Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I recently finished reading the book In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. The book tries to answer the question, "what should we eat." He covers a lot of scientific research and a lot of history and concludes that the safest way to eat is to eat traditional foods, foods your great grandmother would have eaten (or anybody's great grandmother-- he thinks any traditional cuisine is fair game). Turns out that the scientists who study nutrition (I won't go into his thoughts about that right now) don't agree on much. For example, they don't all agree that saturated fat is bad. But they do agree that we should all eat more plants, especially leafy greens. The distilled summary is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

He offers a lot of general rules to follow when shopping for food. For example, shop the edges of the grocery store and avoid foods that have been processed. Buy what you can from farmer's markets (he calls it shaking the hand that feeds you). Avoid foods with more than five ingredients, or foods with ingredients you don't know how to pronounce.

I highly recommend this book. I may post more about it periodically. It certainly has changed my perspective about food despite the fact that I have long been a vegetarian with a leaning towards whole foods.