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Through all this advice and critique of food, a few ideas have emerged as most insightful and interesting to me. As I read about food, I found myself getting very stressed without knowing why. I thought this was interesting when I got to the chapters surrounding our obsession with food nutrition, with my interest culminating in chapter ten. I feel as though I have grown up being taught that I must only eat the least caloric and most nutritious foods, and that doing so was indeed nutrition itself. In addition, I have grown up in an eating climate where dessert is a guilty pleasure, not really something I can fully enjoy. Because of all this, I believe reading more about what I should and should not eat simply fueled this obsession Pollan describes. .
In chapter ten, Pollan focuses on the work of Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Rozin has done a series of experiments on Americans in regards to their diet and perceptions of food intake. The study that struck me most was that in which participants were asked to word associate with "chocolate cake ". What Rozin found is that the top response for Americans was "guilt ". When the same experiment was done with the French, their most popular response was "celebration ". Clearly, this shows a discrepancy in how Americans think about foods that are "bad " for us in comparison with our foreign counterparts. However, it is not that this is simply how we think about such foods, it is how we obsess over them. Guilt is a feeling of anxiety, a very unhealthy phenomenon that deteriorates health. Also, anxiety is a proponent of the mind, one that is associated with many mental disorders. This is significant because unlike the French, we cannot see chocolate cake as something that can be enjoyed in moderation for special occasions, but rather as something that we should always feel bad about consuming. .
Our health is significantly worse off than most European countries, though they do not have the same chocolate cake phobia that we do.