LEWISTON – Michael Pollan sums up his philosophy aimed at transforming the way Americans view their relationship with food in seven simple words.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The best-selling author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” was welcomed by a rousing crowd Monday night that overflowed the aisles and spilled from the doorways of the Bates College Chapel. The University of California-Berkley professor drew such a large crowd – several hundred more than expected – that college officials had to ask more than 100 people to leave the floor area in front of the stage and Pollan himself agreed to an encore presentation Tuesday at 9 a.m.

“I think it’s really great that there are so many young people here. These are our young voters. This is the next generation,” said Calla Carothers, 45, of Cumberland, one of the hundreds who packed the chapel in order to hear Pollan’s message.

The annual Otis Lecture is presented by Bates through the Philip J. Otis Endowment.

Pollan’s speech comes at a time when Americans are more conscious of their diet.

His recently-released follow-up “In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution” calls attention to what he considers an American paradox that the more people worry about nutrition, the less healthy the nation seems to become.

“There are a lot of very good solutions and alternatives out there … in answer to this very basic question: where does our food come from,” Pollan said. “This was not a question that needed to be asked 100 years ago.”

While “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” traced the roots of the various foods American’s eat from initial source to final meal, his most recent calls into question marketers, nutritional scientists and mass-producers of what he calls “edible food-like substances.” He likened America’s quest for the next healthy diet and latest and greatest nutritional trends to religion, an ideology that, according to Pollan, changed more in the last 100 years than it had the first 10,000 years of human existence.

“There are satanic nutrients that we’re driving from the diet, and there are blessed nutrients on the other side,” Pollan quipped. “This is how we organize food. It’s the … struggle between good and evil. The identity of good and evil nutrients is changing all the time.”

Pollan said nutritionism, an ideology that assumes scientifically-identified nutrients in foods determine their dietary value, leads to breaking down food into its good and bad nutrients, but doesn’t look at the whole picture. As an example, he pointed to the “fat free food” craze of the late 1980s where people tended to overindulge on products labeled “fat free” because the notion of “fat free” equaled “guilt free” in the minds of many Americans.

According to Pollan, nutritionism ultimately lends a hand to the processed food industry because of the ease with which processed foods can be scientifically engineered to avoid the constantly changing nutritional evil of the day.

“It gives an enormous edge to the foods where all you need to do is play with the dial,” Pollan said.

The problem was that fat-free foods in many instances led to an obesity problem the population couldn’t quite understand. What happened, Pollan stressed, was that just because something was labeled fat free didn’t mean there was a free pass. The result, he said, was a public health disaster because people were eating more processed foods with less nutrients rather than eating less whole foods with better nutrients.

“You have this mystery on one end of the food chain which is the complexity of food,” Pollan said. “And on the other side, you have this mystery of the complexity of the human digestive system.”

Pollan pointed out the documented, direct correlation between conditions like heart disease, Type II diabetes and certain types of cancers and the Western (Civilization) diet. He encouraged the crowd to consider several simple, common sense rules when considering future food choices. Two were met with a round of applause from the crowd: Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize; and don’t eat anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce.

In the end, Pollan called for the nation and its millions of eaters to return to agricultural roots where overall substance matters more than the latest dietary fad. For many attending Pollan’s lecture, challenging Americans to take a hard look at not only what’s in their food, but how it arrived at their dinner table has important political implications this election season.

One person who strongly agreed with Pollan’s message was Robert Fish, co-founder of Food for Maine’s Future, a nonprofit organization committed to building a secure, sustainable and democratic local food system.

“In his books he lays out great examples and avenues to follow to reach our goal,” Fish said. “Food security and food independence – it’s an issue of national security and if we can’t create these local avenues, then where are we going to be if the cost of oil one day prohibits the trucks from traveling from California to here?”

Another strong believer in Pollan’s message is Scarborough resident Roger Doiron, whose organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, urges America to “Eat the View” by planting local gardens in their front yards as a way to combat the nation’s dependence on mass-produced edible, foodlike substances such as those discussed by Pollan.

Doiron has drawn national attention this past year by calling on the next administration to plant a “Victory Garden” on several acres of the White House lawn.

“It’s an important discussion because we need to completely rethink the way we produce and eat food,” Doiron said of Pollan’s ideas. “Our food system is built on the false notion that food can come from anywhere at anytime regardless of the distance.”