Via The New York Times:
1. Eat food. Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t
recognize as food. there are many foodlike items in the supermarket your
ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars?
Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
2. Avoid food products bearing health claims. Margarine, one of the first
industrial foods to claim that it was healthier than the traditional food it
replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast
about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have
become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food
makers for their endorsement.)
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b)
unpronounceable, c) more than five in number – or that contain high-fructose
corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful, but all
are reliable markers of foods that have been highly processed.
4. 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. You will find fresh whole foods picked at
the peak of their nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your
great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
5. Pay more. Americans spend, on average, less than 10% of their income on
food, down from 24% in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation.
Better food often costs more, because it has been raised with more care,
without government subsidy and with less environmental impact. Those of us
who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good
soils will contribute not only to your health but also to the health of
those people who grow it and live downstream, and downwind, of the farms
where it is grown.
6. “Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all. But the scientific case
for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie
restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many
researchers believe it offers the strongest link between diet and cancer
prevention. Once one of the longest-lived people, the Okinawans practiced a
principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80% full. Quality
may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the
quality of food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied.
7. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. They’re really good for you. By
eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming fewer calories, since plant
foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things
you might eat. Vegetarians and near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are
healthier than carnivores. Thomas Jefferson advised treating meat more as a
flavoring than a food.
8. Let culture be your guide; Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or
the Italians. Or the Greeks. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a
healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. Pay
attention to how a culture eats, as well as what it eats. It may not be the
nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!)
so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking,
communal meals-and the serious pleasure taken in eating.
9. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate
processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the
values and culture of fast food: that food should be cheap and easy; that
food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, embodied in
those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet
and health than any nutrition journal.
10. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to
your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you
are to cover all your nutritional bases. Biodiversity in the diet means less
monoculture in the fields. The vast monocultures that now feed us require
tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Diversifying
those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants
and animals, and healthier people. Your health isn’t bordered by your body
and what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.
