps, but they also say:
Phthalates are not deliberately added to food. They are
industrial chemicals used to soften plastics and are used
as solvents, in adhesives and in ink on packaging. The
chemicals migrate into food from food processing equipment
like plastic tubing, conveyor belts and gaskets and other
plastic materials used in the manufacturing process, and
can also seep in from printed labels or plastic materials
in the packaging."
Comments
That's about nutrition though, and this is about contamination from packaging. The article would still have been written if mac and cheese were an entirely untreated plant product.
Something that Michael Pollan advocates is avoiding processed foods. In the quote above, though counterintuitive, "food" as defined by Pollan does not include processed foods like boxed mac and cheese.
From the article the GP post linked:
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
Ok, but why? I'm sure leafy greens are objectively "better", but is eating Mac & Cheese once a week (for example) going to cause physical harm? Do I need to adopt a zero tolerance policy?
No, of course not. But let's not overlook the fact that there are people who eat that every other day and lots of people who eat nothing but processed food to the point that they find real food sort of gross and hard to cook, eat or digest. This is a Bad Thing.
I don't follow what you're saying?
He's saying that the advice you mention "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is not very relevant to the article, because even if you mainly eat plants, the kind of chemicals that the article talks about can still be present in them (from the process of packing, transporting them, etc -- plus of course all the crap they put on them to make their grow faster and bigger).
In other words, your advice is about "eat less processed food" while the article is about how all kinds of food (processed or not) can have those chemicals. Plants can still come wrapped in plastic, with labels attached, pass through conveyor belts, etc.
If I'm reading the article correctly, it says that the phthalates in mac and cheese are in the cheese mix, not the plastic packaging.
For that particular case, perhaps, but they also say: