Rules to Eat By, by Michael Pollan

Lettering by Jacob Magraw-Mickelson






Rules to eat by. Sounds great, but few people even care about them, except three rules, if a food or meal doesn't have lots of salt, sugar and fat, it's not food. And it's even better if it's loaded with high fructose corn syrup, or if on a "diet", and it contains sucralose or aspartame, to make you feel "better" about consuming the chemical glob.

"Deciding what to eat, indeed deciding what qualifies as food, is not easy in such an environment. When Froot Loops can earn a Smart Choices check mark, a new industrywide label that indicates a product’s supposed healthfulness, we know we can’t rely on the marketers, with their dubious health claims, or for that matter on the academic nutritionists who collaborate on such labeling schemes. (One of them defended the inclusion of Froot Loops on the grounds that they are better for you than doughnuts. So why doesn’t the label simply say that?) Making matters worse, official government pronouncements about eating aren’t necessarily much more reliable, not when the food industry influences federal nutrition guidelines. But even when the “best science” prevails, that science can turn out to be misguided — as when the official campaign against saturated fat got us to trade butter for stick margarine loaded with trans fats, a solution that turned out to be worse than the problem."

View the entire article, Rules to Eat By, and the concise Food Rules: Your Dietary Dos and Don'ts, at The New York Times.