Food Rules Quotes

“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation. ”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Use the apple test

"If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. ”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Be the kind of person who takes supplements -- then skip the supplements.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“S policy: “no snacks, no seconds, no sweets—except on days that begin with the letter S.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Eating in our time has gotten complicated — needlessly so, in my opinion. I will get to the “needlessly” part in a moment, but consider first the complexity that now attends this most basic of creaturely activities. Most of us have come to rely on experts of one kind or another to tell us how to eat — doctors and diet books, media accounts of the latest findings in nutritional science, government advisories and food pyramids, the proliferating health claims on food packages. We may not always heed these experts’ advice, but their voices are in our heads every time we order from a menu or wheel down the aisle in the supermarket. Also in our heads today resides an astonishing amount of biochemistry. How odd is it that everybody now has at least a passing acquaintance with words like “antioxidant,” “saturated fat,” “omega-3 fatty acids,” “carbohydrates,” “polyphenols,” “folic acid,” “gluten,” and “probiotics”? It’s gotten to the point where we don’t see foods anymore but instead look right through them to the nutrients (good and bad) they contain, and of course to the calories — all these invisible qualities in our food that, properly understood, supposedly hold the secret to eating well.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t. .”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) .”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. So we ignore the elephant in the room and focus instead on good and evil nutrients, the identities of which seem to change with every new study.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Be the kind of person who takes supplements—then skip the supplements.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“...Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science. ”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“You’re better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on “lite” food products packed with sugars and salt.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. There”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don’t. What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel rather than a form of communion with other people, and also with other species—with nature. On a more practical level, you will eat what your garden yields, which will be the freshest, most nutritious produce obtainable; you will get exercise growing it (and get outdoors and away from screens); you will save money (according to the National Gardening Association, a seventy-dollar investment in a vegetable garden will yield six hundred dollars’ worth of food); and you will be that much more likely to follow the next, all-important rule.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb’s quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“I realized that the answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we should eat wasn’t so complicated after all, and in fact could be boiled down to just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“And, even more important for our purposes, these facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them. Here they are: FACT 1. Populations that eat a so-called Western diet—generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet. Four of the top ten killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments in nutritional science are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrient in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or the refined carbohydrates or the lack of fiber or the transfats or omega-6 fatty acids—or what? The point is that, as eaters (if not as scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet, for whatever reason, is the problem. FACT 2. Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat, and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! (While it is true that we generally live longer than people used to, or than people in some traditional cultures do, most of our added years owe to gains in infant mortality and child health, not diet.) There is actually a third, very hopeful fact that flows from these two: People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back, and relatively quickly.”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you’re not hungry.)”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”
― POLLAN MICHAEL, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual