Michael Pollan

What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.

A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered in a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

Think about it: Most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children. This is, historically speaking, an usual state of affairs.

Choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories. Or as grandmothers used to say, ‘Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.’

People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets. Scientists can argue all they want about the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but whichever it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very much the same: Stop eating a Western diet.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

There’s a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The health-care industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Avoid products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,’ points out Marion Nestle, an NYU nutritionist, ‘is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

A related adage: ‘After lunch, sleep awhile; after dinner, walk a mile.