Seven words

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Michael Pollan, a journalist, put the whole of nutrition into seven words in 2008, in In Defense of Food, and I've never seen it improved on.

His argument was that we'd replaced eating with nutritionism: the idea that food is a delivery system for nutrients, that the nutrients can be studied one at a time, and that an expert can tell you which to add and which to cut. A century of that produced the most anxious, most medicalized, and least healthy eaters in human history. His alternative was to go back to food, by which he meant the things your great-grandmother would recognize as food, and to the way whole cultures have eaten for centuries without ever hearing the word antioxidant.

The seven words break down simply. Eat food: real food, not food-like products; if it has more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce, or makes health claims on the package, it's probably not food. Not too much: eat slowly, stop when you're eighty percent full, eat at a table with others, and don't eat alone or in the car. Mostly plants: not exclusively, but plants at the center of the plate and everything else at the edges.

It sits here, near the end of the table keys, because it's the summary of all of them. Every program on this shelf, the Mediterranean, Pritikin, Ornish, the plant-based ones, DASH, agrees with the seven words. They differ on the details. The details matter less than people think.

For the month of Meaning: Pollan's deepest point was that eating is culture, not chemistry. A meal is a practice, shared, slow, and pleasurable, and the cultures that keep it that way are healthier than the ones that turned it into fuel.