Mr. Pollan is not a biochemist or a nutritionist but rather a professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. You may recognize his name as the author of two highly praised books on food and nutrition, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” (All three books are from Penguin.)

If you don’t have the time and inclination to read the first two, you can do yourself and your family no better service than to invest $11 and one hour to whip through the 139 pages of “Food Rules” and adapt its guidance to your shopping and eating habits.

Chances are you’ve heard any number of the rules before. I, for one, have been writing and speaking about them for decades. And chances are you’ve yet to put most of them into practice. But I suspect that this little book, which is based on research but not annotated, can do more than the most authoritative text to get you motivated to make some important, lasting, health-promoting and planet-saving changes in what and how you eat.

Reasons to Change

Two fundamental facts provide the impetus Americans and other Westerners need to make dietary changes. One, as Mr. Pollan points out, is that populations who rely on the so-called Western diet — lots of processed foods, meat, added fat, sugar and refined grains — “invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.” Indeed, 4 of the top 10 killers of Americans are linked to this diet.

As people in Asian and Mediterranean countries have become more Westernized (affluent, citified and exposed to the fast foods exported from the United States), they have become increasingly prone to the same afflictions.

The second fact is that people who consume traditional diets, free of the ersatz foods that line our supermarket shelves, experience these diseases at much lower rates. And those who, for reasons of ill health or dietary philosophy, have abandoned Western eating habits often experience a rapid and significant improvement in their health indicators.

I will add a third reason: our economy cannot afford to continue to patch up the millions of people who each year develop a diet-related ailment, and our planetary resources simply cannot sustain our eating style and continue to support its ever-growing population.

In his last book, Mr. Pollan summarized his approach in just seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The new book provides the practical steps, starting with advice to avoid “processed concoctions,” no matter what the label may claim (“no trans fats,” “low cholesterol,” “less sugar,” “reduced sodium,” “high in antioxidants” and so forth).

As Mr. Pollan puts it, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

Do you already avoid products made with high-fructose corn syrup? Good, but keep in mind, sugar is sugar, and if it is being added to a food that is not normally sweetened, avoid it as well. Note, too, that refined flour is hardly different from sugar once it gets into the body.

Also avoid foods advertised on television, imitation foods and food products that make health claims. No natural food is simply a collection of nutrients, and a processed food stripped of its natural goodness to which nutrients are then added is no bargain for your body.

Those who sell the most healthful foods — vegetables, fruits and whole grains — rarely have a budget to support national advertising. If you shop in a supermarket (and Mr. Pollan suggests that wherever possible, you buy fresh food at farmers’ markets), shop the periphery of the store and avoid the center aisles laden with processed foods. Note, however, that now even the dairy case has been invaded by products like gunked-up yogurts.

Follow this advice, and you will have to follow another of Mr. Pollan’s rules: “Cook.”

“Cooking for yourself,” he writes, “is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors.” Home cooking need not be arduous or very time-consuming, and you can make up time spent at the stove with time saved not visiting doctors or shopping for new clothes to accommodate an expanding girth.

Although the most wholesome eating pattern consists of three leisurely meals a day, and preferably a light meal at night, if you must have snacks, stick to fresh and dried fruits, vegetables and nuts, which are naturally loaded with healthful nutrients. I keep a dish of raisins and walnuts handy to satisfy the urge to nibble between meals. I also take them along for long car trips. Feel free to use the gas-station restroom, but never “get your fuel from the same place your car does,” Mr. Pollan writes.

Treating Treats as Treats

Perhaps the most important rules to put into effect as soon as possible are those aimed at the ever-expanding American waistline. If you eat less, you can afford to pay more for better foods, like plants grown in organically enriched soil and animals that are range-fed.

He recommends that you do all your eating at a table, not at a desk, while working, watching television or driving. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re eating, you’re likely to eat more than you realize.

But my favorite tip, one that helped me keep my weight down for decades, is a mealtime adage, “Stop eating before you’re full” — advice that has long been practiced by societies as diverse as Japan and France. (There is no French paradox, by the way: the French who stay slim eat smaller portions, leisurely meals and no snacks.)

Practice portion control and eat slowly to the point of satiation, not fullness. The food scientists Barbara J. Rolls of Penn State and Brian Wansink of Cornell, among others, have demonstrated that people eat less when served smaller portions on smaller plates. “There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion,” Mr. Pollan writes. “Special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.”

Here is where I can make an improvement. Ice cream has been a lifelong passion, and even though I stick to a brand lower in fat and calories than most, and limit my portion to the half-cup serving size described on the container, I indulge in this treat almost nightly. Perhaps I’ll try the so-called S policy Mr. Pollan says some people follow: “No snacks, no seconds, no sweets — except on days that begin with the letter S.”

By “food” Pollan means real food, not creations of the food-industrial complex. Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize.

Pollan points out that populations that eat like modern-day Americans — lots of highly processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains — suffer high rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. But populations that eat more traditional diets don’t. Our great-grandmas knew what they were doing.

But in the last few decades, we seem to have lost that old cultural know-how — or maybe it’s just hard to remember it in our drive-thru world. We need rules.

Like Rule No. 19: “If it’s a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.” Or Rule 36: “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.” Or Rule No. 20: “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”

For most of us, “not too much” is especially hard. But if you follow Rule 52 — “Buy smaller glasses and plates” — your portions will seem larger. And Rules 58 (“Do all your eating at a table”) and 59 (“Try not to eat alone”) will help you slow down and enjoy your meals more.

Hard-core vegetarians complain about the “-ly” in the rule “mostly plants.” So be it: Pollan isn’t dogmatic. He urges us to eat less meat, and better-raised meat. But he doesn’t insist that we give it up entirely.

He ends his book with Rule 64: “Break the rules once in a while.” Decades of obsessing about nutrition — eating low-fat this and low-carb that, drinking sugar-free sodas and vitamin-enhanced water — haven’t made us thinner or healthier.

It’s time we ate like our great-grandmas.

But clarity and inspiration both are to be found in a small book by journalism professor and food writer Michael Pollan. His “Food Rules” are direct, amusing and encouraging. Just what some of us need when our New Year’s resolve is dissolving into excuses.

Some of the rules are pretty easy to follow.”Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk” is simply a choice at the grocery store. But Pollan points out that a lot of what is at the grocery store isn’t so much food as it is an “edible food-like substance.” Hence rule No. 19: If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t. Again, simple enough on the surface.

But how do you make eating plants as easy as buying the packaged-in-the-plant concoctions? And how do you make plants as exciting as the highly advertised products exploding from the page or screen?

Another food rule (even though it’s not Pollan’s) to the rescue: Find great-tasting simple recipes and make them. And then share them. This is the rule our friend Nancy was observing when she passed on and encouraged us to try a simple and superb recipe for roasted cauliflower. Even if you think you don’t like cauliflower, try it. It’s so elegant and so tasty and so easy that it may get you thinking differently about not only cauliflower but about the subconscious rules that are determining your food choices.

The high-heat roasting fills your kitchen with warmth while beautifully caramelizing the vegetables, and a sprightly drizzle of lemon and capers brings sunshine to the dish and your day. It’s the kind of dish that transforms “food rules” from a list of admonitions to a happy acclamation: “Food RULES!”

Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Olive Oil and Capers

1 (2-pound) head cauliflower, green leaves discarded

¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, or to taste

1 tablespoon drained small capers (packed in brine)

¼ teaspoon black pepper

2 cups loosely packed fresh flat-leaf parsley sprigs

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450 degrees. Lightly oil a 9-inch pie plate or square baking dish. Core cauliflower, leaving head intact, then discard core and put cauliflower head in pan. Drizzle 2 tablespoons olive oil over top of cauliflower and sprinkle with ½ teaspoon salt. Bake until tender, 1 to 1¼ hours. Transfer to a serving dish.

Whisk together lemon juice, capers, pepper and remaining ½ teaspoon salt in a small bowl, then whisk in remaining ¼ cup oil. Surround cauliflower with parsley sprigs and drizzle cauliflower and parsley with dressing. Serves 6-8.

Source: Gourmet, November 2006 at epicurious.com

Lynne Ireland lives to eat and welcomes comments and questions from others who do (or don’t).  Contact her at features@journalstar.com

Or maybe more like that little angel that sits on one shoulder: “Avoid food products that contain high fructose corn syrup.” (Not, he says, because it’s less healthful than sugar, but because it’s a sign of a highly processed product.)

Those and 61 other notions make up the influential author’s new book, “Food Rules” (Penguin, $11 paperback), meant to be a simple guide to eating, something anyone can use without reading through a lot of science and nutrition research. And it is really simple, with many of the rules along the lines of things many people know if they stop to think about it. Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and a professor at UC Berkeley, makes some of the advice clever: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

The book is based on his mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan bemoans the fact that many people rely on “experts” to know what to eat when, really, there are just two major facts.

The first is: “Populations that eat a so-called Western diet – generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains … invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.”
And the second is that people who eat a range of traditional diets don’t suffer from those diseases.

Many of the rules are based on traditional wisdom; some are based on more modern notions.

Rule No. 27: “Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.”

No. 36: “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.”

And, there’s the all-important last rule – thank goodness: “Break the rules once in a while.”

“We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have,” Mr. Pollan writes in his new book “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” (Penguin). “Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.”

To compile the rules for his book, which total 64, Mr. Pollan says he consulted folklorists, anthropologists, doctors, nurses, nutritionists and dietitians “as well as a large number of mothers and grandmothers.” He solicited rules from his own readers and audiences at conferences and speeches. He also posted a request to readers of the Well blog, who delivered more than 2,500 suggestions.

The result is a useful and funny purse-sized manual that could easily replace all the diet books on your bookshelf.

I love this book not only for its simplicity and practical advice, but because the rules themselves are memorable and will ring in your head long after you read it. Choosing just one rule that is new to you from each of the book’s three sections would certainly lead to meaningful changes in your eating habits.

This week, I spoke with Mr. Pollan about how he compiled “Food Rules,” his favorite submissions and those that made him laugh but didn’t make the cut. Read our conversation below and then please join the discussion.

What was the impetus for this book?

I’ve spent 10 years looking at agriculture, food and health. I’ve done it mostly as a reporter with a lot of research and adventures and explorations. At the end of the day people want to know what to do with this information. What’s the practical import of what you’ve learned? It’s the question I always get when I’m speaking to readers.

After I published “In Defense of Food,” a polemic about nutrition science and the food industry and how little we know about nutritional science, I heard from doctors who said, “I would love to have a pamphlet I could give to patients.” They didn’t have time to give them a big nutrition lecture. They liked the simple rule concept. They understood you don’t need to know all the science to make smart decisions. I kept hearing the word pamphlet, and I wanted to write a book that would reach as many people as possible. It’s a real radical distillation of everything I’ve been working on. It’s really just to help people to act. It’s about daily practice more than theory.

On the cover of “In Defense of Food,” you gave us the rule “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Isn’t that one rule enough?

You’ll see it still organizes the book. Those are the three big categories. “Eat food” is devoted to rules that help you distinguish real food from edible food-like substances. There is a section on “Mostly plants,” about making distinctions between foods, meat eating and the kinds of foods to eat. The third section, “Not too much,” is about the manners of eating, the cultural rules that help keep us from overeating, things like “Stop before you’re full,” and “Buy smaller plates and glasses.” It’s the umbrella under which all the other rules fit.

When you wrote “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” did you know it would become such a popular, oft-repeated rule?

I came up with that when I was writing a piece for The New York Times Magazine called “Unhappy Meals,” which became my book. I was trying to simplify everything I learned as radically as possible. I thought that was a compromise. I really wanted to say just “Eat food,” but I realized that wasn’t enough. You had to sort of take a position on meat and vegetables, and you had to address the whole issue of quantity. I’ve learned that from Marion Nestle (the New York University nutrition professor and author), that in the end, so much of the discussion about nutrition is a way to avoid talking about how much people are eating. People would rather talk about anything else than quantity. Eat food was the main message, but I realized I needed to qualify it. I was hoping for two words. I compromised at seven.

The adverb “mostly” has been the most controversial. It makes everybody unhappy. The meat people are really upset I’m taking a swipe at meat eating, and the vegetarians are saying, “What’s with the ‘mostly?’ Why not go all the way?” You can’t please everyone. In a way that little word is the most important. It’s not all or nothing. Mostly. It’s about degree. But in the whole food discussion, I’ve learned the most from that, that little “ly” and people’s reaction to it.

In compiling the new food rules, was brevity important to you?

Brevity is important, and humor is important. This isn’t a somber book at all. One that came through the Well blog, “Don’t buy cereals that change the color of the milk,” that’s a nice way to get at don’t buy things with strange ingredients, colors and additives. I want rules to be vivid and sticky, easy to remember. I don’t want people to have to carry the book around with them. I was looking for cultural blips that will stick in your head.

Do we need to embrace all 64 rules? Can we pick and choose?

The reason there are 64, for some people one rule will work better than the other. I think it’s important to take at least one from each category. If you only take from “Eat food” or “Mostly plants,” you’ll get highly processed edible food-like substances out of your cart, but it might not help you deal with the problem of overeating. You need something about eating at tables, eating with other people, all the kind of getting back in touch with your body so you don’t eat in a lot of the ways that are going to make you fat.

I remember reading in “In Defense of Food” about the role of tradition and culture in healthful eating. Can you tell me more about that?

One of the things I’m trying to do in both projects is question the premise that science is the only source of authority we have on matters having to do with food in our bodies. Long before nutrition science, we had something called culture that guided us on the same questions. People have been dealing with health long before there was science, certainly before nutrition science. We’re constantly reading about scientific studies that support old wives’ tales.

There is a line I got from grandmothers, both Jewish and Italian, it might be my favorite rule: “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.” There was an understanding that white flour may not be good for you, and whole grain might be better long before the current research on whole grains. I’m trying to resurrect that cultural wisdom. This book is full of the wisdom of the grandmothers. But it takes some work. There is also some nonsense. There are old wives’ tales that are nothing but old wives’ tales.

What were some of the rejects?

“Don’t eat anything bigger than your head” is a funny line. But is that really true? You could eat a melon and you’d be fine. My favorite one that we got was, “Only one meat per pizza.” I thought that was wonderful. Talk about someone deciding to curb their excess at the last possible second. We got a ton that were funny and playful and not necessarily good health advice.

Do you have any favorite rules besides the grandmother rule you mentioned earlier?

“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” That gets at a lot of our issues. I love French fries, and I also know if I ate French fries every day it would not be a good thing. One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make. Wash the potatoes, fry potatoes, get rid of the oil, clean up the mess. If you made them yourself you’d have them about once a month, and that’s probably about right. The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them. Try to make your own Twinkie. I don’t even know if you can. I imagine it would be pretty difficult. How do you get the cream in there?

Tell me about some of the other rules.

Some of these rules require absolutely no explanation. “If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.” “It’s not food if it’s served through the window of your car.” “It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language.” Think Big Mac, Cheetos or Pringles. Another one I like, “The banquet is in the first bite.” Economists call this the law of diminishing marginal utility. When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that’s a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you’re talking calories and not pleasure. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

Did you learn anything new yourself from the rules?

What I learned the most about wasn’t so much about nutrition. I learned a lot from hearing from readers and other people who sent things in about the psychology of food. The games we play with ourselves about food, about how we confuse lots of food with lots of food experience. They’re not the same thing. You can have intense food experience with less food. Europeans have intense food experiences but eat less food. The biggest lesson I got from this is from people sharing their tricks, their psychological games and deepest feelings about food. The psychology of food is fascinating and barely understood.

Michael Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” has synthesized that tome’s analysis and explanation into “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.”

It doesn’t get much easier than this.

Each page has a simple rule, sometimes with a short explanation, sometimes without, that promotes Pollan’s back-to-the-basics-of-food (and-food-enjoyment) philosophy.

Rule No. 1: Eat food.

He explains that he’s referring to edible items that haven’t been processed beyond recognition. A third of the book focuses on this theme. The second part addresses the type of food people should eat: Mostly plants. The third part focuses on how much food (you might be able to see this coming): Not too much.

Among the gems: Be the kind of person who takes supplements — then skip the supplements. (That’s Rule No. 40.) Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk (Rule No. 36). It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car. (Rule No. 20). Try not to eat alone (Rule No. 59).

So if you need simple directions to achieve a more healthful, perhaps more sane way of eating — not a fancy, complex eating plan involving percentage of carbs and timing (and you also don’t want to have to read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” though you think you should) — this could be your year.

(As for cleaning your plate, he advises against it. Rule No. 61.)