What can nutrition science teach us about climate response?

Michael Pollan has offered the mantra that the key to our nutritional, agricultural, and environmental quandaries may be as fundamental as eating less while spending more on the food we do consume. It’s a useful rule of thumb that fits nicely into the need for most of us to see the world in simple, concrete terms.

Nutritionist Kate Geagan reminded me of “Pollan’s law” while a group of us tried to make sense of the impressive body of research being presented at a unique international gathering of passionate, inspiring scientists working on solutions to our growing human, agricultural, and environmental crises, being held this week in Greece. As deeply complex data are discussed among peers that add dimension to human understanding of the interactions between nutrition, genetics, food chemistry, and lifestyle, it becomes the job of nutritionists and dieticians (and those like Pollan) to absorb, analyze, and then distill pertinent information for a mainstream, food-consuming public that, especially in the United States, seems programmed for black-and-white oversimplification: low-fat diets, high-protein diets, high-fiber diets, French diet, Greek diet, nuts, chocolate, red wine, and so on. We seem only able to process silver bullets – which seem to change with mind-blowing frequency – making the job of the popular nutrition community impossibly daunting...

Read the rest of this article at www.climatecounts.org.

Wood Turner is the executive director of Climate Counts and is currently posting from Greece from the Stonyfield Farm-sponsored Inaugural Conference of the World Council on Genetics, Nutrition, and Fitness for Health. He and others are tweeting from the conference at @climatecounts using #greekhealth, and also on Facebook.

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About Climate Counts
Climate Counts is a non-profit organization bringing consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change. Launched with financial support from organics pioneer Stonyfield Farm, the Climate Counts Company Scorecard was developed with oversight from a panel of business and climate experts from leading non-governmental organizations and academic institutions. Criteria were chosen for their effectiveness at accomplishing a single goal – solving the global climate crisis. Since 2007, Climate Counts researchers have used these criteria to now rate the climate actions of nearly 150 companies (representing approximately 3,000 brands) in 16 industry sectors. Companies are given the opportunity to confirm or provide public data sources. Information on all scored companies is available at www.climatecounts.org .

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