Nutrition

Last week when our class went to Syracuse to hear Michael Pollan speak, we heard loud and clear his emphasis on our somewhat false faith in nutritional science. He spoke about nutrition as a relatively new science that we have not yet mastered, and especially spoke about the increasing view Americans have that we eat only to supply our body with scientifically determined elements that create the perfect diet.

I come from a family of athletes- my three brothers spend most of their time playing soccer and baseball, my mom has now run 2 marathons, my stepdad (perhaps the craziest of all) has run several IronMan races, and we all love to ski. Needless to say, in a house with so many active people, we go through a lot of food each week (the poor milkman nearly breaks his back getting all 7 gallons of milk to our front stoop). Our cabinets are also filled with many "exercise" foods-- granola bars, protein drinks, "goo," energy gummies--you name it, we've tried it.

Hearing Michael Pollan speak about nutrition got me thinking about the conjunction of these two things--exercise and nutrition, and where Pollan's message fits in. Pollan argued that healthy people exist on all parts of the planet eating an unbelievable variety of different foods. If this is true, can athletes succeed to their maximum capacity eating by Pollan's mantra? Do some sports require different diets than others?

I recently heard that Lance Armstrong (one of my family's all time heroes) eats by the "6 ingredient diet." With this diet, Armstrong eats only foods with less than 6 ingredients, excluding a wide variety of the sports foods I mentioned in my description of my family's cabinets. This emphasizes a clear decision on the part of one of the world's most successful athletes to return to less processed foods, and perhaps to eat a little more at home (where he has control over the things he puts in his food). Armstrong's performance in this year's Tour de France is no indication that this diet has created maximum physical performance (he crashed in a very important stage, for those of you who watch Wimbledon instead of the Tour on summer mornings), but his decision to switch to this diet could be a sign that Pollan's message is infiltrating a genre of eating that has long been ruled by nutritional information, however accurate.