Umarbek

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.

The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is. Real food is alive... and therefore it should eventually die.

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

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

Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

We've gotten fat on low-fat products.

Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.

Eating what stands on one leg is better than eating what stands on two legs, which is better than eating what stands on four legs.

Eat your colors.

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Stop eating before you're full.

Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

The banquet is in the first bite.

Treat treats as treats.

Break the rules once in a while. All things in moderation, including moderation.

Populations that eat a so-called Western diet invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

There is no single ideal human diet but the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new Western diet that most of us now are eating.

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an antioxidant is.

There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes.

Sugar is sugar. And organic sugar is sugar too.

You won't find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmers' market.

If you're going to let others cook for you, you're much better off if they are other humans, rather than corporations.

Vegetarians are notably healthier than carnivores, and they live longer.

A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.

The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead.

Be the kind of person who takes supplements, then skip the supplements.

Pay more, eat less.

To say "I'm hungry" in French you say "J'ai faim" - "I have hunger" - and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but "Je n'ai plus faim" - "I have no more hunger."

Food is a costly antidepressant.

Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

Better to go to waste than to waist.

The shared meal elevates eating from a biological process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community.

Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors.

Most of these items don't deserve to be called food; I call them edible foodlike substances.

Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons, our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt.

The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases than preventing them.

Deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.

For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed rather than a whole food.

Margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to contain transfats that give people heart attacks.

By demonizing one nutrient (fat), we inevitably give a free pass to another, supposedly "good," nutrient, carbohydrates in this case... and then proceed to eat too much of that instead.

To make something like nonfat cream cheese that contains neither cream nor cheese requires an extreme degree of processing.

Read the ingredients on a package of Twinkies or Pringles and imagine what those ingredients actually look like raw or in the places where they grow: You can't do it.

It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.

In countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States.

The diet of the animals we eat strongly influences the nutritional quality and healthfulness of the food we get from them.

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world (lamb's quarters and purslane) are weeds.

Whether soups or cereals or soft drinks, foods and beverages that have been prepared by corporations contain far higher levels of salt and sugar than any ordinary human would ever add, even a child.

Don't drink your sweets. There is no such thing as a healthy soda.

Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work.

The French seldom snack, eat small portions from small plates, don't go back for second helpings, and eat most of their food at long, leisurely meals shared with other people.

It can take twenty minutes before your brain gets the word that your belly is full.

Simply switching from a twelve-inch to a ten-inch dinner plate caused people to reduce their consumption by 22 percent.

No other bite will taste as good as the first, and every subsequent bite will progressively diminish in satisfaction.

Among Americans ages eighteen to fifty nearly a fifth of all eating takes place in the car.

Gas stations have become processed corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you.

When we eat alone, we eat more.

Obsessing over food rules is bad for your happiness, and probably for your health too.

Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.

Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans.

Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

Eat only foods that will eventually rot.

Buy your snacks at the farmers' market.

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Avoid food products that make health claims.

Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.

Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.

Eat wild foods when you can.

Don't overlook the oily little fishes.

Sweeten and salt your food yourself.

Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature.

Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.

Do all your eating at a table. No, a desk is not a table.

Try not to eat alone.

Leave something on your plate.

Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don't.

Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.

Put down your fork between bites.

Drink your food, chew your drink.