doodad review: Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
Okay, I admit it. One of this year’s resolutions was to get in shape, and while I’ve got a number of ideas about how to do it, nothing as of yet has actually translated into action. So I’ve decided to begin by trying to eat better (and feed my family better).
As with most new undertakings, I thought I’d begin by reading about it. So I picked up this bite-sized book called Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual at the airport and read it in one hour of a two-hour flight. It’s more of a pamphlet than a book really and could have been half the pages and half the price, considering the generous amount of white space and the gratuitous sketches of utensils and rutabagas and such. But, because I liked the book, I’m choosing to see the layout as a metaphor for the simplistic method of eating that Pollan espouses.
Journalist Michael Pollan begins Food Rules with a brief essay about what’s wrong with our Western diet. He starts with two indisputable facts we all need to know about the link between food and diet:
FACT 1. People that eat a Western diet (high in processed foods, extra fat and sugar, refined grains, and low in vegetables, fruit and whole grains) invariably suffer from Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
FACT 2. People that eat from a wide range of traditional diets don’t suffer from these diseases.
According to Pollan, almost all other cultures eat healthier because they choose from a simpler menu. Other diets may be disproportionately high in seal blubber or cattle blood and may not include every nutrient available to man, but there’s a simplicity to which the human body adapts, and that simplicity results in better health. North American nutritional ingenuity, on the other hand, has led to the development of “the one diet that reliably makes its people sick.”
Pollan adds an important third fact that follows from the first two:
FACT 3. People who drop the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health.
Through the rest of the book, Pollan offers 64 rules, or “personal policies” to follow to wean yourself off an unhealthy diet and toward better nutrition. The rules are loosely organized into three categories: What should I eat? What kind of food should I eat? and How should I eat? Spoiler alert: I’ve provided a sampling of the rules below. Almost all of the rules are based on one simple premise: “Don’t buy anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
So far, the practical application of these rules has radically increased my shopping time. It takes time to read all of those ingredient labels. There’s also lot of stuff that has to go back on the shelves while you look for a healthier alternative. And according to the inverse behavioural rule of shopping with toddlers, the longer the trip, the worse my kids behave. If we’ve reached 45 minutes, my 3-year-old is running back and forth to the cart, filling it with anything that has a colourful label and my one-year-old is busy opening said packages and tossing them back out of the cart. And my blood pressure rises. If the transition doesn’t kill me, it will only make me stronger, right?
Anyway. Gotta go. It’s lunchtime and the kids are asking for KD. We’ll see if whole grain noodles, with organic milk, butter and shredded cheddar works for them. We’ll see…
Michael Pollan’s 10 rules for shopping and eating better
Here are some highlights from Pollan’s book…
1. Don’t buy anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid products with ingredients that cannot be found in an ordinary pantry.
3. Don’t buy anything that lists sugar in its first three ingredients.
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay away from the middle.
5. If it came from a plant, buy it. If it was made in a plant, pass it by.
6. If it says lite, low-fat, or non-fat on the package, put it down.
7. Avoid food that is pretending to be something it is not.
8. Foods making health claims on the package are not foods you want to buy.
9. Avoid food that is advertised on television.
10. Get out of the supermarket. Look to farmer’s markets.
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