Food Rules

1. Eat food.
2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
4. Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
5. Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.
6. Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients.
7. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
8. Avoid food products that make health claims.
9. Avoid food products with the wordoid “lite” or the terms “low-fat” or “nonfat” in their names.
10. Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.
11. Avoid foods that you see advertised on television.
12. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Taken from Michael Pollan's Food Rules.