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Michael Pollan Food Rules List In Post
In the post below, someone requested the list of rules from the book. Here they are:
1. Eat food
2. Don?t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn?t recognize as food
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry
4. Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup
5. Avoid food products that have some form of sugar (or sweetener listed among) the top three ingredients
6. Avoid food products that have more than 5 ingredients
7. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce
8. Avoid food products that make health claims
9. Avoid food products with the wordoid ?lite? or the terms ?low fat? or ?nonfat? in their names
10. Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not
11. Avoid foods you see advertised on television
12. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
13. Eat only foods that will eventually rot
14. Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature
15. Get out of the supermarket whenever you can
16. Buy your snacks at the farmers market
17. Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans
18. Don?t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap
19. If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don?t.
20. It?s not food if it arrived through the window of your car
21. It?s not food if it?s called by the same name in every language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos or Pringles)
22. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
23. Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food
24. 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].
25. Eat your colors
26. Drink the spinach water
27. Eat animals that have themselves eaten well
28. If you have space, buy a freezer
29. Eat like an omnivore
30. Eat well-grown food from healthy soil
31. Eat wild foods when you can
32. Don?t overlook the oily little fishes
33. Eat some foods that have been predigested by bacterial or fungi
34. Sweeten and salt your food yourself
35. Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature
36. Don?t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk
37. The whiter the bread, the sooner you?ll be dead
38. Favor the kinds of oils and grains that have traditionally been stone-ground
39. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself
40. Be the kind of person who takes supplements ? then skip the supplements
41. Eat more lie the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
42. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism
43. Have a glass of wine with dinner
44. Pay more, eat less
45. Eat less
46. Stop eating before you?re full
47. Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored
48. Consult your gut
49. Eat slowly
50. The banquet is in the first bite
51. Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it
52. Buy smaller plates and glasses
53. Serve a proper portion and don?t go back for seconds
54. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like pauper
55. Eat meals
56. Limit your snacks to unprocessed plant foods
57. Don?t get your fuel from the same place your car does
58. Do all your eating at a table
59. Try not to eat alone
60. Treat treats as treats
61. Leave something on your plate
62. Plant a vegetable garden if you have space, a window box if you don?t
63. Cook
64. Break the rules once in a while
Re: Michael Pollan Food Rules List In Post
Can anyone explain this on to me, please?
17. Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans.
Best sound ever: baby's heartbeat! (Heard @ 10w1d)
- rather than eating food that has been cooked/prepared/created by a corporation
Thank you very much for this. I don't quite understand this one either:
41. Eat more lie the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. (Is the "lie" supposed to be "like?")
Yes it's "like." Here's what the follow-up paragraphs to Rule 41 say:
People who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than those of us eating a modern Western diet of processed foods. Any traditional diet will do: If it were not a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn't still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others, Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats welll as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, for example, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fats and white flour?!?) as much as their food habits: small portions eaten at leisurely communal meals; no second helpings or snacking. Pay attention, too, to the combinations of foods in traditional cultures: In Latin America, corn is traditionally cooked with lime and eaten with beans; what would otherwise be a nutrionally deficient staple becomes the basis of a healthy, balanced diet. (The beans supply amino acids lacking in corn, and the lime makes niacin available). Cultures that took corn from Latin America without beans or the lime would end up with serious nutritional deficiencies such as pellagra. Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.
I agree with a lot of this, but not all. For example, it's pretty wasteful for everyone to leave food on their plate every time they eat. Also, I saw him explain the "eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself," rule on tv, and I remember thinking "hmm, it's really not THAT hard to make 4 dozen cookies once a week." lol. And, while I think I see what he's getting at w/ "stop eating before you're full" (stop eating when you're satisfied but not stuffed?), the only time I made a point to stop eating before I was full (aside from saving room for dessert) was when I had an ED, so I'm kind of turned off by that. I guess I'd rather him say "stop eating when you're satisfied" or "don't stuff yourself."
I do really like his overall approach, based on this list and what I saw in the interview I watched.
Thank you! I do understand the virtue of eating culturally relevant diets--it makes sense--Italians, Greeks, etc are basically the poster children for eating locally and seasonally. I was actually more confused if "lie" was a super-EF term that I wasn't aware of. "like" makes complete sense in the statement--it just seemed like the entire post was cut and pasted so I was a little confused as to why there would be a typo in the middle of the sentence.