Food Rules: An Eater's Manual QUOTES

2 " Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist "

― Michael Pollan , Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

4 " 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

6 " 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

8 " Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. "

― Michael Pollan , Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

10 " 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

12 " Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die. "

― Michael Pollan , Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

14 " 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

16 " 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

18 " ...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

20 " Be the kind of person who takes supplements—then skip the supplements. "

― Michael Pollan , Food Rules: An Eater's Manual