Our culture shapes our diets, corporations market choices to us, restaurants we like to spend time in (or like because we spend basically no time in) line almost every road in our city. Our supermarket society makes it easy for us to eat foods that sound or look healthy without our understanding of the contents of that food. We trust it. We assume we eat generally well, but we generally don’t.

To change to a healthy diet we must truly understand the food that we eat.

A charming rule recommends this: if your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, don't eat it. (This means Pop-tarts). Our world advanced incredibly with its ability to create foods from chemicals, but until the last beast falls and the last grass is grazed, make better choices. We still have food on the planet, miraculously. Let’s not jump ahead of our doom.

This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2010.