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NEW YORK, U.S.A., January 28, 2007: (HPI note: This is a short summary of a very long, complex article which while not advocating vegetarianism outright, makes a pretty good case for it.) The perplexing question of what we should eat to stay healthy has become even more confusing as scientists learn more and more about food and nutrients. Michael Pollan explores the subject matter in his essay by zeroing in on low-fat diets, nutritional science and the Western diet. He finally concludes with the following common sense points:
1. Eat food, that is do not eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food and that includes breakfast cereal bars and non-dairy creamers.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks.
3. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
4. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care.
5. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
6. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.
7. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.

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