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"The banquet is in the first bite." Taking this adage to heart will help you enjoy your food and eat more slowly. No other bite will taste as good as the first, and every subsequent bite will progressively diminish in satisfaction. Economists call this the law of diminishing marginal utility, and it argues for savoring the first few bites and stopping sooner than you otherwise might. For as you go on, you'll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does. American gas stations now make more money inside selling food (and cigarettes) than they do outside selling gasoline. But consider what kind of food this is: Except perhaps for the milk and water, it's all highly processed, imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become "processed corn stations": ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you. Don't eat here.

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

It can take twenty minutes before your brain gets the word that your belly is full; that means that if you take less than twenty minutes to finish a meal, the sensation of satiety will arrive too late to be of any use. So slow down and pay attention to what your body--and not just your sense of sight--is telling you. This is what your grandparents were getting at with the adage "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

Choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories. Or as grandmothers used to say, "Better to pay the grocer than the doctor."

"The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead."

"Better to go to waste than to waist."

Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.

Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.

"Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals]."

Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

Eat only foods that will eventually rot.