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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food Rules: A Completely Different Way To Fix The Health Care Crisis
  • Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:14:30 -0700


Food Rules: A Completely Different Way To Fix The Health Care Crisis
by Michael Pollan
Published on Monday, January 4, 2010 by Huffington Post
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/04-9

The idea for this book came from a doctor--a couple of them, as a matter of
fact. They had read my last book, "In Defense of Food", which ended with a
handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous
landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. "What
I would love is a pamphlet I could hand to my patients with some rules for
eating wisely," they would say. "I don't have time for the big nutrition
lecture and, anyway, they really don't need to know what an antioxidant is in
order to eat wisely." Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say
"you can't imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by
eating food products instead of food." So rather than leaving his heart
patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives
them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome
meals out of it -- a very different way of thinking about health.

Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the
American diet -- roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on
health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can
be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet. And a healthy diet is
a whole lot simpler than the food industry and many nutritional scientists --
what I call the Nutritional Industrial Complex -- would have us believe.
After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly
complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I
discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of
it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern
western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refined grains and
sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit.

So I decided to take the doctors up on the challenge. I set out to collect
and formulate some straightforward, memorable, everyday rules for eating, a
set of personal policies that would, taken together or even separately, nudge
people onto a healthier and happier path. I solicited rules from doctors,
scientist, chefs, and readers, and then wrote a bunch myself, trying to boil
down into everyday language what we really know about healthy eating. And
while most of the rules are backed by science, they are not framed in the
vocabulary of science but rather culture -- a source of wisdom about eating
that turns out to have as much, if not more, to teach us than nutritional
science does.

What follows is a small sample of "Food Rules", a half dozen policies that
will give you a taste of what you'll find in the book: sixty-four food rules,
each with a paragraph of explanation. I think you'll see from this little
appetizer that "Food Rules" is a most unconventional diet book. You can read
it in an hour and it just might change your eating life. I hope you'll take
away something you can put to good use, and maybe get a chuckle or two along
the way. And do let me know if have any food rules I should know about. I'm
still collecting them, at pollanfoodrules@gmail.com.

#11 Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

Food marketers are ingenious at turning criticisms of their products -- and
rules like these -- into new ways to sell slightly different versions of the
same processed foods: They simply reformulate (to be low-fat, have no HFCS or
transfats, or to contain fewer ingredients) and then boast about their
implied healthfulness, whether the boast is meaningful or not. The best way
to escape these marketing ploys is to tune out the marketing itself, by
refusing to buy heavily promoted foods. Only the biggest food manufacturers
can afford to advertise their products on television: More than two thirds of
food advertising is spent promoting processed foods (and alcohol), so if you
avoid products with big ad budgets, you'll automatically be avoiding edible
foodlike substances. As for the 5 percent of food ads that promote whole
foods (the prune or walnut growers or the beef ranchers), common sense will,
one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush -- these are the
exceptions that prove the rule.

>From "Food Rules":

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

#36 Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

This should go without saying. Such cereals are highly processed and full of
refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even
drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating
these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're
eating them every day. The french fry did not become America's most popular
vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and
frying the potatoes -- and cleaning up the mess. If you made all the french
fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so
much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice
cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them --
chances are good it won't be every day.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out
of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be
aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry --
before you eat and then again along the way. (One old wive's test: If you're
not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.) Food is a costly
antidepressant.

#58 Do all your eating at a table.
No, a desk is not a table. If we eat while we're working, or while watching
TV or driving, we eat mindlessly -- and as a result eat a lot more than we
would if we were eating at a table, paying attention to what we're doing.
This phenomenon can be tested (and put to good use): Place a child in front
of a television set and place a bowl of fresh vegetables in front of him or
her. The child will eat everything in the bowl, often even vegetables that he
or she doesn't ordinarily touch, without noticing what's going on. Which
suggests an exception to the rule: When eating somewhere other than at a
table, stick to fruits and vegetables.
© 2010 Huffington Post
Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of Food Rules: An Eater's
Manual. His previous book, a New York Times best-seller, was In Defense of
Food: An Eater's Manifesto. His book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural
History of Four Meals (2006), was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by
the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the author of The
Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own
(1997); and Second Nature (1991). A contributing writer to the New York Times
Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including
the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the
Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan
served for many years as executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now the
Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley.





  • [Livingontheland] Food Rules: A Completely Different Way To Fix The Health Care Crisis, Tradingpost, 01/04/2010

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