Top 10 Things I Learned From In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

A followup to his 2006 best-seller, "In Defense of Food" picks up where "The Omnivore's Dilemma" left off. In "Omnivore," Pollan explored the food chain of three different types of meals: fast food, organic and wild. In his new book, Pollan builds on the dietary pros and cons he uncovered before by asking a simple question: "What should we eat?"

The answer is equally simple, yet not always easy in today's drive-through, pre-cooked meal, ready-to-eat-in-seconds world. But changing the way we eat in the ways Pollan recommends is likely to make us -- and the planet -- both healthier and happier.

Here are the top 10 insights Pollan delivers in "In Defense of Food":

1. Stop obsessing about how high-fat, low-carb, vitamin-enriched, omega-3-supplemented your foods are. The idea that foods are simply the sum of their nutrient parts doesn't line up with the fact that real foods are always more healthful than processed ones, Pollan says. "Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished," he writes.

2. In the same vein, stop looking at food as only a way to deliver health. Throughout history, people have eaten food for many reasons other than to satisfy hunger, Pollan writes: "Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity."

3. Whatever diet you choose to follow, make sure it's not today's contemporary Western one. People have thrived on a variety of diets for thousands of years -- everything from one based almost completely on fruits, nuts, vegetables and grains to one that's almost all meat and dairy. "What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets," Pollan writes.

4. When shopping, avoid buying any food with ingredients you can't pronounce. Pollan also advises against foods with more than five ingredients (bread, for example, is traditionally made with just flour, water, yeast and salt) and anything with high-fructose corn syrup in it.

5. If you have to shop at a grocery store, stick to the outer edges, where the fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, cheese and milk are found. The vast middles of most supermarkets offer mostly highly processed foods.

6. Better still, buy most of your food from a farmer's market or from community-supported agriculture. The food you'll find there is "real," in that it was grown or raised, then comes straight to you with no processing required.

7. Eat a variety of good foods. That means not only expanding your diet beyond the same old potatoes, corn and wheat, but choosing food that grew in healthy soils or were fed healthful diets (meaning, avoid industrially-farmed produce and grain-fed, industrially-raised meats).

8. If you can, grow your own food. Even a couple of pots on your balcony can provide you with fresh herbs, tomatoes and strawberries in season. When you grow it yourself, you know what went into it.

9. Eat old-fashioned meals. That doesn't mean you have to eat exactly what your great-grandparents ate every day. It does mean you should try to eat with family or friends, sitting down at a table, to share food communally. It's not a meal if you eat in the car or alone at your desk, Pollan writes.

10. Finally, here's the simplest advice of all, straight from Pollan's introduction: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."