Food and nutrition.

The NY Times says: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

(Requires a NYT login.  Try BugMeNot for a login/password.)

Here are the steps that essay lists, and my responses to them.  Note: this is not an "I disagree! I opine!" post, but rather an "I introspect!" post.  So you know.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

For a sample, check out a few menus from the early 1900s.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They're apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best.

Because seriously – chocolate-covered granola bars?  WTF.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

That last one pretty much means no more eating any food that isn't strictly just-off-the-farm fresh.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.

You know, I have always wanted to get my ass down to the farmer's market, down the street from me…

5. Pay more, eat less. … Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. … "Calorie restriction" has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention.

Well, I kind of already have the eat less part down pat.  I could do better about the eating better thing, though.  Especially now that I have a job.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

This has created in me a terrific jonesin' for a spinach salad.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren't a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn't still be around.

I'm not certain I entirely follow this, but I can see where the author is going with it, so.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.

The gist of this is to get away from preprocessed foods and get back to the idea of food as communion – with ourselves, with the natural cycles of food, with others.  I can get behind that.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet.

Essentially, relying on one thing as your source of anything – in this case, the preprocessed crap we eat requires a whole lot of processing to keep it going – is dumb.  I agree.

Now, keep in mind that I'm agreeing with a lot of this while eating Triscuits.

Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts.  Comment here or there.