Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

by Michael Pollan

FACT 1. 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.

FACT 2. Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.

omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

There is actually a third, very hopeful fact that flows from these two: 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.1

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Following @MichaelPollan's proverbial Food Rule

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

@michaelpollan Is glucose/fructose syrup OK? Michael Pollan: @tomk_ No, that's just the British name for HFCS.

Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients. Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.