Many people who are concerned about our modern food environment

find themselves in search of simple rules.

This is why so many fad diets gain a following,

even when there's very little science behind them.

People want easy to follow dietary advice, but the human diet is inherently complex.

Having said that, there are simple ways of wording sound dietary advice.

Here's one of the best examples.

>> Michael, you use a simple framework for

delivering a lot of your advice on how to approach one's relationship with food.

And what comes to mind is your kind of mantra, eat food, not too much,

mostly plants.

>> Yeah. Well, coming up with those seven words,

which I'm afraid will be on my gravestone unless I come up with something better

soon- >> [LAUGH]

>> Is the result of a very long process of

examining the science of nutrition.

But as I got deeper, and deeper, and deeper, I realized, well actually,

the key issue is are you eating real food?

Or what I like to call edible food like substances,

which is to say processed foods.

And so

the phrase eat food, I realized that's really what you need to know, to eat well.

Eat Food, by which I mean real food, but then I realized that isn't quite enough

because we're also eating too many calories.

So Not Too Much became part of the mantra, and then, lastly, I was like,

well, within the range of foods, is there a class that's better than another class?

And one of the things we know is that people who eat lots of plant

foods tend to have much better health and

better longevity than people who eat a heavy meat diet.

So, Mostly Plants, not all plants, mostly, I'm trying to be very reasonable and

although it tends to offend both vegetarians and

carnivores when you say mostly plants.

So Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants is basically I think,

all you need to know.

Now, eat food is probably the hardest part of that to

understand because isn't all that stuff in the supermarket food?

Well, I would argue it's not, and

I would argue a lot of it are relatively new, highly processed

edible food-like substances that really are what gets most people into trouble.

They tend to have lots of refined sugars, lots of refined fats,

and very little fiber, very little of the antioxidants you find in plants.

And basically they were designed for long shelf life, these processed foods.

And the way you make the food last longer is you take out what is nutritionally

valuable.

I'm talking about omega three fatty acids, I'm talking about fiber,

all these things don't store well.

So we've gone down a path of eating a lot of things that shouldn't be dignified with

that beautiful word, food.

[MUSIC]

>> Replacing the highly processed food in our diets with reasonable amounts

of real food, including plenty of plant-based foods is sound advice for

people who want to protect their health and Paulin's mantra: Eat Food,

Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

These seven words can be a helpful guide for

anyone who wants to keep it simple when it comes to choosing food.

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Stanford Introduction to Food and Health

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