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Authors: Michael Pollan

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BOOK: Food Rules
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FaCT 2. 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 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! (While it is true that we generally live longer than people used to, or than people in some traditional cultures do, most of our added years owe to gains in infant mortality and child health, not diet.)
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 q uickly.
1
In one analysis, a typical American population that departed even modestly from the Western diet (and lifestyle) could reduce its chances of getting coronary heart disease by 80 percent, its chances of type 2 diabetes by 90 percent, and its chances of colon cancer by 70 percent.
2
Yet, oddly enough, these two (or three) sturdy facts are not the center of our nutritional research or, for that matter, our public health campaigns around diet. Instead, the focus is on identifying
the
evil nutrient in the Western diet so that food manufacturers might tweak their products, thereby leaving the diet undisturbed, or so that pharmaceutical makers might develop and sell us an antidote for it. Why? Well, there’s a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you p rocess 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. So we ignore the elephant in the room and focus instead on good and evil nutrients, the identities of which seem to change with every new study. But for the Nutritional Industrial Complex this uncertainty is not necessarily a problem, because confusion too is good business: The nutrition experts become indispensable; the food manufacturers can reengineer their products (and health claims) to reflect the latest findings, and those of us in the media who follow these issues have a constant stream of new food and health stories to report. Everyone wins. Except, that is, for us eaters.
As a journalist I fully appreciate the value of widespread public confusion: We’re in the explanation business, and if the answers to the questions we explore got too simple, we’d be out of work. Indeed, I had a deeply unsettling moment when, after spending a couple of 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 more words than that. Fortunately for both of us, I realized that the story of how so 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.
This book is not antiscience. To the contrary, in researching it and vetting these rules I have made good use of science and scientists. But I am skeptical of a lot of what passes for nutritional science, and I believe that there are other sources of wisdom in the world and other vocabularies in which to talk intelligently about food. 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 antioxidant is.
So whom did we rely on before the scientists (and, in turn, governments, public health organizations, and food marketers) began telling us how to eat? We relied of course on our mothers and grandmothers and more distant ancestors, which is another way of saying, on tradition and culture. We know there is a deep r eservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived and prospered to the extent we have. This dietary wisdom is the distillation of an evolutionary process involving many people in many places figuring out what keeps people healthy (and what doesn’t), and passing that knowledge down in the form of food habits and combinations, manners and rules and taboos, and everyday and seasonal practices, as well as memorable sayings and adages. Are these traditions infallible? No. There are plenty of old wives’ tales about food that on inspection turn out to be little more than superstitions. But much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding. That is exactly what this book aims to do.
Food Rules
distills this body of wisdom into sixty-four simple rules for eating healthily and happily. The rules are framed in terms of culture rather than science, though in many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known; not surprisingly, these two different vocabularies, or ways of knowing, often come to the same conclusion (as when scientists recently confirmed that the traditional practice of eating tomatoes with olive oil is good for you, because the l ycopene in the tomatoes is soluble in oil, making it easier for your body to absorb). I have also avoided talking much about nutrients, not because they aren’t important, but because focusing relentlessly on nutrients obscures other, more important truths about food. Foods are more than the sum of their nutrient parts, and those nutrients work together in ways that are still only dimly understood. It may be that the degree to which a food is processed gives us a more important key to its healthfulness: Not only can processing remove nutrients and add toxic chemicals, but it makes food more readily absorbable, which can be a problem for our insulin and fat metabolism. Also, the plastics in which processed foods are typically packaged can present a further risk to our health. This is why many of the rules in this book are designed to help you avoid heavily processed foods—which I prefer to call “edible foodlike substances.”
Most of these rules I wrote, but many of them have no single author. They are pieces of food culture, sometimes ancient, that deserve our attention, because they can help us. I’ve collected these adages about eating from a wide variety of sources. (The older sayings appear in quotes.) I consulted folklorists and a nthropologists, doctors, nurses, nutritionists, and dietitians, as well as a large number of mothers, grandm others, and great-grandmothers. I solicited food rules from my readers and from audiences at conferences and speeches on three continents; I publicized a Web address where people could e-mail rules they had heard from their parents or others and had found personally helpful. A single request for rules that I posted on the
New York Times
’s “Well” blog resulted in twenty-five hundred suggestions. Not all of them made a whole lot of sense (“One meat per pizza” is probably not a surefire prescription for good health), but many of them did, and several are included here. Thank you to all who contributed to the project. Taken together, these rules comprise a kind of choral voice of popular food wisdom. My job has been not to create that wisdom so much as to curate it and vet it. My wager is that that voice has as much or more to teach us, and to help us right our relationship to food, than the voices of science and industry and government.
The sixty-four rules here are each accompanied by a paragraph or two of explanation, except for a few that are self-explanatory. There is no need to learn or memorize them all, because many will take you to the same place. For example, rule number 11 (“Avoid foods you see advertised on television”) and rule number 7 (“Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce”) are both designed to keep more or less the same highly processed foodlike products out of your cart. My hope is that a handful of these rules will prove sufficiently sticky, or memorable, that they will become second nature to you—something you do, or don’t do, without giving it a thought.
While I call them rules, I think of them less as hard-and-fast laws than as personal policies. Policies are useful tools. Instead of prescribing highly specific behaviors, they supply us with broad guidelines that should make everyday decision making easier and swifter. Armed with a general policy, like rule number 36 (“Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk”), you’ll find you won’t have to waste as much time reading ingredients labels and making decisions standing in the cereal aisle. Think of these food policies as little algorithms designed to simplify your eating life. Adopt whichever ones stick and work best for you.
But do be sure to adopt at least one from each of the three sections, because each section deals with a different dimension of your eating life. The first section is designed to help you “eat food,” which in the modern supermarket turns out to be a lot more difficult than you would think. These rules offer screens or filters to help you tell the real food from the edible foodlike s ubstances you want to avoid. The second section, subt itled “Mostly plants,” offers rules to help you choose among real foods. And the third, subtitled “Not too much,” deals with
how
rather than
what
to eat and offers a series of policies designed to foster some simple everyday habits that will help you moderate your eating
and
enjoy it more. If those two goals sound contradictory, well, you haven’t dipped into this book yet.
PART I
What should I eat?
(Eat food.)
The rules in this section will help you to distinguish real foods—the plants, animals, and fungi people have been eating for generations—from the highly processed products of modern food science that, increasingly, have come to dominate the American food marketplace and diet. Each rule proposes a different filter for separating the one from the other, but they all share a common aim, which is to help you keep the unhealthy stuff out of your shopping cart.
1
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.
BOOK: Food Rules
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ads

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