Pollan’s Food Forte

Atkins, Juice cleanse, Weight Watchers, and Paleo diets are only a few of the numerous diets that are popular today for people who desire a body like Kim Kardashian or Liam Hemsworth. However, are any of these diets really even beneficial?

The word “diet” sounds like such a chore and for the most part, diets are only a one-time thing.  Conversely, “healthy lifestyle” is a more suitable commitment that you can maintain for a lifetime. Food Rules by Michael Pollan not only provides insight on eating beneficial food but also heightens awareness of America’s dangerous food industry. Separated into three parts, Food Rules covers all the questions that readers might ask, such as what or how should one eat.

Michael Pollan’s overall goal is to advocate for the change in America’s food industry and inform people of the consequences of prioritizing calories and budgets over nourishment and ethical production. Most artificial foods produced for diets can also end up harming one’s body by preventing it from receiving nutrients. After all, what body can last a lifetime on frozen packaged “lean” foods?

Thankfully, America is slowly but surely transitioning from cheap unhealthy food to mildly expensive, healthy quantities of food. Many of the rules in Pollan’s book advocate this change such as rule number 11, “Avoid foods you see advertised on television”. This is an important role especially today in society where dozens of unhealthy foods are put up on display on screens and billboards to lure people in and make them forget rule number 4, “Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored”. It’s hard to admit it but we easily yield to processed foods with artificial flavoring, something that Food Rules attempts to combat to ensure a healthy lifestyle.

This book hits home for many people; it brings back traditional ways of judging types of foods and eating them as well. Rule number 2, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”, is surely an important one. It stresses the idea that our new generation is full of processed, weirdly shaped foods that don’t aim to fulfill our nutritional needs and rather promote short term diets that can be harmful in the long run. It’s a common thing to joke about, for most people, that grandparents always cook for and feed their grandchildren until they’re more than satisfied.

It’s obvious that Pollan lists a number of rules for a healthier you, but he surely reminds you that the one rule to always follow is to “eat food”.