Avoid foods your great grandmother wouldn't recognize

This lengthy column in The New York Times slices through the last 40 years of the American experience with nutrition and health claims. In the end, there is much to commend this piece by Michael Pollan.
Some great lines:

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims.

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

In the end, Pollan does list a few food rules of his own, some bringing with their advice the unmistakable tone of an elitist. Here are a few:

Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
Pay more, eat less.
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
Eat more like the French.

Even if they may seem condescending to the Oreo-loving masses, these are rules fruit and vegetable growers and marketers would gladly see followed by millions more Americans.