What I Eat

It’s not as consistent as you’d think

Mark Bittman
Heated

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Photo: Justin Hackworth

There are, as my friend, the doctor David Katz, often says, no major questions remaining about the best way to eat. It’s food, real food, minimally processed, with as much as possible from the plant kingdom. Whatever went wrong with our diet — and we know that something did — it involves products of the last hundred years: factory-farmed meat, hyper-processed foods of all kinds (but especially carbohydrates) and lots and lots of sugar. Choose your poison, because that’s what all of these are, and eliminate what you can, making sure always, or at least whenever possible, to plug those gaps you’ve left in your diet with fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds. I’m sure you know the drill.

Because I write about all of this regularly, because for better or worse some people have the impression that I’m a vegan, because I advocate for more plants in our diets and less junk, I get asked what I actually eat a lot. The short answer — which is much more about my personality than my diet — is that I’m routine-resistant. I’m reluctant to establish predictable modes of behavior, and that’s doubly true for diet. I can’t give you my “usual” weekly menu.

Thus, 12 years ago, when I had gained the weight that many careless people gain in the years after turning 40, when my blood numbers were headed in the wrong direction and…

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