Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

4. "Avoid food products that carry health claims."

Wouldn't sushi and the raw bar be included in this?

I've read all of Michael Pollan's book and this is considered more guideline than commandments. The first one is just the first general step. He's referring to, say, Go-Gurt. She wouldn't know what to do with it - brush her teeth? As for eating healthy - I'm a busy college student but I make it a conscious decision to eat right since I've done enough reading to know that poor diet high in animal-based proteins and fats is what is driving the obesity, heart disease, diabetes and even cancer in our country. Don't eat organic - it is often shipped from very far away so it's not always that good for you since it's not fresh and has a high carbon footprint due to transportation. I go to the grocery store twice a week and spend about $30 ($60/wk) on fruits and vegetables and seeds/nuts mostly. It would be convenient for me to just eat at fast food restaurants and get my quick heavy fix of calories, but if i ate twice a day at Taco John's, McDonalds, Burger King, etc.. it would cost me about ten dollars a day ($70/wk). Or even eating on campus costs about $50-60 so it's looks like it's better to just make my own food at home. And it's MUCH cheaper to make your OWN pizzas instead of ordering them out all the time. It's just less convenient. I actually love the time I spend making my food... cutting the vegetables. It creates so much anticipation for what you're about to eat you're about to explode by the time you finally get to eat it.

The problem with corn-fed beef is that the cattle are literally sick when slaughtered. A grass fed cow reaches slaughter weight around 4 years (~48 months), but a corn fed cow is grass fed for 6 months and then sent to a feedlot where they are fed a corn/grain based diet until slaughtered at 14-16 months (about 8 months to reach 48 month equivalent). The grain, that their digestive tracks aren't meant to digest, can make them very sick. The biggest health problem seen on feedlots is bloat from all the grain that they're systems just can't properly break down which creates large amounts of gas (leading to methane that gets in the air). Because the corn makes them so sick, they are injected with antibiotics (which you then eat). Your food is only as good as what your food ate. Of course the beef tastes different - corn is the basis of almost our whole diets by sweetening up this or that or making foods more appealing. But the meat tastes so empty compared to properly prepared grass-fed beef. It's not really the humanity of these operations that keeps me from eating beef, it's knowing that the food I'm eating would have died within a few months after if not slaughtered at 14 months from health complications due to force fed corn.

You find once you care about what you eat and where it's coming from, all of these guidelines are pretty much common sense and come pretty easy to follow. Most of the rest of the world consider food always near the top of the priority list - and they don't have the rates of disease as we see in this country. Wonder why?

I'd like to argue that cows that are grass-fed, grass-finished, as just as good tasting as corn finished. It's also better for the cows, because feeding them grain, such as corn, is stressful to their systems - it also diminishes the omega-3 content they gain while eating grass.

I've found a good brand recommended by Eating Well magazine, called La Cense Beef. They recently sent out an email to their customers letting them know about a giveaway their doing I thought I'd share the site:

www.winagrassfedcow.com

CVilleBilly, low income families tend to gain weight because the affordable foods are calorie-dense and nutritionally-empty. Please read more on this issue before making such insulting remarks. Thanks.

I'm all for grassfed, no CAFO meats. If you have had pastured chicken and turkey, naturally-raised pork and really cooked the right way with grassfed beef, you know what I mean. It tastes meatier. You want fat with your steak? Top it with some bleu cheese. If you ever read how commercial meats are raised (Fast Food Nation) or themeatrix.com, you'll understand.

What a bunch of nit-pickers. Get with the spirit of the rules. We could all pick them apart with picayune exceptions, myself included. But generally-speaking, even making an attempt to follow these rules will have people eating quite a bit better. Geeze.

Seyo, some soy products aren't "fake" anything, they're real soy foods. There's a long-standing tradition for tofu, okara, yuba, tempeh, etc. - that totally fits with the rest of these so-called commandment.

KISS in the post above meant in this sense , of course.

All pretty good, except #1. "Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

Neither of my grandmothers or my wife's grandmothers would recognize sushi as food, period. And I am *not* giving up my sushi. :)

Cost per calorie is at best an irrelevant measure. The amount of calories in a bag of chips is indeed greater than that of a bag of carrots of the same cost. But those are empty calories. The nutritional value per dollar spent is almost always better with fresh an unprocessed foods. And thats what really matters. Calories in and of themselves are meaningless. Thats another problem, we're too conditioned to think in terms of calories, less in terms of nutritional value.

Re: #3, the only actual food items that excludes are:

honey
real dark chocolate
hard tack

Instead, we should eat stuff that will eventually rot, like:

corn syrup
milk chocolate
Twinkies

?!!?!?