Drop Dead Healthy

The Ten Best Pieces of Food Advice I’ve Gotten All Year

“Just eat a goddamn vegetable.”

—The Onion newspaper

In an enlightening 2011 article, The Onion quoted an FDA spokesman who said, “Just buy a bag of f*cking carrots and eat them the way you’d normally eat a hot dog. You stand in front of a cold fridge stuffing the hot dogs in your fat face, just do that with a carrot. It’s that simple.” Well said.

“Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.”

—Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body

I’m not opposed to all carbs, but white bread, white pasta, white tortillas? Ban them from your plate. And arguably potatoes as well. Ferriss—as well as more traditional experts like Walter Willett, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition—says to avoid potatoes. “The venerable baked potato increases blood sugar and insulin levels nearly as fast and as high as pure table sugar,” Willett writes in his book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy.

“Make it crunchy.”

—Paul McGlothin, coauthor of The CR Way

The junk food industry spends millions figuring out how to press our gustatory buttons. Their researchers use scary-sounding words like “bliss point” and “hedonics.” But why should they have all the fun? Why can’t healthy eaters steal their tricks? Like crunchiness. As billions of Cheetos prove, we love a crunchy food. McGlothin suggests adding sunflower seeds to salads and fish.

“Shop the perimeter of the grocery store.”

—Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and author of What to Eat

As Nestle has explained, “Supermarkets want customers to spend as much time as possible wandering the aisles because the more products they see, the more they buy. So it’s best to stay out of the maze of the center aisles, where all the junk foods are, and just shop the perimeter, where the healthier, fresh foods are.”

She says to look down. Or up. Avoid the foods at eye level—along with anything sold at the cash registers and ends of aisles. They are generally the most high-profile, heavily-advertised packaged foods. In other words, junk.

“If you are going to eat meat, make it a side dish.”

—Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and founding flexitarian

Jefferson wrote that he ate meat only “as condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” Jefferson was also an early locavore, finding much of his food in his garden, which, according to the folks at Monticello “featured more than 250 varieties of herbs and vegetables, including those that others considered exotic or even possibly poisonous, such as the tomato.”

“Create pause points.”

—Brian Wansink, Ph.D., Cornell psychology professor and author of Mindless Eating

Unless we are given a cue, we’ll just keep troweling food into our mouths. (Remember the experiment with the secretly refilled tomato soups?) This is why Wansink suggests creating “pause points,” visual cues that slow us down. Instead of eating “directly out of a package or box, put your snack in a separate dish and leave the box in the kitchen.” Or else, repackage treats into little plastic bags. Even distance can create a pause point. When you’re at your desk, make sure all food is out of reach. The thought of hoisting yourself out of the chair is a compelling pause point.

“Protein and fats for breakfast”

—Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat

If I were to round up the people who caused the obesity epidemic, I’d start with nineteenth-century health guru John Harvey Kellogg. Along with his other questionable cures (e.g., yogurt enemas), Kellogg believed protein was the devil’s food. So he crusaded to have America’s traditional protein-heavy breakfast replaced with his cereals. Which is why millions of Americans eat bowls full of gut-expanding simple carbs every morning.

Instead, Taubes and others advise, eat some protein. It will keep you satiated much longer and prevent your blood sugar from spiking. My own breakfast often includes the white of a hard-boiled egg and a handful of walnuts.

“Eat your colors”

—Michael Pollan, Food Rules

Not to be confused with “taste the rainbow,” the official slogan of the Skittles Diet. The idea is to eat vegetables of all different hues—red peppers, yellow tomatoes, green spinach—to ensure you’re getting a variety of antioxidants.

“Buy a steamer.”

—Ellen Jacobs, my mom

Thank you, Mom. You saved me from consuming thousands of calories.

“Don’t be so obsessed with healthy food that you end up sitting alone in the corner eating organic kale and silently judging your friends.”

—Steven Bratman, M.D., coauthor of Health Food Junkies

That’s a paraphrase, but the sentiment is from Bratman—the man who coined the term “orthorexia,” meaning an unhealthy obsession with healthy foods.