Chapter 16

We as omnivores have the dillema that we eat such a wide variety of food that when it comes to choosing what is best and safest it is up to us. The advantages of being an omnivore is the wide selection of food we have to choose from, some bad and some good. People who can not stand the taste of something or cant eat it because of allergies need not to fear, because the body can gather nutrients if the same value from other food. There are not many creatures out there that are as well adapted as we are to eat anything we please almost. We are adapted with teeth for both meat and plants. We have complex taste buds that act as our first defense against food that could be potentially bad, as well as allowing the body to know what to ingest the most of to provide the greatest amount of energy. Another adaptation that opens our diet up is the adaptation of cooking. WE are able to cook many plants and remove their bitter toxins, so that they appeal to us and we are able to gain valuable vitamins from them. When Pollan talks about the rat and how it treats it's stomach like a laboratory, it made me think of how people get sick when they rapidly change their diet. People who have been accustomed to eating high fat, high sodium, and high sugar diets can become sick if they switch to healthy food minus the fat, salt and sugar. This is because the body becomes used to running on the things that it is provided with and when it changes suddenly the body does not have the things that it has been used to getting for who knows how long.