Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

by Michael Pollan

It’s gotten to the point where we don’t see foods anymore but instead look right through them to the nutrients (good and bad) they contain, and of course to the calories—all these invisible qualities in our food that, properly understood, supposedly hold the secret to eating well. But for all the scientific and pseudoscientific food baggage we’ve taken on in recent years, we still don’t know what we should be eating.

Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650—very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I’ll wait awhile.

Populations that eat a so-called Western diet—generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet.

Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.

People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back, and relatively quickly.

for the Nutritional Industrial Complex this uncertainty is not necessarily a problem, because confusion too is good business:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This was the bottom line, and it was satisfying to have found it, a piece of hard ground deep down at the bottom of the swamp of nutrition science: seven words of plain English, no biochemistry degree required.

But I am skeptical of a lot of what passes for nutritional science, and I believe that there are other sources of wisdom in the world and other vocabularies in which to talk intelligently about food.

focusing relentlessly on nutrients obscures other, more important truths about food.

many of the rules in this book are designed to help you avoid heavily processed foods—which I prefer to call “edible foodlike substances.”

(Eat food.)

But most of these items don’t deserve to be called food—I call them edible foodlike substances.

Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.

Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.

there are now some forty types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetener, dextrin, dextrose, fructo-oligosaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert sugar, polydextrose, sucrose, turbinado sugar, and so on.

Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

Avoid food products that make health claims.

The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

Avoid food products with the wordoid “lite” or the terms “low-fat” or “nonfat” in their names.

Since the low-fat campaign began in the late 1970s, Americans actually have been eating more than 500 additional calories per day, most of them in the form of refined carbohydrates like sugar.

Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.

Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

As for the 5 percent of food ads that promote whole foods (the prune or walnut growers or the beef ranchers), common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush—these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Eat only foods that will eventually rot.

Real food is alive—and therefore it should eventually die. (There are a few exceptions to this rule: For example, honey has a shelf life measured in centuries.)

Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.

Get out of the supermarket whenever you can.

Buy your snacks at the farmers’ market.

Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans.

Don’t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

Use in posts or article.

It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)

See wide variety rapini/broccoli rabe names.

Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

For BR & DNY Content Farms.

Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants—the antioxidants? the fiber? the omega-3 fatty acids?—but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases;

Also, by eating a diet that is primarily plant based, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods—with the exception of seeds, including grains and nuts—are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you eat. (And consuming fewer calories protects against many chronic diseases.) Vegetarians are notably healthier than carnivores, and they live longer.

Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.

“flexitarians”—people who eat meat a couple of times a week—are just as healthy as vegetarians.

there is evidence that the more meat there is in your diet—red meat in particular—the greater your risk of heart disease and cancer.

Thomas Jefferson was probably onto something when he recommended a mostly plant-based diet that uses meat chiefly as a “flavor principle.”

Content farm

“Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].”

Eat your colors.

The idea that a healthy plate of food will feature several different colors is a good example of an old wives’ tale about food that turns out to be good science too. The colors of many vegetables reflect the different antioxidant phytochemicals they contain—anthocyanins, polyphenols, flavonoids, carotenoids. Many of these chemicals help protect against chronic diseases, but each in a slightly different way, so the best protection comes from a diet containing as many different phytochemicals as possible.

Drink the spinach water.

The water in which vegetables are cooked is rich in vitamins and other healthful plant chemicals. Save it for soup or add it to sauces.