Nutrition advice doesn’t change that much

I’ve been obsessively reading about nutrition for a month, which in internet terms makes me an expert.

I’ve always heard people say nutrition advice is “always changing.” I’ve repeated that myself as I continued to eat garbage because who knows what’s healthy anyway?

The other day I came across this quote:

The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on junk foods. Follow these precepts and you will go a long way toward preventing the major diseases of our overfed society—coronary heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and a host of others….

These precepts constitute the bottom line of what seem to be the far more complicated dietary recommendations of many health organizations and national and international governments—the forty-one “key recommendations” of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, for example. … Although you may feel as though advice about nutrition is constantly changing, the basic ideas behind my four precepts have not changed in half a century.

Marion Nestle

And just for good measure, here’s another banger:

The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches.

Efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do. Knowledge in this case is not, as of yet, power; would that it were so.

David L. Katz

And of course, there’s the classic:

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Michael Pollan

So while the nit-picky details of nutrition advice seem to change every day, the main points “have not changed in half a century.” Square that with the fact that only 1 in 10 adults eats enough plants and those nit-picky details seem irrelevant.

Eat mostly plants (and move your stupid body of course) and you’ll almost definitely be much healthier.

(I’m trying to do that with the help of a habit tracker to check off servings of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and protein. I’ll report back but right now it’s too early; the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.)