36: “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.”Īnd, there’s the all-important last rule – thank goodness: “Break the rules once in a while.It started with a simple idea: when it comes to food, we would do well to model our diets after our grandparents, which is to say, we should eat less meat (most of our grandparents couldn’t afford to eat meat in the quantities most Americans do now) and far less processed food.įrom this basic premise sprouted Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, a slim handbook of food knowledge that brilliantly illustrates how different cultures with a broad range of traditions all share the same lasting food wisdom, and answers the common question, “What should I eat?” 27: “Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.” Many of the rules are based on traditional wisdom some are based on more modern notions. The first is: “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 … invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.”Īnd the second is that people who eat a range of traditional diets don’t suffer from those diseases. Mostly plants.” Pollan bemoans the fact that many people rely on “experts” to know what to eat when, really, there are just two major facts. The book is based on his mantra: “Eat food. Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and a professor at UC Berkeley, makes some of the advice clever: “If it came from a plant, eat it if it was made in a plant, don’t.” And it is really simple, with many of the rules along the lines of things many people know if they stop to think about it. Those and 61 other notions make up the influential author’s new book, “Food Rules” (Penguin, $11 paperback), meant to be a simple guide to eating, something anyone can use without reading through a lot of science and nutrition research.
Or maybe more like that little angel that sits on one shoulder: “Avoid food products that contain high fructose corn syrup.” (Not, he says, because it’s less healthful than sugar, but because it’s a sign of a highly processed product.) Michael Pollan is sounding suspiciously like my mother: “Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.” And: “Do all your eating at a table.” 64 Rules for Eating Right from Michael Pollan By Mary MacVean
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