Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Jackie Funk

Author:   Michael Pollan

Genre:  Non Fiction, Food, Health, Science, Nutrition

152 pages, published December 29, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The title of Food Rules describes its content perfectly.  In this short book Michael Pollan, the author of many best-selling books on food (including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food; both of which I read and enjoyed) offers the reader practical advice on what to eat and what not to eat.  His main advice is to “eat food, mostly plants, not too much.”  The book elaborates on each part of this guidance with enough explanation to understand the reason behind the recommendation.

Quotes 

“Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human 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 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!”

 

“Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.”

 

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

 

“As grandmothers used to say, ‘Better to pay the grocer than the doctor”

 

“The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

 

“Use the apple test. If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry.”

 

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

 

“…There’s a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. ”

 

“For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.”

 

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

 

“Be the kind of person who takes supplements — then skip the supplements.”

 

“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].”

 

“Leave something on your plate… ‘Better to go to waste than to waist”

 

“Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.”

 

“So don’t drink your sweets, and remember: There is no such thing as a healthy soda.”

 

“The banquet is in the first bite.”

 

“For as you go on, you’ll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.”

 

“So: Ask yourself not, Am I full? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.” 

My Take

Having read and enjoyed two previous books by Michael Pollan, I was looking forward to this mini-book which distilled his eating philosophy into small, bite-sized, easily remembered chunks.  I was not disappointed.  Food Rules offers a lot of pithy, common-sense advice in response to the age old question:  What should I eat?  While I’m still following the low-carb recommendation of Gary Taubes (author of Why We Get Fat), I am intentionally eating more vegetables and some fruit after being reminded of their healthful properties.