Book Review  

Food Rules:  An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan, (New York:Penguin Books, 2009)

Metabolism is such a fickle friend.  In my teens and twenties the amount of food—any food!—I could pack into my 150 pound frame was quickly, easily, and efficiently digested with no apparent poundage left behind.  My thirties were all that—everything that a man’s thirties are supposed to be and what I heard.  150 turned quickly to 160, then 170.  Now at the dawn of my forties my metabolism has come full circle, does nothing, as my frame learns to manage 180.

Twenty years ago, food really didn’t matter.  Now food matters more than I ever imagined.  This short, humorous and insightful book helpfully challenges people to live by some simple food consuming rules—about 64 of them.  Written in a “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” style, the goal is for the reader to adopt the ones which are most “sticky”, as Pollan says, a handful of them at first.  The thesis is that living by even one of these rules will change our eating habits and consequent life for the better.

Take for instance Rule #2:  “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  Consider her picking “up a package of Go-GURT Portable Yogurt tubes--(without a) clue what this plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel could possibly be.”  Humorous, simple and best of all forgiving of our sweet human disposition.

If you want to make a dent in your diet and ever so slightly tilt the method by which you satisfy your hunger, Food Rules is a great tool in your health toolbox.