Food rules
A pocket compendium of food wisdom from the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan, our nation's most trusted resource for food-related issues, offers this indispensible guide for anyone concerned about health and food. Simple, sensible, and easy to use, Food Rules is a set of memorable rules for eating wisely, many drawn from a variety of ethnic or cultural traditions. Whether at the supermarket or an all-you-can-eat-buffet, this handy, pocket-size resource is the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food we eat.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
8people
2010–2024years
50% recommend38% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's all sorts of stuff, but avoiding "processing" will lead you to make the best choices in practice.
Food processing is complex, dynamic, and adversarial (see my comment above)
As Hall points out, there is more research possible to find the underlying mechanisms. However even those mechanisms are proximate causes, not the ultimate cause.
We already know a lot -- it basically boils down to economics:
(1) Processing uses ingredients you can't find in your kitchen which may be bad for you. For example, emulsifiers -- did your grandma cook with xanthan gum, etc.? Because these things make it easy to process food at scale.
A mechanism that has been suggested by Lustig is that the emulsifiers still emulsify in your stomach, and give you leaky gut syndrome
This is just one example; there are hundreds of food additives that basically exist to support SCALE of manufacturing and sale, including increased shelf life
(2) Predictable inputs to assembly lines support food processing, including both plants and animals
In plants, this is a monoculture of single breeds of wheat, corn, and rice. (Pollan talks about how everything in the middle supermarket shelves is like this. It has a very wide range of labeling, colors, packaging, etc. but most of it is the SAME commodities processed in various ways, and lacking in nutrition. Picture: think about that commodity wheat that was stuck on a boat in Ukraine.)
And a lack of things like fermentation, which is hard to control industrially.
In animals, it's factory farming, which optimizes the mass of the animal against all else (including nutrition). These homogeneous animals have a very homogeneous set of diseases treated with antibiotics and so forth
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In addition to dozens of other books, the recent book "What Your Food Ate" by U of W scientists talks how this optimizes for CALORIES and deoptimizes for NUTRITION.
e.g. Think bland, tasteless supermarket carrots and tomatoes -- those didn't exist 80 years ago! McDonald's has to put mayo and sauce on them to make them palatable, but a real carrot or tomato tastes amazing
If you believe in capitalism, and believe that it's possible for say a carrot of great mass/calories to have less nutrition, you would have to explain how this would NOT happen (e.g. regulation, which doesn't do it).
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Basically people have to eat more to get the same amount of nutrition, making them fatter.
I think this gets at the core of it more than say "emulsifiers" or "trans fat". Your body is extremely resilient -- it can metabolize small amounts of almost any chemical.
But it CANNOT metabolize this steady and large volume of processed food -- say 50% more daily calories than what people ate in 1940, with fewer nutrients. This is what gets you chronic diseases, i.e. "Western diet disease"
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Although I think Pollan's books have the most explanatory power -- they talk about how this system arose. (including advertising toward women, e.g. freeing the women of the burden of booking)
"Food Rules" has aphorisms that get at the cause:
https://www.amazon.com/Food-Rules-Eaters-Michael-Pollan/dp/0...
Like "don't eat what doesn't spoil". Processed food is made NOT to spoil. That's what makes it profitable.
One way to make it not spoil is to take out things that microorganisms want to eat. But if a bacteria doesn't want to eat it, then YOU probably don't want to eat it either! It's probably just empty calories and processed wheat/corn, with little nutrition
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tl;dr processing, scale, and profits are the fundamental causes. You can find more specific mechanisms and specific chemicals, but just avoiding processed foods is the most actionable advice. There have been dozens of vilified nutrients and foods in the past, so if you focus on that now, the food industry will "work around" it tomorrow
- Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. From Food Rules:
https://michaelpollan.com/books/food-rules/
And "Nutrition: the Emperor has no clothes":
- I’ve read most of them. There be dragons. There’s an entire landscape of conflicting information backed by conflicting scientific studies. You’ll go mad trying to find an objective answer.
But I’d recommend Food Rules by Michael Pollan. Honestly, you can get the summary in the first paragraph below: “Eat [real, unprocessed] food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/
I’d also recommend anything by Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I feel like she does not have an agenda and is putting out best-effort evidence.
- Food Rules by Michael Pollan - for understanding food and nutrition
Sapiens - for understanding what it means to be human
The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant - for understanding groups of humans (civilization)
The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor by Howard Marks - for understanding investing
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger by Peter Bevelin - for understanding mental models in general
- So there's this short little book "Food rules" by Michael Pollan. Not much content but seems like the author went through a lot of research. He comes to conclusion based on this tons of data that all we really know for sure is that people living in these blue regions are living much longer and it seems to be related to what they eat. That it is basically the only solid and stable data point we have. Welp. (I'm overstating it a bit, but not by that much)
- It's great to see a new subject from this author.
I've read several of his books, which just seemed like re-writes of the same topic in more concise formats each time.
Omnivore's Dilemma (450 pages) -> In Defense of Food (256 pages) -> Food Rules (140 pages)
