64 Days of Michael Pollan Day# 6

Day#6 Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients.
The specific number you adopt is arbitrary, but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it probably is. Note 1: A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same thing; that's fine. Note 2: Some products now boast, somewhat deceptively, about their short ingredients lists. HaagenDazs has a new line of ice cream called "five". Great-but it's still ice cream. Same goes for the three-ingredient Tostitos corn chips advertised by Frito-Lay-okay, but they're still corn chips.

64 Days of Michael Pollan Day# 5

Day #5 Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.
Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar. Complicating matters is the fact that, thanks to food science, there are now some forty types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetener, dextrin, dextrose, fructo-oligosaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, surcrose, turbinado sugar, and so on. To repeat: Sugar is sugar. And organic sugar is suar to. 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 yet well understood. But it may be that deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.