
About the Show
In Defense of Food
Join best-selling author Michael Pollan on a fascinating journey to answer the question: What should I eat to be healthy? Cutting through confusion and busting myths and misconceptions, In Defense of Food shows how common sense and old-fashioned wisdom can help us rediscover the pleasures of eating and avoid the chronic diseases so often associated with the modern diet.
Pollan’s journey of discovery takes him from the plains of Tanzania, where one of the
Join best-selling author Michael Pollan on a fascinating journey to answer the question: What should I eat to be healthy? Cutting through confusion and busting myths and misconceptions, In Defense of Food shows how common sense and old-fashioned wisdom can help us rediscover the pleasures of eating and avoid the chronic diseases so often associated with the modern diet.
Pollan’s journey of discovery takes him from the plains of Tanzania, where one of the world’s last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers still eats the way our ancestors did, to Loma Linda, California, where a group of Seventh Day Adventist vegetarians live longer than almost anyone else on earth, and eventually to Paris, where the French diet, rooted in culture and tradition, proves surprisingly healthy. Along the way he shows how a combination of faulty nutrition science and deceptive marketing practices have encouraged us to replace real food with scientifically engineered “food-like substances.” And he explains why the solution to our dietary woes is in fact remarkably simple:
Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Meet the Host
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is the author of five New York Times Best Sellers: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, The Botany of Desire (which was also adapted for PBS in 2009), In Defense of Food, Food Rules and, mostly recently, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. In 2010 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.