Written by Regina Gee of Wellspring Coaching
The Western Diet
The word ‘diet’ comes from the Greek diaita meaning ‘a way of life.’ One modern definition of diet is: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. The “Western Diet” (WD) is the name of the eating pattern used by many modern Americans and industrialized nations. According to Angela Betsaida B. Laguipo BSN, the Western Diet is, “a modern-day style diet that mostly contains high amounts of processed foods, red meat, high-fat dairy products, high-sugar foods, and pre-packaged foods, that increase the risk of chronic illness.” Additionally, the Western Diet is low in fruit and vegetables and consists of large portions, high calories, and excess sugar.
Lots of processed foods & meat, added fat & sugar, lots of everything – except fruits, vegetables, & whole grains.
Growing up I often heard the phrase, “You are what you eat.” I didn’t get it. Now equipped with knowledge of chemistry and food webs, I can wrap my head around the fact that humans live in this world, not just on it, and that we are connected to the ecology & biology of our food system through what we eat. Eating a Western Diet has a myriad of effects on the health of our bodies, minds, and environments.
“I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.” Michael Pollan
A Firmer Grasp
Science Journalist Michael Pollan writes extensively on the Western Diet in his book: In Defense of Food. Pollan tracks the development of the Western Diet to the industrialization of food and the rise of nutritionism. He sees this connection through a series of five movements:
- From Whole to Refined Foods
- From Complexity to Simplicity
- From Quality to Quantity
- From Leaves to Seeds
- From Food Culture to Food Science
Understanding these movements helps us to see the ways we think about food, how our patterns impact our health, and can help us understand how to escape harmful habits.
“By gaining a firmer grasp on the nature of the Western Diet – trying to understand it not only physiologically but also historically and ecologically – we can begin to develop a different way of thinking about food that might point a path out of our predicament.” Michael Pollan
Whole to Refined
Pollan writes that one of the most challenging features of the western diet is food that lies to our sense. Evolutionarily, we could trust what tasted good and sweet to be in season & ripe produce. In nature, sugar is found in fruits and some vegetables and gives us a slow-release form of energy while also being paired with crucial micronutrients and minerals. Refined sugar lies to our senses, telling us to eat more of things that are bad for us by leveraging the dopamine response of the brain. Refined sugar is broken down rapidly in the body and causes our insulin and blood sugar levels to skyrocket, wreaking havoc on many physiological systems.
In addition to creating food that tricks our senses, the process of refining food strips them of nutrients, leaving us with less nutritious food when we move from whole to refined. This trend in the western diet leaves us with nutrition inflation, causing us to eat more calories in search of the nutrients our body needs.
“The processing of foods typically robs them of nutrients, vitamins especially. Store food is food designed to be stored and transported over long distances, and the surest way to make food more stable and less vulnerable to pests is to remove the nutrients from it. In general, calories are much easier to transport than nutrients.” Michael Pollan
Complexity to Simplicity
The movement from diversity and complexity in our food to uniformity and simplicity is a characteristic of the Western Diet. Pollan writes, “At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification.” Historically, humans have eaten 80,000 different species, 3,000 of which have been widespread. Today 4 species (corn, soy, wheat, and rice) account for two thirds of the calories we eat. The lack of diversity in modern diets leads to a lack of diversity of nutrients and microbiome. The more diverse the food you eat, the more likely you are to cover your nutritional bases, a feat rarely accomplished in modern western eaters.
In addition to the lack of diversity in the species we eat, the modern diet is built on a system of industrialized farming, one that utilizes pesticides and other chemical techniques. Foods grown with the use of pesticides are less nutritious than foods grown organically (because the plant doesn’t have to defend itself, producing less complex chemistry inside the plant). Crop monocultures, GMOs, and chemical use also contribute to simplified soils. Simplified soil produces chemically simplified plants, and on up the food chain. leaving us lacking nutrients.
“When we eat processed, sugar-laden foods, we’re hungry all the time because our body is starved for the nutrients it requires.” Nicole LePera
Quality to Quantity
One characteristic of the Western Diet is the sheer amount of calories we consume; on average Americans consume 3600 calories a day, whereas the average number of calories used by our metabolism is around 1500 calories. This leaves us with an extreme daily calorie excess, making us fat and contributing to many health risks. The industrialized food system has excelled at pulling macronutrients (calories) form the land, but these gains in quantity have come at the expense of the quality of the food. The food grown today on industrialized farms is much less nutritious than food that was grown in the past or food that is grown organically. Lower density of nutrients in our foods leave us eating more calories to get the same amount of nutrients, making us fat and hungry.
“A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.” Michael Pollan
Overfed & Undernourished
Leaves to Seeds
Pollan writes, “Of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading “The Western Diet,” the shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all.” Seeds are very calorie dense; they are designed with the intent to have enough in them to make a plant grow. Building a diet with seeds at the base means we have a high calorie foundation, contributing to the quantity of calories we ingest. Leaves on the other hand are much less calorie dense and contain phytonutrients and micronutrients that we can only get from plants. Switching from a foundation of greens to one of seeds has caused to consume much higher amounts of calories, contributing to many health issues.
Food Culture to Food Science
Before the modern food era, people answered questions of what to eat and how to prepare it by referring to cultural knowledge. In the Western Diet, people turn towards science and nutritionism to answer those questions. Today, western eaters are caught up in a whirlwind of institutional imperatives – the food industry, nutrition science, and journalism – all trying to tell us what to eat and how. This knowledge base is contingent on a paradigm of reductionistic science, breaking the world down into its components and attempting to understand the whole. To use the cliché: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and trying to understand the whole of our food and nutrition through reductionism makes it so nutrition science falls short when understanding the complexity of the whole. We know that people eating a western diet are prone to diseases that seldom appear in people eating more traditional diets, a fact not helped by our loss of cultural wisdom around sustenance.
“The problem with nutrient by nutrient science is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.” Marion Neslee
Western Diseases
Refined foods, chemically simplified foods & soils, the lack of diversity, more calories and less nutrition, a foundation of seeds, and a dependence on food science and loss of food culture has created the environment in which western people find themselves now in: overfed, undernourished, and sick. The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be directly traced to the industrialization of our food and the emergence of the western diet. The way we are eating now is making us fat and sick with a wide variety of afflictions, showing us the relationship between how we farm, how we eat, and how we feel. As the western/American diet continues to spread and become the worlds diet, it becomes clear that a healthier world requires a paradigm shift around how and what we eat and produce.
“We have known for a century now that there is a complex of so-called Western Diseases – including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and a specific set of diet related cancers – that begin almost invariably to appear soon after a people abandons it traditional diet and way of life.” Michael Pollan
Impact of the Western Diet
Moving from whole to refined, complexity to simplicity, quality to quantity, leaves to seeds, and food culture to food science has created a world of nutrition where we are overfed, undernourished, sick, and fat. We eat high amounts of processed foods, red meat, high fat dairy, high sugar foods; lots and lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. We are starving for real nutrients and real foods, longing to feel good in our body and in our environment. We have created a system that pillages the environment instead of participates in it. A system that makes us sick & fat, and it is killing us. How we eat determines how the world is used and how our bodies are made. We need to rethink our food pattern to live our way into health and wellbeing.
Resources & Citations
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200220/What-the-western-diet-is-doing-to-your-brain.aspx#:~:text=The%20Western%20Pattern%20Diet%20(WPD,the%20risk%20of%20chronic%20illness.
