OBC Food Rules-Day 39: Eat all the Junk Food You Want as Long as You Cook it Yourself

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking a soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them everyday.  The french fry did not become America's most popular vegetable  until industry took over  the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes-and cleaning up the mess.  If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work.  The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream.  Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them-chances are good it won't be every day.

OBC Food Rules-Day 36: Don't Eat Breakfast Cereals that Change the Color of Milk

This should go without saying.  Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives.

OBC Food Rules-Day 34: Sweeten and Salt your Food Yourself

Whether soups or cereals or soft drinks, food and beverages that have been prepared by corporations contain higher fat levels of salt and sugar than any ordinary human being would ever add-even a child.  By sweetening and salting these foods yourself, you'll make them to your taste, and you will find you're consuming a fraction as much sugar and salt as you otherwise would.

OBC Food Rules-Day33: Eat Some Foods that have been Predigested by Bacteria or Fungi

Many traditional cultures swear by the health benefits of fermented foods-foods that have been transformed by live microorganisms, such as yogurt or sauerkraut, soy sauce, kimchi, and sourdough bread.  These foods can be a good source of vitamin B12, an essential nutrient you can't get from plants.  (B12 is produced by animals and bacteria.)  Many fermented foods also contain probiotics-beneficial bacteria that research suggests improve the function of the digestive and immune systems and, according to some studies, help reduce allergic reactions and inflammation.

OBC Food Rules-Day 32: Don't Overlook the Oily Little Fishes

Wild fish are among the healthiest things you can eat, yet many wild fish stocks are on the verge of collapse becuase of overfishing.  Avoid big fish fish at the top of the marine food chain-tuna, swordfish, shark-because they're endangered, and because they often contain high levels of mercury.  Fortunately, a few of the most nutritious wild fish species, including mackerel, sardines, and anchovies, are well managed, and in some cases are even abundant.  These oily little fish are particularly good choices.  According to a Dutch proverb, "A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors."

OBC Food Rules-Day 30: Eat Well-Grown Food from Healthy Soil

It would have been easier to say "eat organic" and it is true that food certified organic is usually all grown in relatively healthy soil-soil nourished by organic matter rather than chemical fertilizers.  (It also will contain  little or no residue from synthetic pesticides or pharmaceuticals.)  Yet there are always exceptional farmers and ranchers in America who for one reason or another are not certified organic, and the excellent food they grow should not be overlooked.  (And just because a food is labeled organic, does not mean it's good for you:  Organi soda is still soda-a large quantity of utterly empty calories.)

We now have a body of research supporting the hypothesis, first advanced by organic pioneers Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale, that soils rich in organic matter produce more nutritious food:  that is food with higher leveles of antioxidants, flavanoids, vitamins, and minerals.  Of course, after a few days of rising cross-country in a truck, the nutritional quality of any kind of produce will deteriorate, so ideally you want to eat food that is both organic and local.

OBC Food Rules-Day 29: Eat like an Omnivore

Whether or not you eat any animal foods, it's a good idea to try to add some new species, and not just new foods, to your diet-that is, new kinds of plants, animals, and fungi.  The dazzling diversity of food products on offer in the supermarket is deceptive, because so many of them are made from the same small handful of plant species, and most of those-the corn and soy and wheat-are seeds rather than leaves.  The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all of your nutritional bases.

OBC Food Rules-Day 28: If you have the Space, Buy a Freezer

When you find a good source of pastured meat, you'll want to buy it in quantity.  Buying meat in bulk-a quarter of a steer, say, or a whole hog-is one way to eat well on a budget.  Dedicated freezers are surprisingly inexpensive to buy and operate, because they aren't opened nearly as often as the one in your refrigerator,  A freezer will also enable you to put up food from the farmers market, and encourage you to buy produce in bulk at the height of its season, when it will be most abundant-and therefore the cheapest.  And freezing does not significantly diminish the nutritional value of produce.

OBC Food Rules-Day 27: Eat Animals that have Themselves Eaten Well

The diet of the animals we eat strongly influences the nutritional quality, and healthfulness, of the food we get from them, whether it is meat or milk or eggs.  This should be self-evident, yet it is a truth routinely overlooked by the industrial food chain in its quest to produce vast quantities of cheap animal protein.  That quest has changed the diet of most of our food animals in ways that have often damaged their health and healthfulness.  We feed animals a high energy diet of grain to make them grow quickly, even in the case of rumminants that have evolved to eat grass.  But even food animals that can tolerate grain are much healthier when they have access to green plants-and so it turns out, are their meat and eggs.  The food from these animals will contain much healthier types of fat (more omega-3s, less omega-6s) as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.  (For the same reason, meat from wild animals is particularly nutritious; see rule 31).  It's worth looking for pastured animal foods in the market-and paying the premium prices they typically command if you can.

OBC Food Rules-Day 22: Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves

Scientists may disagree on what’s good about some plants-the antioxidants?  The fiber?  The omega-3 fatty acids?- but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt.  There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States.  Also, by eating a diet that is primarily plant based, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods-with the exception of seeds, including grains and nuts-are typically less “energy dense” than the other things youe at.  (And consuming fewer calories protects against many chronic diseases.)  Vegetarians are notably healthier than carnivores, and live longer.

OBC Food Rules-Day 21: It’s Not Food if it’s Called the Same Name in Every Language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles)

OBC Food Rules-Day 20: It’s Not Food if it Arrived Through the Window of Your Car

OBC Food Rules-Day 19: If it Came From a Plant, Eat it; if it was Made in a Plant, Don’t.

OBC Food Rules-Day 18: Don’t Digest Foods Made in Places Where Everyone is Required to Wear a Surgical Cap

OBC Food Rules-day 15: Get Out of the Supermarket Whenever You Can

You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market.  You also won’t find any elaborately processed food products, any packages with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients or dubious health claims, anything microwaveable, or, perhaps best of all, any old food from far away.  What you will find are fresh, whole foods harvested at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality-precisely the kind your great-grandmother, or even your Neolithic ancestors, would easily recognize as food.  The kind that is alive and eventually will rot.

OBC Food Rules-Day 14: Eat Foods Made from Ingredients that you can Picture in their raw State or Growing in Nature

Read the ingredients on a package of Twinkies or Pringles and imagine what those ingredients actually look like raw or in the places where they grow:  You can’t do it.  This rule will keep all sorts of chemicals and foodlike substances out of your diet.

OBC Food Rules-Day 13: Eat Only Foods that will Eventually Rot

What does it mean for our food to “go bad”?  It usually means that the fungi and bacteria and insects and rodents with whom we compete for nutrients and calories have got to it before we did.  Food processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from these competitors.  This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing to them, by removing other nutrients likely to turn rancid, like omega-3 fatty acids.  The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is.  Real food is alive – and therefore should eventually die.  (There are a few exceptions to this rule: For example, honey has a shelf life measured in centuries.)  Note:  Most of the immortal foodlike substances in the supermarket are found in the middle aisles.

OBC Food Rules-Day 12: Shop the Peripheries of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle

Most supermarkets are laid out in the same way.  Processed foods dominate the center aisles of the store, while the cases of more fresh food – produce, meat and fish, dairy – line the walls.  If you keep to the edges of the store, you’ll be much more likely to wind up with real food in your shopping cart.  This strategy is not foolproof, however since things like high-fructose corn syrup have crept into the dairy case under the flavored yogurts and the like.

Food Rules-Day 11: Avoid Foods You See Advertised on Television

Food marketers are ingenious at turning criticisms of their products - and rules like these - into new ways to sell slightly different versions of the same processed foods.  They simply reformulate (to be low-fat, have no HFCS or transfats, or to contain fewer ingredients) and then boast about their implied healthfulness, whether the boast is meaningful or not.   The best way to escape these marketring ploys is to tune out the marketing itself, by refusing to buy heavily promoted foods.  Only the biggest food manufacturers can afford to advertise  their products on television.   More than 2/3 of food advertising is spent promoting processed foods (and alcohol), so if you avoid products with big ad budgets, you'll automatically be avoiding edible foodlike substances.  As for the 5% of food ads that promote whole foods, common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush - these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Bogus health claims and faulty food science have made supermarket particularly treacherous  places to shop for real food, which suggests the next 2 rules.

Food Rules-Day 10: Avoid Foods that are Pretending to be Something They Are Not

Imitation butter-aka margarine-is the classic example.  To make something like nonfat cream cheese that contains neither cream nor cheese requires an extreme degree of processing; such products should be labeled as imitations and avoided.  The same rule applies to soy-based mock meats, artificial sweeteners, and fake fats and starches.