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.

Food Rules-Day 9: Avoid Food Products with the Wordoid "Lite" or the terms "Low-Fat" or "Nonfat" in their Names

The 40 year old campaign to create low and nonfat versions of tradition foods has been a failure:  We've gotten fat on low-fat products.  Why?  Becuase removing the fat from foods doesn't neccessarily make then nonfattening.  Carbohydrates can also make you fat, and many low and nonfat foods boost the sugars to make up for the loss of flavor.  Also, by demonizing one nutrient-fat-we inevitably give a free pass to another, supposedly "good", nutrient-carbohydrates in this case - and then proceed to eat too much of that instead.  Since the low-fat campaign began in the late 1970's, Americans have actually been eating more than 500 additional calories per day, most of them in the form of refined carbohydrates like sugar.  The result:  The average male is 17 lbs heavier, and the average female is 19 lbs heavier than in the late 1970's.  You;re better off eating the real thing in moderation than binging on "lite" food products packed with sugars and salt.

Food Rules-Day 8: Avoid Food Products That Make Health Claims

This sounds counterintuitive, but consider:  For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat, it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.  Then, 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.  Don't forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to contain more transfats that give people heart attacks.   The healthiest food in the supermarket-the fresh produce-doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging.  Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

Food Rules-Day 7: Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients that a 3rd Grader Cannot Pronounce

Basically the same idea, different mnemonic.  Keep it simple!

Food Rules-Day 5: Avoid Foods that have Some Form of Sugar (or sweetener) Listed Among the Top 3 Ingredients

Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.  (For the exception to this rule, see rule 60, regarding special occasion foods.) Complicating matters is the fact that , thanks to food science, there are now some 40 types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetner, dextrin, dextrose, fructo-oligossaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert sugar, polydextrose, turbinado sugar, and so on.  To repeat:  Sugar Is Sugar.  And organic sugar is sugar too.  As for noncaloric sweeteners such as aspartame or Splenda, research (in both humans and animals) suggests that switching to artificial sweeteners does not lead to weight loss, for reasons not well yet understood.  But it may be that deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.

Food Rules-Day 4: Avoid Food Products that Contain High-Fructose Corn Syrup

Not because high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is any worse for you than sugar, but because it is, like many of the other unfamiliar ingredients in packaged foods, a reliable marker for a food product that has been highly processed.  Also, high-fructose corn syrup is being added to hundreds of foods that have not been traditionally sweetened-breads, condiments, and many snack foods-so if you avoid products that contain it, you will cut down on your sugar intake.  But don't fall for the food industry's latest scam:  products reformulated to contain "no HFCS" or "real cane sugar."  These claims imply these foods are somehow healthier, they they are not.  Sugar is sugar.

Food Rules-Day 3: Avoid Food Products Containing Ingedients that No Ordinary Human Would Keep in their Pantry

Ethoxylated diglycerides?  Cellulose?  Xanthan gum?  Calcium Propionate?  Ammonium sulfate?  If you wouldn't cook with them yourself, why let others use these ingredients to cook for you?  The food scientists' chemistry is designed to extend shelf life, make old food look fresher and more appetizing than it really is, and get you to eat more.  Whether or not any of these additives pose a proven hazard to your health, many of them haven't been eaten by humans for very long, so they are best avoided.

Food Rules-Day 2: Don't Eat Anything Your Great-Grandmother Wouldn't Recognize as Food

Imagine your great-grandmother (or grandmother depending on your age) at your side as your roll down the aisles of the supermarket.  You're standing together in front of the dairy case.  She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt Tubes - and hasn't a clue what the plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel could possibly be.  Is it a food or is it toothpaste?  There are now thousands of foodish products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn't recognize as food. 

The reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products are many, and go beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain, or the plastics in which they are typically packaged, some of which are probably toxic.  Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons-our inborn preferences for sweetness & salt.  These tastes are difficult to find in nature but cheap & easy for the food scientists to deploy, with the result that food processing induces us to consume more of these rarities than is good for us.  The great-grandma rule will help keep most of these items out of your cart.

Note:  If your great-grandmother was a terrible cook or eater, you can substitute someone else's grandmother-a Sicilian or French one works particularly well.

The next several rules refine this strategy by helping you navigate the treacherous landscape of the ingredients label.

Food Rules-Day 1: Eat Food

These days this is easier said than done, especially when seventeen thousand new products show up in the supermarket each year, all vying for your food dollar.  But most of these items don't deserve to be called food - I call them edible foodlike substances.  They're highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists, consisting mostly of ingedients derived from corn & soy that no normal person keeps in their pantry, and they contain chemical additives with which the human body has not been long acquainted.  Today much of the challenge of eating well comes down to choosing real food and avoiding these industrial novelties.