Rule 1 – Eat Food.

Pollan’s first and most foundational tip is Eat Food. I’m going to quote this one at length because it’s the foundation of his whole book. From here on the tips should be more user-friendly, specific, and concise, but I think it’s worth including the whole paragraph here because all the tips that come after are really the practical application of this one idea.

This is much more easily said than done because most grocery store items “don’t deserve to be called food.” Pollan calls 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.” So this is the basic premise.

Next week, we’ll start in with the rules that can help us “eat food” rather than the impostors vying for our wallets as well as our bellies.

The tips are courtesy of Michael Pollan’s book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Happy, Healthy Eating!