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