1. Eat food.
2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
4. Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
5. Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.
6. Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients.
7. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
8. Avoid food products that make health claims.
9. Avoid food products with the wordoid “lite” or the terms “low-fat” or “nonfat” in their names.
10. Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.
11. Avoid foods that you see advertised on television.
12. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Everyone should read Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. It takes a total of a half an hour of your time. And I hope that it changes your relationship with food forever. These are just the first twelve “rules” but there are 64 pleasantly entertaining rules to eat by.