“Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients,
or ingredients you can’t pronounce.”
This comes across as being poor advice. Some of the worst processed foods (sauces found in a supermarket isle) often contain 90% of one of the following staples: water, tomato, potato, onion, apple, corn, carrot, ...
It looks healthy but the remainder of the product is salt, refined sugar, perhaps a dash of another staple ingredient and if you're lucky and 1% herbs or spices that you can't taste anyway because they were cutting costs.
Quality food will often contain 10-20 fresh ingredients in varying and balanced quantities. A mix of greens from different families, other vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, herbs, spices, etc.
Which will be better for your body:
1. A diet consisting of tomato, potato and salt?
2. A diverse diet that combines dozens of fresh/raw ingredients.
That's just one of pollan's "rules". Taken out of context, I agree. Put it in context with the others where he suggests, for example "Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad" (or...to paraphrase...eat fresh foods)...and it's fine.
I also think his "rules" can be somewhat hyperbolic. It's not "anything" with more than 5 ingredients....as, for example, a great hot n sour soup has WAY more than that. Holistically his rules would be...understand what you're eating..eat less processed food...eat mostly plants, etc.
It looks healthy but the remainder of the product is salt, refined sugar, perhaps a dash of another staple ingredient and if you're lucky and 1% herbs or spices that you can't taste anyway because they were cutting costs.
Quality food will often contain 10-20 fresh ingredients in varying and balanced quantities. A mix of greens from different families, other vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, herbs, spices, etc.
Which will be better for your body:
1. A diet consisting of tomato, potato and salt?
2. A diverse diet that combines dozens of fresh/raw ingredients.