“I had a deeply unsettling moment when, after spending a couple years researching nutrition for my last book, In Defense of Food, 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.
This was the bottom line, and it was satisfying to have found it, a piece of hard ground deep down at the bottom of the swamp of nutrition science: seven words of plain English, no biochemistry degree required. But it was also somewhat alarming, because my publisher was expecting a few thousand words more than that. Fortunately for both of us, I realized that the story of how simple a question as what to eat had ever gotten so complicated was one worth telling, and that became the focus of that book.
The focus of this book is very different. It is much less about theory, history, and science than it is about our daily lives and practice. In this short, radically pared-down book, I unpack those seven words of advice into a comprehensive set of rules, or personal policies, designed to help you eat real food in moderation and, by doing so, substantially get off the Western diet. The rules are phrased in everyday language; I deliberately avoid the vocabulary of nutrition or biochemistry, though in most cases there is scientific research to back them up.”
~ Michael Pollan from Food Rules
Michael Pollan is the author of a number of New York Times best-selling books on nutrition (including In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma). He’s a longtime New York Times contributor and Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
If you’re looking for a SUPER compact, witty look at the primary rules on how to eat well, this is it. I HIGHLY recommend you pick up a copy as I think it’s the page-for-page best guide on the basic fundamentals of nutrition.(Get a copy here.)
It’s a fun, witty, concise guide to eating well featuring 64 food rules structured around Pollan’s seven words of wisdom:
Part 1 = Eat food.
Part 2 = Mostly plants.
Part 3 = Not too much.
I’m excited to share a few of my favorite Big Ideas we can apply to our lives TODAY so let’s jump straight in!
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