Food Rules Read online

  PART III

  How should I eat?

  (Not too much.)

  The rules in the previous two sections deal primarily with questions about what to eat; the ones in this section deal with something a bit more elusive but no less important: the set of manners, eating habits, taboos, and unspoken guidelines that together govern a person’s (and a culture’s) relationship to food and eating. How you eat may have as much bearing on your health (and your weight) as what you eat.

  This may well be the deeper lesson of the so-called French paradox: the mystery (at least to nutritionists) of a population that eats all sorts of supposedly lethal fatty foods, and washes them down with red wine, but which is nevertheless healthier, slimmer, and slightly longer lived than we are. What nutritionists fail to see in the French is a people with a completely different relationship to food than we have. They seldom snack, eat small portions from small plates, don’t go back for second helpings, and eat most of their food at long, leisurely meals shared with other people. The rules governing these behaviors may matter more than any magic nutrient in their diet.

  The rules in this section are designed to foster a healthier relationship to food, whatever it is you’re eating.

  44

  Pay more, eat less.

  With food, as with so many things, you get what you pay for. There is also a trade-off between quality and quantity, and a person’s “food experience”—a meal’s duration or quotient of pleasure—does not necessarily correlate with the number of calories consumed. The American food system has for many years devoted its energies to increasing quantity and reducing price rather than to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food—measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond)—costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation. As the cost of food in America has declined, in terms of both price and the effort required to put it on the table, we have been eating much more (and spending more on health care). If you spend more for better food, you’ll probably eat less of it, and treat it with more care. And if that higher-quality food tastes better, you will need less of it to feel satisfied. Choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories. Or as grandmothers used to say, “Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.”

  45

  . . . Eat less.

  This is probably the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do—regardless of whether you are overweight—is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. We eat much more than our bodies need to be healthy, and the excess wreaks havoc—and not just on our weight. But we are not the first people in history to grapple with the special challenges posed by food abundance, and previous cultures have devised various ways to promote the idea of moderation. The rules that follow offer a few proven strategies.

  46

  Stop eating before you’re full.

  Nowadays we think it is normal and right to eat until you are full, but many cultures specifically advise stopping well before that point is reached. The Japanese have a saying—hara hachi bu—counseling people to stop eating when they are 80 percent full. The Ayurvedic tradition in India advises eating until you are 75 percent full; the Chinese specify 70 percent, and the prophet Muhammad described a full belly as one that contained ⅓ food and ⅓ liquid—and ⅓ air, i.e., nothing. (Note the relatively narrow range specified in all this advice: somewhere between 67 and 80 percent of capacity. Take your pick.) There’s also a German expression that says: “You need to tie off the sack before it gets completely full.” And how many of us have grandparents who talk of “leaving the table a little bit hungry”? Here again the French may have something to teach us. To say “I’m hungry” in French you say “J’ai faim”—“I have hunger”—and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but “Je n’ai plus faim”—“I have no more hunger.” That is a completely different way of thinking about satiety. So: Ask yourself not, Am I full? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.

  47

  Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

  For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you’re eating, and ask yourself if you’re really hungry—before you eat and then again along the way. (One old wives’ test: If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you’re not hungry.) Food is a costly antidepressant.

  48

  Consult your gut.

  Most of us allow external, and usually visual, cues to determine how much we eat. The larger the portion, for example, the more we eat; the bigger the container, the more we pour. As in so many areas of modern life, the culture of food has become a culture of the eye. But when it comes to food, it pays to cultivate the other senses, which often provide more useful and accurate information. It can take twenty minutes before your brain gets the word that your belly is full; that means that if you take less than twenty minutes to finish a meal, the sensation of satiety will arrive too late to be of any use. So slow down and pay attention to what your body—and not just your sense of sight—is telling you. This is what your grandparents were getting at with the adage “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

  49

  Eat slowly.

  Not just so you’ll be more likely to know when to stop. Eat slowly enough to savor your food; you’ll need less of it to feel satisfied. If it is a food experience rather than mere calories you’re after, the slower you eat, the more of an experience you will have. There is an Indian proverb that gets at this idea: “Drink your food, chew your drink.” In other words, eat slowly enough, and chew thoroughly enough, to liquefy your food, and move your drink around in your mouth to thoroughly taste it before swallowing. The recommendation sounds a bit clinical perhaps, but try following it at least to the point of fully appreciating what’s in your mouth. Another strategy, encoded in a table manner that’s been all but forgotten: “Put down your fork between bites.”

  50

  “The banquet is in the first bite.”

  Taking this adage to heart will help you enjoy your food and eat more slowly. No other bite will taste as good as the first, and every subsequent bite will progressively diminish in satisfaction. Economists call this the law of diminishing marginal utility, and it argues for savoring the first few bites and stopping sooner than you otherwise might. For as you go on, you’ll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.

  51

  Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.

  This is a pretty good metric that honors the cook for the care you or he or she has put into the meal at the same time that it helps you to slow down and savor it.

  52

  Buy smaller plates and glasses.

  The bigger the portion, the more we will eat—upward of 30 percent more. Food marketers know this, so they supersize our portions as a way to get us to buy more. But we don’t have to supersize portions at home, and shouldn’t. One researcher found that simply switching from a twelve-inch to a ten-inch dinner plate caused people to reduce their consumption by 22 percent.

  53

  Serve a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds.

  You lose all control over portion size when you have second helpings. So what is a proper portion? There is folklore offering some sensible rules of thumb based on your size. One adage says you should never eat a portion of animal protein bigger than your fist. Another says that you should eat no more food at a meal than would fit into the bowl formed by your hands when cupped together.
If you are going to break the rule on seconds, at least wait several minutes before doing it: You may well discover you don’t really need seconds, or if you do, not as much as you thought.

  54

  “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.”

  Eating a big meal late in the day sounds unhealthy, though in fact the science isn’t conclusive. Some research suggests that eating close to bedtime elevates triglyceride levels in the blood, a marker for heart disease that is also implicated in weight gain. Also, the more physically active you are after a meal, the more of the energy in that meal your muscles will burn before your body stores it as fat. But some researchers believe a calorie is a calorie, no matter what time of day it is consumed. Even if this is true, however, front-loading your eating in the early part of the day will probably result in fewer total calories consumed, since people are generally less hungry in the morning. A related adage: “After lunch, sleep awhile; after dinner, walk a mile.”

  55

  Eat meals.

  This recommendation sounds almost as ridiculous as “eat food,” but nowadays it too no longer goes without saying. We are snacking more and eating fewer meals together. Sociologists and market researchers who study American eating habits no longer organize their results around the increasingly quaint concept of the meal: They now measure “eating occasions” and report that we have added to the traditional Big Three—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—an as yet untitled fourth daily eating occasion that lasts all day long: the constant sipping and snacking we do while watching TV, driving, working, and so on. (One study found that among Americans ages eighteen to fifty nearly a fifth of all eating takes place in the car.) In theory, grazing—eating five or six small meals over the course of the day—makes sense, but in practice people eating this way often end up eating more, and eating more processed snack foods. So unless you can confine your grazing to real food, stick to meals.

  56

  Limit your snacks to unprocessed plant foods.

  Remember the old taboo against “between-meal snacks”? Decades of determined food marketing have driven the phrase from our consciousness. But the bulk of the 500 calories Americans have added to their daily diet since 1980 (the start of the obesity epidemic) have come in the form of snack foods laden with salt, fat, and sugar. If you are going to snack, try to limit yourself to fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

  57

  Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.

  American gas stations now make more money inside selling food (and cigarettes) than they do outside selling gasoline. But consider what kind of food this is: Except perhaps for the milk and water, it’s all highly processed, imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become “processed corn stations”: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you. Don’t eat here.

  58

  Do all your eating at a table.

  No, a desk is not a table. If we eat while we’re working, or while watching TV or driving, we eat mindlessly—and as a result eat a lot more than we would if we were eating at a table, paying attention to what we’re doing. This phenomenon can be tested (and put to good use): Place a child in front of a television set and place a bowl of fresh vegetables in front of him or her. The child will eat everything in the bowl, often even vegetables he or she doesn’t ordinarily touch, without noticing what’s going on. Which suggests an exception to the rule: When eating somewhere other than at a table, stick to fruits and vegetables.

  59

  Try not to eat alone.

  Americans are increasingly eating in solitude. Although there is some research to suggest that light eaters will eat more when they dine with others (perhaps because they spend more time at the table), for people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption, if only because we’re less likely to stuff ourselves when others are watching. We also tend to eat more slowly, since there’s usually more going on at the table than ingestion. This is precisely why so much food marketing is designed to encourage us to eat in front of the TV or in the car: When we eat alone, we eat more. But regulating appetite is only part of the story: The shared meal elevates eating from a biological process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community.

  60

  Treat treats as treats.

  There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion. This is another case where the outsourcing of our food preparation to corporations has gotten us into trouble: It’s made formerly expensive or time-consuming foods—everything from fried chicken and french fries to pastries and ice cream—easy and readily accessible. Frying chicken is so much trouble that people didn’t use to make it unless they had guests coming over and a lot of time to prepare. The amount of work involved kept the frequency of indulgence in check. These 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. One way is to start making these foods yourself; if you bake dessert yourself, you won’t go to that much trouble every day. Another is to limit your consumption of such foods to weekends or social occasions. Some people follow a so-called S policy: “no snacks, no seconds, no sweets—except on days that begin with the letter S.”

  61

  Leave something on your plate.

  Many of us were told by our parents while growing up that we should always clean our plates—an instruction that in later life we have perhaps taken a little too much to heart. But there is an older and healthier tradition that holds it is more genteel not to finish every last morsel of food: “Leave something for Mr. Manners,” some children once were told, or, “Better to go to waste than to waist.” Practice not cleaning your plate; it will help you eat less in the short term and develop self-control in the long.

  62

  Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don’t.

  What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel rather than a form of communion with other people, and also with other species—with nature. On a more practical level, you will eat what your garden yields, which will be the freshest, most nutritious produce obtainable; you will get exercise growing it (and get outdoors and away from screens); you will save money (according to the National Gardening Association, a seventy-dollar investment in a vegetable garden will yield six hundred dollars’ worth of food); and you will be that much more likely to follow the next, all-important rule.

  63

  Cook.

  In theory, it should make little difference to your health whether you cook for yourself or let someone else do the work. But unless you can afford to hire a private chef to prepare meals exactly to your specifications, letting other people cook for you means losing control over your eating life, the portions as much as the ingredients. Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you’re eating real food and not edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt. Not surprisingly, the decline in home cooking closely parallels the rise in obesity, and research suggests that people who cook are more likely to eat a more healthful diet.

  64

  Break the rules once in a while.

  Obsessing over food rules is bad for your happiness, and probably for your health too. Our experience over the past few decades suggests that dieting and worrying too much about nutrition has made us no healthier or slimmer; cultivating a relaxed attitude toward food is important. There will be special occasions
when you will want to throw these rules out the window. All will not be lost (especially if you don’t throw out number 60). What matters is not the special occasion but the everyday practice—the default habits that govern your eating on a typical day. “All things in moderation,” it is often said, but we should never forget the wise addendum, sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Including moderation.”

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank all the people who helped in the writing of this book, many of whom I don’t know by name, and many of whom don’t even know they’ve helped. But several I’m happy to be able to acknowledge by name. David Ludwig, MD, read the manuscript and made many valuable suggestions; he also caught several errors, though he shouldn’t be held responsible for any that remain. He has been an invaluable teacher on questions of nutrition. So has Daphne Miller, MD, who contributed several memorable rules drawn from her medical practice and extensive fieldwork on traditional diets around the world. I’ve also learned a lot about diet and health from my conversations with Marion Nestle, Walter Willett, and Joan Gussow, even though I’m sure each will find things to disagree with in these pages. Special thanks to Tara Parker-Pope at the New York Times for letting me solicit rules on her blog, and to her readers, whose overwhelming response enriched the project immeasurably. My old friend and colleague Michael Schwarz read the manuscript and improved it with his editing; thank you once again. Thanks again, too, to Amanda Urban and her crack team at ICM, and to the wonderful crew at Penguin, but especially to Ann Godoff, Lindsay Whalen, Holly Watson, and Rachel Burd. For her first-rate research and editing I’m grateful to Malia Wollan. Adrienne Davich also contributed valuable research and fact-checking. And finally, heartfelt thanks to Judith and Isaac, the best dinner companions anyone could wish for; your ideas and words (not to mention your cooking) always nourish me, and particularly nourished this book.