Food Rules (#4)

I suspect this will be more 85% personal anecdotes/15% book post, but it is only because the ideas in this book have really have become increasingly integrated into our household's everyday life.

In the next month or so, we're going to hit the 1-year anniversary of our food/eating revolution.  It all started innocently enough when Todd, after a bout with the flu, scheduled a physical with his doctor.  Long story short, his cholesterol numbers were through the roof.  Thankfully the doctor had him go to a dietitian instead of just putting him on medication (which the numbers likely warranted).  Fast forward, three months later.. and changes to how (very, very basically... "balancing" carbs and protein) and what we ate (french fries a couple times a week and a handful of oreos each night, ummm... not such a great idea) and Todd's cholesterol was normal, with even the doctor being impressed with the dramatic drop.

I scheduled a physical for myself a few months after and my blood work came back fine, while I can't be sure, I am sure this change in my eating played a factor in those lab results. Between the two of us we've lost about 50 lbs total (ok, only about 15 of those are my own) and it has been even more than that as Todd has shared info/advice with his family members.  And this is all with changes in eating... we had bouts with exercise, but nothing steady of late.

Around this same time (year-ish ago?), Todd read Michael Pollan's books, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and was also passing his philosophy onto me.  Pollan's take isn't so "diet" oriented with the carbs, protein, and fat... but says that will take care of itself if you eat "real" food.  What you say?  Well, you'd be surprised what "food" has morphed into over the past several decades.  Much of what is in your local supermarket is what Pollan calls "edible food-like substances"...  manufactured, over-processed, chemical-ized, and otherwise modified creations that while they may look like, really bear little resemblance, to the "food" they purport to be.

I just want to jump in and also give further credit to our food revolution to my friend Jen. We found each other on the Internet/blogs (think it was our mutual love of The Amazing Race), but long before any these food changes occurred, she was a whisper in my ear, a friendly tap on my shoulder for eating organically, locally, and sustainably (she's the editor of the Eat Local Challenge website, too!). 

And to round things out, throw in the must-see, and now Academy Award nominated, documentary Food Inc. and Pollan's recent appearance on the mother of all publicity, Oprah... the "What is food?" light bulbs continue to pop off and there seems to be no turning back to our old ways.

With all this going on, my intention was to read one of the Pollan books already in our house.  But my fellow avid readers know how that goes, just always seemed like another book got in the way. With some guilt over not reading those, when Michael Pollan's Food Rules was published, I figured it was perfect substitute, since it was basically a Cliff Notes/bullet point version of Pollan's food philosophy and previous books.  Simply stated it is: Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much.

I can not imagine there are many people who would not benefit from reading this book. While one will dismiss many of the "rules" as common sense or no-brainers, I challenge most of you (well, not Jen!) to look in your refrigerator and pantry and supermarket and think again. For example,

Rule #3: Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

Go ahead, look... I'll wait.  I suspect you'll find plenty of ingredients you cannot pronounce either!  Now, in today's world, it is virtually impossible to avoid ingredients that sound more at home in a chemistry class.  But as you become aware of it, you can start making incremental and informed changes to start decreasing them. 

For instance, I made the switch back to putting half-and-half in my coffee.  The ingredients: Grade A Pasteurized Milk and Cream.  Okay, "pasteurized" is a probably a word a 3rd grader would have trouble pronouncing, but you get the idea!  This was a replacement for Coffee-mate. I seem to be doing just fine without the following in my morning joe: corn syrup solids, vegetable oil, sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, and sodium aluminosilicate.  Pollan would love that many of those ingredients are underlined in red as possible misspellings and/or not in the dictionary! Recently, I made further progress with another goal, finding replacements for two condiment-y food products that had high fructose corn syrup high on the ingredients list.

So, needless to say, I highly recommend this book.  It's a quick, informative, funny introduction to all this food stuff... and very, very quick too.  I suspect even the slowest reader could read this in one sitting as it is 140 pages with a lot of empty spaces (given my reading/pages challenge, I only "credited" myself with 60 pages).  Though I purposely stretched it out, reading 8 of the 64 rules each day... allowing the concepts to sink in... and again, they are more suggestions or ways to turn the ship in the right direction. The only knock I'll give it is that at $11 retail, it is a bit pricey on a price/time/size ratio, but the awareness it brings and the changes it encourages I think are well worth it! 

Thanks for hanging in and reading all this!

Comments

[Jeff]

Cool, I think I will check it out. Heh, the thing about Coffee-Mate hits a little close to home. I wasn't always a nondairy creamer user, but for some reason a while back when we ran out of milk, I went over to creamer and got in a rut. I will go back to natural today! ;-)

[jen maiser]

I was so proud the day that you gave up the Coffeemate for half and half. It continues to surprise me how many people I know who use Coffeemate. Ugh.

I haven't gotten the Food Rules yet, but I've heard him talking about it a lot.

I mentioned this on Twitter, but this round of attention toward sustainable food (the new Pollan book + OPRAH + Food Inc) has gotten the message to many more people than ever before. Which is amazing.

Thanks for the shout out -- and you're right -- it *was* TAR that originally led me to your blog like a gazillion years ago.