Food Rules
An Eater's Manual
Energy, Nutrition, Modern Classic Michael Pollan is the author of a number of New York Times best-selling books on nutrition. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. If you’re looking for a SUPER compact, witty look at the primary rules on how to eat well, this is it. It’s a fun, witty, concise guide to eating well featuring 64 food rules structured around Pollan’s seven words of wisdom: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Big Ideas we explore include the 2 Facts of nutrition everyone can agree on, Rule #1, why low-fat made us fat, and the final rule (#64).
Big Ideas
- Nutrition: 2 FactsEveryone agrees on.
- Rule #1: Eat FoodNot edible foodlike substances.
- Will Your Food Rot?Good test.
- 66% - 80%Not too much.
- FuelDon’t get yours where you car does.
- Final RuleBreak them once in a while.
“I had a deeply unsettling moment when, after spending a couple years researching nutrition for my last book, In Defense of Food, I realized that the answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we should eat wasn’t so complicated after all, and in fact could be boiled down to just seven words:
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 it was also somewhat alarming, because my publisher was expecting a few thousand words more than that. Fortunately for both of us, I realized that the story of how simple a question as what to eat had ever gotten so complicated was one worth telling, and that became the focus of that book.
The focus of this book is very different. It is much less about theory, history, and science than it is about our daily lives and practice. In this short, radically pared-down book, I unpack those seven words of advice into a comprehensive set of rules, or personal policies, designed to help you eat real food in moderation and, by doing so, substantially get off the Western diet. The rules are phrased in everyday language; I deliberately avoid the vocabulary of nutrition or biochemistry, though in most cases there is scientific research to back them up.”
~ Michael Pollan from Food Rules
Michael Pollan is the author of a number of New York Times best-selling books on nutrition (including In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma). He’s a longtime New York Times contributor and Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
If you’re looking for a SUPER compact, witty look at the primary rules on how to eat well, this is it. I HIGHLY recommend you pick up a copy as I think it’s the page-for-page best guide on the basic fundamentals of nutrition.(Get a copy here.)
It’s a fun, witty, concise guide to eating well featuring 64 food rules structured around Pollan’s seven words of wisdom:
Part 1 = Eat food.
Part 2 = Mostly plants.
Part 3 = Not too much.
I’m excited to share a few of my favorite Big Ideas we can apply to our lives TODAY so let’s jump straight in!
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Listen to the PodcastThe Two Facts of Nutrition
“I learned that in fact science knows a lot less about nutrition than you would expect—that in fact nutrition science is, to put it charitably, a very young science. It’s still trying to figure out exactly what happens in your body when you sip a soda, or what is going on deep in the soul of a carrot to make it so good for you, or why in the world you have so many neurons—brain cells!—in your stomach, of all places. It’s a fascinating subject, and someday the field may produce definitive answers to the nutritional questions that concern us, but—as nutritionists themselves will tell you—they’re not there yet. Not even close. 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.
But if I’ve learned volumes about all we don’t know about nutrition, I’ve also learned a small number of very important things we do know about food and health. This is what I meant when I said the picture got simpler the deeper I went.
There are basically two important things you need to know about the links between diet and health, two facts that are not in dispute. All the contending parties in the nutrition wars agree on them. And, even more important for our purposes, these facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them.”
Two facts.
We’ll get to those in a moment.
For now, you’ve gotta kinda laugh imagining nutrition science as being about as developed as surgery was in 1650. Hah. And, d’oh!
Bottom line: There’s a lot we DON’T know about how our diets affect our health.
But, Pollan tells us, everyone agrees on these two facts:
Fact #1. Populations that eat a typical Western 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” suffer from the typical Western diseases of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
(Remember: 80% of heart disease and more than 33% of cancers can be linked to that diet.)
Fact #2. Populations that don’t eat that stuff don’t suffer from those chronic diseases. Their traditional diets vary TREMENDOUSLY—from the super high fat diets of the Inuit in Greenland who eat mostly seal blubber to the super high carbohydrate diets of Central American Indians who eat a ton of maize and beans to the super high protein diets of the Masai in Africa who eat mostly cattle meat, blood and milk. But, even with that extreme variety, they DO NOT suffer from the chronic diseases we suffer from.
Pollan tells us there “is no single ideal human diet” and that the human omnivore has evolved to handle a variety of different diets.
EXCEPT ONE: The Western diet that most of us now eat.
Most nutritionists argue about which particular component within the Western diet is the ultimate culprit. For our purposes, we simply need to step back and remove the primary staples of the Western diet.
As Pollan says, “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.”
Let’s review the main culprits:
- Lots of processed foods and meat
- Lots of added fat and sugar
- Lots of refined grains
- Lots of everything but vegetables, fruits and whole grains
How’re you doing with that? See any opportunities to optimize?! What’s the #1 thing you could do today that would most help you?
P.S. There are those neurons—brain cells!!!—in the gut again. Our second brain. Remember: There are more neurons in your gut than your head. And, your second brain produces more serotonin than the brain in our heads. Amazing.
Nutrition Rule #1: Eat Food (Vs. Edible Foodlike Substances)
“Eat food. These days this is easier said than done, especially when seventeen thousand new products show up in the supermarket each year, all vying for your food dollar. But most of these items don’t deserve to be called food—I call them edible foodlike substances. They’re highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists, consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no normal person keeps in the pantry, and they contain chemical additives with which the human body has not been long acquainted. Today much of the challenge of eating well comes down to choosing real food and avoiding these industrial novelties.”
Alright. So, do you remember our seven word food rules mantra?
See if you can retrieve it in that brain of yours:
1. ______ 2. ______ 3. ______ 4. ______ 5. ______ 6. ______ 7. ______
(And remember that “active retrieval”—although it feels a little uncomfortable because you need to stretch your brain a bit, is the key to the science of learning/Learning 101. Make It Stick!)
You get it? Here it is: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
(<— Let’s memorize that in the course of this Note. :)
So, Chapter 1/Rule #1 is very simple: EAT FOOD.
Note: Do *not* eat “Edible foodlike substances.”
If your great-grandmother didn’t eat it and your 3rd grader can’t pronounce the ingredients, YOU shouldn’t eat it. It really is that simple.
Eliminate the processed foods that have become “edible foodlike substances.”
If we all just followed that ONE rule, we’d be doing pretty darn well.
P.S. Joe de Sena puts it this way in Spartan Up!: “Here’s the one Spartan rule you must live by: ‘If your great grandparents didn’t eat it, you probably shouldn’t eat it.’”
Rule #13: Eat Only Foods That Will Eventually Rot
“What does it mean for food to ‘go bad’? It usually means that the fungi and bacteria and insects and rodents with whom we compete for nutrients and calories have gotten to it before we did. Food processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from these competitors. This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing to them, by removing nutrients from it that attract competitors, or by removing other nutrients likely to turn rancid, like omega-3 fatty acids. The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is. Real food is alive—and therefore should eventually die. (There are a few exceptions to this rule: For example, honey has a shelf life measured in centuries.) Note: Most of the immortal foodlike substances in the supermarket are found in the middle aisles.”
That’s Rule #13: “Eat only foods that will eventually rot.”
We talked about this in Clean Gut: The longer the shelf life of the food you eat, the shorter your life will be.
Alejandro Junger basically tells us that those “preservatives” that extend shelf life should really be considered “antibiotics”: “There are other, more insidious antibiotics decimating our intestinal flora. These are found in our food. Some of the same antibiotics doctors prescribe to human patients are administered to livestock by the food industry. These antibiotics kill your good bacteria as well. Now include the number of antibiotics the food industry adds to any processed food that comes in a box, jar, bag, tube, or bottle. Many chemicals are added to food during processing to kill any bacteria or funguses that would shorten a product’s shelf life. The food industry calls them preservatives, but in essence they act as antibiotics. Other chemicals, such as coloring agents and texture, odor, and flavor chemicals, also make it hard for good bacteria to thrive. How else would something edible last for years without decomposing? Next time you shop the aisles of a supermarket, remember the longer the shelf life of what you are eating, the shorter yours will be.”
So, rule of thumb: Is the food you are eating eventually going to rot?
If not, don’t eat it or YOU will rot faster than you like.
Here’s a way to use a Big Idea from Willpower 101 where we learned that we need to HEAT UP the benefits our future self will experience and COOL DOWN the impulses we feel to satisfy ourselves right.this.moment.
The next time you’re at the grocery store and feel tempted to buy never-perishable stuff, ask yourself how your future self is going to feel an hour (or two or ten) after you eat it AND imagine yourself prematurely old and sick X decades ahead. :0
Let’s make the connection. And, let’s be nice to our future selves!!!
And, remember that the best place to buy your willpower is at the grocery store so precommit to NOT buying that stuff before you even go in. Then, don’t even walk down those aisles, eh?!
* waves goodbye to overly processed foods *
P.S. Pop quiz!!! You remember our seven word food rules mantra? :)
1. ______ 2. ______ 3. ______ 4. ______ 5. ______ 6. ______ 7. ______
Hara Hachi Bu + Je n’ai plus faim.
“Nowadays we think it’s normal and right to eat until you’re full, but many cultures specifically advise stopping well before that point is reached. The Japanese have a saying—hara hachi bu—counseling people to stop eating when they are 80 percent full. The Ayurvedic tradition in India advises eating until you are 75 percent full; the Chinese specify 70 percent, and the prophet Muhammad described a full belly as one that contained 1/3 food and 1/3 liquid—and 1/3 air, i.e., nothing. (Note the relatively narrow range specified in all this advice: somewhere between 67 percent and 80 percent of capacity. Take your pick.) There’s also a German expression that says: ‘You need to tie off the sack before it gets completely full.’ And how many of us have grandparents who talk of ‘leaving the table a little bit hungry?’ Here again the French may have something to teach us. To say ‘I’m hungry’ in French you say, ‘J’ai faim’—‘I have hunger’—and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but ‘Je n’ai plus faim’—‘I have no more hunger.’ That is a completely different way of thinking about satiety. So: Ask yourself not, Am I full? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.”
That’s Rule #46: “Stop eating before you’re full.”
Hara hachi bu.
Je n’ai plus fam.
66% full. 70% full. 80% full. <— Take your pick.
But remember, it’s not 110% full.
That’s a key idea from the “Not too much” section, of course. :)
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Food Rule #57
“American gas stations now make more money inside selling food (and cigarettes) than they do outside selling gasoline. But consider what kind of food this is: Except perhaps for the milk and water, it’s all highly processed, imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become ‘processed corn stations’: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you. Don’t eat there.”
That’s Rule #57: “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”
(<— Funny.)
Quick q: Do you fuel up at the same place your car gets fueled up? If so, STOP!
Plus: Know that those sugary sodas are among the worst possible things you (and your kids) can consume. Unless you’re deliberately looking to jack up your odds of getting diabesity, leave them on the shelf!
Final Rule: Break The Rules Once in a While
“Obsessing over food rules is bad for your happiness, and probably for your health too. Our experience over the past few decades suggests that dieting and worrying too much about nutrition has made us no healthier or slimmer; cultivating a relaxed attitude toward food is important. There will be special occasions when you will want to throw these rules out the window. All will not be lost… What matters is not the special occasion but the everyday practice—the default habits that govern your eating on a typical day. ‘All things in moderation,’ it is often said, but we should never forget the wise addendum, sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde: ‘Including moderation.’”
That is Rule #64: “Break the rules once in a while.” <— Our final rule.
We want to have a clear sense of our basic guidelines, practice them regularly AND use them as guiding stars not absolute commandments.
Joe Manganiello puts it well—telling us to be strict yet flexible: “As I’ve mentioned before, this type of diet is meant to be strict yet flexible. While that might seem contradictory, it actually makes sense. … You have to be consistent, and you can’t make excuses. But if a plan isn’t flexible, odds are you won’t be able to stay on it for the long run. And since consistency is the foundation of success, you need a plan that you can adjust. Not to mention, if you’re on target every day for every meal, it makes it much easier to provide yourself with leeway to enjoy one meal every week without any restrictions.”
All things in moderation. Including moderation. :)
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