Dan Mitchell, “Pollan’s New Rule to Ding Big Food,” The Big Money, June 21, 2010

This recent blog entry claims that author and activist Michael Pollan has publicly renounced his five-ingredient rule—“to eat only foods that list five or fewer ingredients”—because of “the ‘jiu-jitsu’ employed by the food industry whenever someone offers sound advice.” According to Big Money contributor Dan Mitchell, some marketers have capitalized on this widely disseminated “food rule” by explicitly advertising their products as containing five or fewer pronounceable components. As Pollan apparently says of one popular ice cream maker, “You know how many [ingredients] they had before they went to five? Five!”

Mitchell likewise decries these tactics as indicative of a greater marketing trend, one which implies, for example, that “real cane sugar” is healthier than high-fructose corn syrup. “Pollan says that in the face of the food industry’s superior fighting skills, he decided it was ‘hopeless’ to try to communicate simple rules for avoiding the terrible foods the industry foists upon us, because it would always find a way to corrupt them,” concludes Mitchell. “That is, until he thought of a new one: ‘Don’t eat any foods you’ve ever seen advertised on television.’”