Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This catchphrase from Unhappy Meals, a 2007 essay by Michael Pollan of the New York Times, really speaks to me. Focus on eating a diverse balanced whole-food-oriented diet, rather than human-designed food products. Moderate the amount eaten. Finally, eat the way our ancestors did – a plant-based diet, rich in leaves, treating meat à la Thomas Jefferson -- “as a condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”

In his article, Pollan describes how a 1977 US Senate committee drafted guidelines calling for a reduction of meat and dairy product consumption to reduce coronary heart disease that resulted in a political firestorm propelling the US down the path to a new dietary language -- one that shunned plain talk about whole foods, in favor of terms like cholesterol and saturated fats that were guaranteed not to offend powerful food lobbies. He argues that our growing view of food as a “delivery system for nutrients” is responsible for the rise of processed designer foods and resultant health problems like obesity and diabetes.

Pollan goes on to talk about how the things we think we know about the relationship between diet and health are often based on bad science. Food science studies ignore complex interactions -- they don't study nutrients in the context of food or food in the context of diet or diet in the context of lifestyle. And some of the most rigorous, extensive, long-term studies are based on people self-reporting every 3 months what they remember eating -- who can remember what they ate 3 months ago? who knows how it was prepared? and who will admit to eating more than a maintenance-level of calories or greater than a 4 oz. "medium serving size" of meat at a meal?

He discusses principles of healthy eating and ends with some rules of thumb, collected in the course of preparing the article:

1. Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2. Avoid food products that come bearing health claims - they're apt to be heavily processed.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number -- or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible; go to the farmer's market.
5. Eat better quality food and eat less.
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
7. Eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture. If it weren't a healthy diet, the culture wouldn't still be around.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.
9. Eat like an omnivore. Add new species to your diet.

I found Pollan's article a compelling read, and it's made me look at my diet differently. Having successfully lost 30 lbs in the late 1990s following the Zone Diet, I came to view food as fats, proteins, and high- or low-glycemic carbs. I'm going to try getting away from that and viewing food as, well, food again. Give the article a try and see what you think!