A Simple Reminder: Being Healthy is About Eating Good Food to Fuel the Body

Staying healthy isn't about fads or the latest ultra-technical scientific discovery. It's mainly about eating consistently good food to fuel the body.

The Daily Green has a good review of some very basic guidelines that they call The Real Food Diet. And the first rule they mention is from Michael Pollan, one of my favorite food writers. He gets down to basics and just makes so much sense. His motto is a classic:

"Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants."

That pretty much sums it up, and probably covers about 99% of what you need to know about eating healthy foods. Pollan coined a term, "nutritionism", to describe the increasingly reductionist tendency to break human food needs down to a bewildering and confusing array of molecular details that no one can really understand or relate to. Hopefully the nutritionism trend is winding down, with Pollan's help, and we can get back to a more common sense approach to enjoying eating and staying healthy.

After all, before nutritionism, how did your grandparents figure out how to eat? Somehow, they apparently managed to eat and actually stay healthy (healthier, in many ways) they we do now.

Superfoods are an important of a healthy, real foods diet. Simply, these foods are common in traditional diets, and they actually are just foods with concentrated beneficial ingredients. Look for deep, rich flavors, such as colored berries, and deeply colored vegetables, such as carrots. Remember- eat the rainbow!

The Daily Green has a good slide show that highlights the best organic foods to look for in the grocery store.

I've been teaching for over 30 years that the most important thing we can do for our health is to eat a varied diet of whole, unrefined foods. The details matter much less than the overall approach. Enjoy a diet of real food, from many sources, including several different kinds of fruits and vegetables, and you will doo well. Bon appétit!