What Should Humans Eat to Be Maximally Healthy?

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Michael Pollan gives away the answer to that much-asked question in the first sentence of his long New York Times Magazine "Unhappy Meals" treatise on food and health. Great quote:

"Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable."

Why listen to him? Read Pollan's Wikipedia entry.