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many of the trendy low-carb/high fat/high protein diets like Atkins, the Zone and South Beach. While it doesn’t dispute that these diets may indeed help you lose weight, this research does suggest that they aren’t good for you. Kudos to Michael Pollan, whose 2008 book In Defense of Food argues that the healthiest diet consists of smaller portions of high-quality plant-based foods. The book’s central creed reads, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.� And while his “eater’s manifesto� is supported by the IGF-1 study, Pollan maintains a level of skepticism toward using reductionist science to study diet, a practice he calls “nutritionism�: “The widely shared but unexamined assumption [of nutritionism] is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.� While Pollan is by no means anti-science, he argues that nutritionism has sent dietary guidelines on a roller-coaster ride in recent decades, with foods like margarine coming in and out of favor. The deluge of low-fat foods on the market, meanwhile, has done more to increase obesity rates then curb them, because, as we know now, dietary carbohydrates make people gain more weight than fat. Pollan argues that there is an ecology to food that makes it greater than the sum of its parts. It includes where the nutrients are from and what they are consumed with. The first part of his eater’s manifesto, “Eat food,� draws a distinction between industrially produced food and ecologically correct food, with only the latter truly qualifying as food. In the IGF-1 study, there is little mention of where the protein comes from, aside from the obvious fact that the vegans got all of their protein from plants. But the processes by which different proteins are created have different health implications on the eater. Protein from 100 percent grass-fed beef, for example, may be similar to protein from factory-farmed beef, but the factory-farmed beef is fed a diet of grain, which literally creates a different animal. Since cows didn’t evolve to eat grain, grain-fed cattle tend to get sick more often and are thus injected with more antibiotics. While I can’t say how these differences might affect IGF-1 levels in the blood of the cow eater, a relationship isn’t inconceivable. The fact that the IGF-1 study made no attempt to standardize the sources of the proteins in question is a big deal, I believe. Plant protein vs. animal protein; wild meat vs. domestic; free-range vs. confinement— these all have major bearing on the ecology of a meal, as would the presence or absence of a nice glass of wine along with it. So while I read with interest the results of studies like this one, I’d be more interested if the study distinguished between the protein in a Whopper and the protein in a piece of grass-fed beef. Nutritionism might not value the difference between clean, local food and industrially produced food, but I agree with Pollan. It matters. THE BOHEMIAN

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