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kalikshama -> RE: males....... less male (6/27/2012 7:21:20 AM)
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Michael Pollan's, "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual" is the distillation of 10 years of work, reporting on food, agriculture and health and just boiling it down. It's a book you can read in an hour.
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#2 Don't eat anything your great grandmother 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's 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 and fat and salt. These tastes are difficult to find in nature but cheap and easy for the food scientist to deploy, with the result that food processing induces us to consume much more of thee rarities than is good for us. The Great Grandma Rule will help keep most of these out of your cart
# 3 Avoid food products containing ingredients no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
Ethoxylated diglycerides? Celluose? 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 set 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
#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 marketing 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 two thirds 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 percent of food ads that promote whole foods (the prune or walnut growers or the beef ranchers), common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush -- these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
#36 Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.
This should go without saying. Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives.
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