http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=286720

Nutrition vs. Food: Michael Pollan's Eater's Manifesto

EXCERPT:

"It's very hard to make money selling you oatmeal," he said. "Go to the store, you can buy a pound of plain oats for 79 cents. That's a lot of oats. The companies make money by making breakfast cereal out of the oats. Then they can charge you four or five bucks for a few pennies worth of oats."

I realized he was talking about Cheerios. Breakfast cereal is inconvenient, I told him, because you have to sit down at a table, and pour milk into a bowl with the Cheerios, and then eat with a spoon.

"For people like you," he said, "they invented breakfast bars." I realized he was talking about my Honey Nut Cheerios Milk 'n Cereal bars. "They have a layer of artificial milk going through the middle," he explained, "so you can eat your bowl of cereal at the computer, or in the car - no bowl, no pouring milk, no spoon. Then they're making ten or twenty dollars a pound for those oats."

So it's expensive, I said. I can afford a breakfast bar.

"The problem is that every step of additional processing makes the food less nutritious," he replied. "So they add lots of nutrients back in to the processing so they can make health claims. But they only add what they know is missing. There are other things in whole grains that the scientists don't know about. You'll be missing out on that. But you'll be up to date on your email."