Michael Pollan's Food Rules

I was excited to hear about Michael Pollan's latest book, Food Rules, because it sounds like it will correct one of the problems with his earlier books.  By boiling down all of the gathered wisdom (including a lot of new advice which he solicited from medical professionals) into a set of rules on how to choose what to eat, he has made "the Pollan diet" a lot easier and accessible.

I recognize that Pollan was trying specifically to avoid telling people what to eat in his earlier books, particularly In Defense of Food.  From his perspective, telling people what to eat is one of the major problems which has led us to the pickle that we are in as a nation.  No one tells people in other countries what to eat - they just eat what they eat.  And amazingly, those countries are not nearly as fat as America.

Bad eating habits (which lead to problems like diabetes and heart disease, not just to obesity) is the biggest health crisis we face.  A bad diet is almost as bad for you as smoking, from a perspective of both overall health and mortality statistics.  But what constitutes a "good diet"?  If you look at living cultures in the world today (i.e. not even looking at historical cultures), you have perfectly healthy cultures who eat nothing but meat (the Inuit) and perfectly healthy cultures who never eat meat (huge swaths of India).  Obviously, the problem goes deeper than that.

Pollan's primary contention - and there is a lot of data to support it - is that the problem lies with processed foods, more than with the foods themselves.  For example, take a potato.  A potato is perfectly harmless.  Roast that baby up with some garlic, red bell peppers, olive oil and salt, and you have a delicious and healthy meal.  But put that same potato into the hands of the food scientists at Nabsico, and it comes out the other end as something wildly unhealthy - and bearing little resemblance to the tuber that it once was.

Pollan's article on the Common Dreams website excerpts some of the rules he lists in Food Rules.  I laughed at the first one, #11, "Avoid foods you see advertised on television."  This mirrors my own grocery store mantra, "Does it have an ad campaign?"  I think this is a more useful metric than the standby that you should "shop the edges of the store, not the middle."  Because there are a lot of highly processed foods found at the edges of the store (have you seen the yogurt aisle lately?) while there are a lot of minimally processed foods in the middle (where staples like flour, olive oil, and whole grain brown rice can be found).  

However, his rule #39 is an excellent example of why I hesitate at a lot of Pollan's suggestions.  Is it really better to bake and eat your own pie, than to have (say) a bowl of fat free, sugar free, Carb Wise ice cream?  Pollan would say it is, but my waistline begs to differ.

Make no mistake, Pollan's advice is not a weight loss column.  However, it is an excellent road map to health.  I think most of us would be well served by shifting to a Pollan diet, regardless of weight concerns.