Short decision rules offered as an antidote to nutritional complexity — what they say, who said them, and what kind of claim they are.
What the evidence says
- *Pollan's seven-word rule. In Defense of Food* opens by answering the whole question in seven words — eat food, not too much, mostly plants — and presents this as the short answer to what he calls a supposedly complicated question. He immediately qualifies it: a little meat won't hurt but is better as a side than a main, and "eat food" means whole fresh foods rather than processed food products1
- The phrase is the distilled form of the argument, restated and expanded into rule form in his follow-up Food Rules2
- *The health-claim heuristic.* A health claim printed on a package is treated as a warning rather than a recommendation: on Pollan's argument, a product advertising its healthfulness is strong evidence it is a processed formulation rather than food1
- *The great-grandmother test.* Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food — offered as a filter against the thousands of novel edible products in a modern supermarket1
- The underlying critique — "nutritionism," the ideology that a food is merely the sum of its nutrients, and that invisible nutrients therefore require experts to interpret them — is the reason the rules are pitched at the level of food rather than nutrient. That critique is argued independently in the peer-reviewed literature1,3