奇速英语

购买健康食品的新规则

Author Michael Pollan may have one of the hardest jobs: trying to help people make better food choices while battling junk-food marketers’ attempts to undermine his advice. The major problem he faces, as he told The Washington Post, is that marketers take his rules and use them against him.

Buy products with five ingredients or fewer. Pollan says he and others have repeated the rule, “Don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients,” in hopes that people will purchase fresh produce and lean meats. Feeding off of this advice, though, Haagen Dazs started its five campaign. While the ice creams in this line have only five ingredients, those ingredients are high in sugar, fat, and calories. Plus, says Pollan, “They didn’t change anything…it was the same five ingredients they had before.” Pollan also discusses a commercial in which a woman compares Pringles to Tostitos, choosing the Tostitos chips because they have fewer ingredients. Both, however, are high-calorie, high-fat foods. The result is that the consumer is completely confused by clever marketing

Shop the edges of the supermarket. The advice to shop around the edges of the supermarket is supposed to lead shoppers toward fresh produce and lean meats, avoiding the fat processed foods in the middle aisles. But now, claims Pollan, makers of packaged food want to sell their products in that part of the supermarket as well.

Supermarkets can make money by selling a variety of foods. “They can make as much money selling fresh produce as they can packaged goods,” Pollan says. Don’t buy anything advertised in commercials. “Anybody with that kind of marketing budget is selling packaged foods,” Pollan says.

Pollan saw recently that Americans spend about 7 percent of their income on food. By contrast, China spends 33 percent of its income on food, France, 13.5 percent, and Japan, 14.2 percent. Americans seem to have this incapacity to spend more on food. He thinks it’s an enormous challenge. It wasn’t always this cheap. This was a matter of agriculture and technological breakthroughs.