Analysis Of The American Paradox By Michael Pollan

Nowadays, people pay more attention to their health with the improvement of our life quality. Nutrition science is popularized on newspaper, online websites and many other social media. In the essay” The American Paradox,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at University of California, Berkeley, argues that Americans have an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating because we care more about the health consequences of our food choice instead of eating with pleasure. Pollan claims that the food marketing machine, nutrition science, and journalism are main forces for Americans to change their diet. Pollan uses the conflicting reports of scientific studies of low-fat diet and dietary fiber as examples of bad influence of journalism and the

Even though there are same products on the shop shelves, people prefer to buy the food that has the labels of low fat or more nutrition. But these labels can be a big factor that causes people to live in an unhealthy way. According to the study published in Food Quality and Preference, it claims that people are more easily influenced by the labeling highlighted on the front of food packaging, particularly nutrition claims. For example, the obese people prefer the low-fat coke rather than other coke with regular sugar. This kind of nutrition claims gives people psychological comfort that makes them eat without worrying about being obese and unhealthy. But this kind of mental comfort is precisely what lead the obese people remain in an unhealthy obsession with nutrition scientific data because they will rely on what the labels tell them and drink or eat more than they eat the regular food. The nutrition claims make people trust what they eat is healthy, so they release their desire of eating that food with nutrition labelings. But they forget every food has a constant amount of nutrition remained in the food. If they eat that food everyday without controlling, then they will never lose their weight. Above all, the nutrition claims provide a psychological comfort for the people who are eating in an unhealthy which is the main reason makes American people remain in sub-health