Here's a question for you to ponder: we know that obesity/overeating is harmful to the body, right? It leads to Type 2 diabetes, among a myriad of other harmful effects. So why do we continue to eat the way we do? Author and academic (at the University of California, Berkeley) Michael Pollan has taken a valiant stab at answering that question. Pollan is the author of the well-received book The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I have not read the book (though I'm adding it to my list of books to read in 2007), but I did read Pollan's fab article "Unhappy Meals" in this weekend's New York Times. Our obesity problem, says Pollan, is all tied up with a national hangup about eating and nutrition.

The "elephant in the room," writes Pollan, is the Western way of eating. To be healthier and to avoid diseases like Type 2 diabetes, we should cut consumption of meat and carbs, avoid processed foods, and eat lots more fruits and vegetables. In the case of Type 2 diabetes, the nation needs to stop, in the word's of a scientist quoted by Pollan, "mainlining glucose." And yet...it doesn't happen. Instead, Americans subscribe to fad diets, they invest in expensive exercise equipment and gym memberships. Moreover, says Pollan, Americans are beset by "nutritionism." That is, we try to prevent obesity and diet-related diseases like diabetes by identifying and eliminating the harmful substances in our foods - like salt, fat or carbs - when what we need is to totally modify our diets. He (politely) places a lot of the blame for this on scientists and the media for supplying us with a constant stream of nutrition-related advice that's so confusing and contradictory and seemingly-important that we keep forgetting about that big old "elephant" - the Western diet as a whole. This focus, he says, "has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health." It's a conundrum alright.