Many of us (perhaps most of us) are looking for ways to improve our diets, so we’d like to share some ideas on eating better meals.Michael Pollan, a Professor at Berkeley, a famous writer and speaker on food issues and the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s conducted a ton of research on food, and often comes up with some very surprising results.One of his creations is a list of “rules for eating” that can make it easier to make good decisions about eating. He has long lists of 64 rulesand a short list of seven, and some of them are fun like “Don’t buy your food where you buy your gasoline”.
Butthe first three of his list of seven we think are some of the most powerful and easy to remember and follow (and ones that we follow closely at The Dinner Daily when we create recipes and menus for our members)
The First Three Rules for Healthy Eating
- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
- Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
- 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.
What’s interesting about these three rules is that they are all really different ways of saying the same thing: the healthiest foods for you are the most basic ones – fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and dairy.
Most of them have one ingredient, most of them are found on the perimeter of your grocery store and for sure, most of them are foods your great-grandmother not only would recognize but probably bought.
Looking for Healthy Food? It’s probably not in a box.
Now, think about what you have in your kitchen. Most of us have some of these fresh ingredients, but here in the U.S. we also have a lot of “foods” that are comprised of long lists of ingredients and preservatives that you cannot pronounce and look nothing like the orignal food it started out as. 
But it’s actually not all that hard to get back to a diet that uses mostly basic foods. One easy way is to use a meal planning service like The Dinner Daily, which provides a weekly plan for five dinners and a shopping list that uses mostly basic foods (and is tied to the sales at your store). You’ll feel better leaving the grocery store seeing all of the fresh ingredients in your bag.
Start by planning a meal or two a week where you use basic ingredients. You will need to allow a bit more time for meal prep, but your body and family will thank you, and you might just find yourself enjoying it. And it doesn’t have to be that long – most Dinner Daily meals have a 30 minute time to table, for example.
But read the rules again, maybe a few times, and try to think of them the next time you visit your grocery store.
- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
- Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
- 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.
Healthy Eating with Less Work
Are you worried that this sounds like a lot of work?
If you’ve begun the journey to a healthy lifestyle, don’t be discouraged. The Dinner Daily can help by taking a lot of the work out of the healthy eating. We build recipes, create the shopping lists and add time and money saving tips to make every aspect of dinnertime easier – and healthy!
Learn more about how The Dinner Daily can provide you with a weeklypersonalized dinner plan of healthy recipes – and get two free weeks to give it a try!
