Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
Interpretation
Choose natural and whole foods that are recognizable and familiar from our ancestral diet.
Michael Pollan's quote encourages individuals to be mindful of their food choices, suggesting that we should eat only those foods that our ancestors would have recognized as real food. This serves as a caution against processed and artificial food products that have proliferated in modern supermarkets, highlighting the importance of returning to simpler, more natural eating habits for better health.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a health seminar discussing the benefits of whole foods.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.
There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day.
Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.
[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
If you look at three diseases, the three major killers, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, the only disease for which we have really good drugs is HIV. And it's very simple: because there's a market in the United States and Europe.
The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.
I won't take time to repeat all the obvious benefits of physical exercise but will only underscore the well-attested fact that a program of regular exercise increases one's efficiency in every facet of life, including the depth and restfulness of sleep. And the time taken can be minimal; just a few minutes of calisthenics and running in place in one's room or jogging around the yard or block is often sufficient. Exercising doesn't take time. It saves time. Still, few consistently do it.
Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.
For far too many people, the stigma around addiction prevents them from stepping forward for help.
The last thing you ever want to do is extend the period of frailty and disability and make people unhealthy for a longer time period. So lifespan extension in and of itself should not be the goal of medicine, nor should it be the goal of public health, nor should it be the goal of aging science.
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