“[The] evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer.”

—Mark Bittman, TED talk

Food. The term is almost synonymous with life itself. We devote more time to procuring food and eating than we do to any other life-sustaining activity except breathing and sleeping. Food is one of our greatest sources of pleasure, and it is one we share with those we love. We eat as a family, a community, a tribe, nourishing our bodies at the same time that we nourish our relationships. Indeed, dining together releases oxytocin, the “love hormone” that stimulates greater human connectivity. While every species must eat, the human imagination has imbued the simple acts of preparing and consuming food with a whole world of emotion and meaning. Food can express love, gratitude, compassion, creativity, and identity. Historically it has formed a building block of culture—cementing alliances, capturing the unique character of a people, marking significant events. Food is celebration. Food is connection. Food is life.

Yet for millions of people, food is also synonymous with stress, weight gain, neurosis, confusion, and even disease. Americans today have the potential to be the healthiest human beings ever to have walked this earth, but we are quite the opposite. 69% of US adults are overweight and 36% are obese,¹ and these numbers have been steadily rising over the past fifty years.² 17% of children are obese, and 19% have a diet-related chronic condition.³ More than one million Americans die every year from heart disease and cancer, conditions widely referred to in the medical profession as “lifestyle diseases.” In other words, they are primarily caused by the way we eat and other controllable factors. A shocking 115 million Americans are diabetic or prediabetic.⁴

A recent survey from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compared America to thirty-three other member countries on multiple health factors, including life expectancy and death rates from various diseases, and America came in close to the bottom on almost every one.5 And we are exporting our bad dietary habits, with obesity and diet-related disease rates rising around the world as developing countries rush to eat just as we do.⁶

Many of us are trying to do better. According to a 2015 survey,⁷ 77% of Americans are actively trying to eat healthier and researchers estimate that more than 50% of the population is “on a diet” at any given time.⁸ We are eating fewer calories and drinking fewer sugary sodas, and obesity rates may have finally peaked.⁹ The organic food moment has only picked up steam since Whole Foods Market took it national in the 1980s and ’90s. Numerous healthy-eating initiatives dot America’s food landscape, and things that once seemed fringe are becoming commonplace. At this point, however, the green shoots of good news are still crowded out by the bad. Never has there been such variety and abundance of healthy foods available to us, but never has there been so much seemingly conflicting information about what we should and should not eat. Judging by our national health statistics, it would seem that as a culture we are not doing too well at navigating the all-important question we have the privilege of asking: What should I choose to eat today?

Our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and the generations before them never had options the way we do. They probably just ate whatever was most readily available—foods that they could grow or obtain from local producers. In many cultures around the world today, this is still the case. And too many people still struggle simply to get enough to eat. But those of us who are blessed with an abundance of choices have the enviable but serious problem of needing to learn to eat well.

Eating is something every human being does, but most of us don’t do it very skillfully. In fact, skillful is not a term we tend to associate with eating, but we should. You wouldn’t expect to be able to play a sport or a musical instrument very skillfully without dedicated study and practice. The same applies to eating. Just because you’ve been doing it all your life doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the art of self-nourishment. You may just be eating the way your parents brought you up to eat, or the way your friends eat, without deeply thinking about whether it will help you to achieve your own health and life goals.

Every person today who wants to live a long and healthy life needs to become a skillful eater, and we need to bring up our children to be the same. A skillful eater is one who has studied the best of what nutritional science can teach us about food and the way it affects our bodies. She knows how to see past the fog of confusion created by the media and the latest diet fads. A skillful eater makes informed decisions every day about what he puts in his mouth. And his tastes have evolved, along with his understanding, so that what he loves to eat and what’s good for him to eat are one and the same.

The chapters that follow will teach you to become a more skillful eater, in all these ways and more. If you’ve picked up this book, you’ve likely already begun that journey of development. You’re already asking yourself some variation on the question: What kind of diet should I choose for optimum health, vitality, beauty, and longevity? Maybe you’re a lifelong explorer of wellness. Maybe you’re a passionate foodie who loves to eat and also wants to be healthy. Maybe you’re frustrated, having tried countless diets but failed to achieve your goals. Maybe you’ve had a health scare and been told you need to change your lifestyle before it’s too late. Maybe you’re just tired of all the confusion and yearning for some commonsense answers. Whatever brought you here, we hope these pages can offer you the inspiration, clarity, and confidence to become a more skillful eater.

It’s Not as Confusing as It Seems

Which is easier: doing your taxes or figuring out how to eat a healthy diet? In a 2012 study, 52% of people chose the former.10 If you feel confused about the best diet for health and longevity, you’re not alone, and it’s not surprising. Nutritional science, and the news stories that disseminate it, can make you feel as if you might as well just give up trying to find a simple answer and eat whatever you feel like. For every study about some particular finding related to diet or health, a contradictory one can be found. As you sip your morning coffee and idly wonder whether it’s doing you any good, you can easily drum up an article proclaiming coffee’s benefits (antioxidants!), another decrying its ills (caffeine!), a third telling you that to feed your brain you should be drinking your coffee with butter, and a fourth arguing convincingly that bone broth is the new coffee. As you contemplate whether to have bacon, pancakes, or a banana for breakfast, you can find studies and books affirming or challenging each option, some telling you why you should skip breakfast altogether, and others declaring it to be the most important meal of the day. And your friends all claim to have the answers—based on books they’ve read, diets they’ve tried, and cutting-edge information they heard from a trainer at the gym. It’s little wonder so many people are perplexed by the options on their plates.

It’s tragic that our country’s health is failing so badly, because eating well is actually not as confusing as it seems. There are hundreds of different philosophies of eating, and many people and institutions with a vested interest in promoting one or another of them; but when it comes to actual science, there’s a surprisingly robust consensus about what foods make us sick and what foods make us healthy. As Walter Willett, MD, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, and Patrick J. Skerrett, MA, confirm, there are “enough solid strands of evidence from reliable sources to weave simple but compelling recommendations about diet.”¹¹

Yes, there will always be controversies and contradictions, especially when we focus on the details, and there is a considerable amount that science simply does not yet understand about the complex interplay between the foods we eat and the intricate systems of our bodies. We as authors have spent decades studying this subject, continue to seek out the latest studies, and consider ourselves lifetime students of nutritional science. But the bottom line is simple. What we already know—if acted upon—is enough to extend our lives, revolutionize our health, and dramatically reduce our risk of developing chronic diseases. What do we know? It’s this simple:

A whole foods, mostly plant-based diet is the optimum diet for health, vitality, and longevity.

What is a whole foods, plant-based diet? Put simply, it is a diet that prioritizes eating whole or unprocessed plant foods; minimizes meat, fish, dairy products, and eggs; and eliminates highly processed foods.

As you’ll see, this is not necessarily a vegetarian or vegan diet. We suggest that you eat a whole foods, ninety-plus percent (90+%) plant-based diet, which means keeping animal foods (meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products) to 10% or less of your calories. Most importantly, the Whole Foods Diet is not about deprivation, limitation, and loss of pleasure. This is a dietary approach that is inclusive and can be customized for individual needs and preferences. Do you feel attracted to the Mediterranean diet, the Paleo approach, the gluten-free lifestyle, or the vegan ethos? All of these dietary philosophies can be adapted to fit into a Whole Foods Diet framework. Within the parameters of a whole foods, 90+% plant-based diet there is tremendous flexibility to create meal after meal that satisfies your needs, nourishes your body, and delights your senses.

We’re hardly alone in coming to the conclusion that this way of eating is optimal. Hundreds of doctors, clinical trials, and epidemiological studies involving millions of people over several decades have confirmed, over and over again, this simple message about food and health. In fact, when Dr. David Katz, a respected researcher in the field and founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, was asked to compare the medical evidence for and against each of the major dietary trends in the West today—including Paleo, Mediterranean, low fat, low carb, low glycemic, vegetarian, and vegan—his conclusion was this: “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”12

In 2015, together with the nonprofit Oldways, Katz convened twenty-one leading nutritionists of varying persuasions—from plant-based advocates such as Dr. Dean Ornish to the father of the Paleo movement, S. Boyd Eaton—to seek “common ground” on dietary best practices. While the assembled experts didn’t take it quite as far as Katz’s own review, their recommendations pointed in the same direction: “A healthy dietary pattern is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or nonfat dairy, seafood, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol (among adults); lower in red and processed meats; and low in sugar-sweetened foods and drinks and refined grains.”13

Despite some inherent differences, the experts were not so far apart after all. Almost no one argues, for example, that we should eat highly processed foods, and just about everyone agrees that fruits and vegetables are vital to human health, and we should consume a great deal more of them. (In America, total per-capita consumption of fruits and vegetables was 1.68 cups per day in 2014, a drop from 1.77 in 2009.¹⁴ This is significantly short of the USDA recommendation of 4.5 cups, and we would consider even that to be on the low side.)

Things get somewhat more complicated when it comes to grains, fats, and the overall health profile of meat and dairy products. We will spend much more time in the chapters that follow exploring the science around these specific food groups. But the simple point is that while some degree of confusion certainly exists, there is also significant consensus and agreement.

Katz is unequivocal on this point: “We are not, absolutely not, emphatically NOT clueless about the basic care and feeding of Homo sapiens,” he writes. “The fundamental lifestyle formula, including diet, conducive to the addition of years to our lives, and life to our years, is reliably clear and a product of science, sense, and global consensus. Really. You can be confused about it if you want to be, but I advise against it. You will be procrastinating and missing out—because healthy people have more fun.”¹⁵

The science may still be limited, incomplete, even deficient in a few ways, but it is our contention that, approached with an unbiased mind, it speaks with a clear and consistent voice, telling us that the best diet for health and longevity is a whole foods, plant-based diet. There are many dietary variations on this fundamental theme, but, as Katz emphasizes, “the theme is way past debate.”¹⁶

Our conviction in the power of a whole foods, plant-based diet doesn’t just come from reading medical journals. We get to witness the results firsthand as well. Each one of us has experienced the transformation of his or her own health as he or she shifted to this way of eating. And at Whole Foods Market, we’ve had the privilege of watching thousands of team members discover their own health potential. We offer weeklong “immersion” programs free of charge to those who meet the health criteria. Guided by four of our Whole Foodie Heroes—Joel Fuhrman, MD; John McDougall, MD; Scott Stoll, MD; and Rip Esselstyn (with Michael Klaper, MD)—these events are powerful and life changing for many. Often these men and women started out overweight or obese, diabetic, or suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, and other life-threatening conditions. During the immersions, many of them have seen dramatic results in even just one week, and have gone on to lose weight and in some cases have completely reversed their diseases. You’ll read some of their “Whole Foodie Stories” in the pages ahead.

Defining the Diet

Let’s break down the definition of the Whole Foods Diet a little further. There are two key ideas that create the broad parameters for this approach to skillful eating. First, the difference between whole foods and highly processed foods, and second, the difference between plant foods and animal foods. The Whole Foods Diet advises you to follow two simple guiding principles:

1. Eat whole foods instead of highly processed foods.

2. Eat mostly plant foods (90+% of calories).

Follow these two rules and you will essentially follow a dietary pattern that resembles those of some of the world’s healthiest and longest-lived populations. Michael Greger, MD, who has done more than anyone we know to aggregate the wealth of scientific evidence for a whole foods, plant-based diet, has summed up its rationale in two simple statements that apply in almost every case: “Plant foods, with their greater protective nutritional factors and fewer disease-promoting ones, are healthier than animal foods, and unprocessed foods are healthier than processed foods.”17

Food writer Michael Pollan captures the essential point even more succinctly in his three-part manifesto for healthy eating: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”¹⁸ Although Pollan is a prolific writer who has been instrumental in enlightening millions of people about where their food comes from, these memorable seven words may go down in history as his greatest contribution. He tells us that doctors are now starting to include this phrase in their dietary recommendations to patients—a welcome sign that perhaps a much-needed shift is beginning.

By “Eat food,” Pollan means eat whole, real foods instead of processed “food-like substances,” as he calls them. “Mostly plants” speaks for itself. Incidentally, if there’s one part of his statement we respectfully take issue with, it would be the last: “Not too much.” It’s certainly true that most Americans consume excess calories and could benefit from moderation. But the beautiful thing about a whole foods, plant-based diet is that if you really follow those first two instructions and eat food, mostly plants, it’s hard to eat too much. You’ll naturally find yourself satisfied and nourished without overconsuming calories, and you’ll experience the joy of no longer having to worry about portion control.

Whole Foods vs. Processed Foods

A whole food means an unprocessed food—a food that is still close to the form in which it grew. It has not been broken down into its component parts and refined into a different form. It’s real food. As Pollan puts it, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”19

Sounds pretty simple, right? But if you take this definition to the grocery store, you’ll quickly find yourself with a whole new set of questions.

The truth is that, unless you eat it fresh from the garden, almost every food has undergone some form of processing, even if it is only that it has been harvested and its stalks or leaves have been removed. Even whole grain brown rice, a poster child for whole foods, has had its husks removed to make it edible. So if we accept that most food is processed in some way, the question becomes, how much processing is too much? Where do we draw the line on the spectrum between reasonable adaptions that make our food more accessible and adulterations that make it unhealthy?

Journalist Megan Kimble decided to take this question literally when she went a whole year without eating a processed food, while living in New York City. “All foods are processed,” she writes in Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food, “but if we understand the difference between an apple and a bag of Chex Mix—and we do—and if the space between the two matters for the health of our bodies and the environment—and it does—then the question of what makes a food too processed also matters.”²⁰

Kimble took her quest to the extreme—milling her own wheat, extracting salt from the sea, slaughtering a sheep, and milking a goat. We’re assuming most readers of this book won’t go that far. However, you might start thinking more carefully about what someone else has done to your food and whether it constitutes “too much processing” or not.

Let’s say you’re looking at a bag of steel-cut oats. They’re cut up, so are they a whole food? Common sense tells you they’re a lot better for you than the sugary boxed oat cereals down the aisle. But why? In this case there are two reasons. First, while the steel-cut oats may have been cut up, all their parts are still there. None of the important nutrients have been removed in the process. Second, nothing has been added to them—no sugar, salt, oil, or preservatives. So while those steel-cut oats are not technically whole, they are so minimally processed that they can be considered a whole food.

Next, let’s look at the difference between an olive and a bottle of olive oil. To get from the fruit to the bottle of oil, the olives are ground into a paste, pressed to separate the liquid from the fiber, placed in a centrifuge to drain out water, and then filtered to remove any remaining particles. All of these steps make olive oil a processed food, packed with calories and stripped of nutrients. (If you’ve been led to believe that olive oil is a health food, you’ve been misled, as we’ll explain in chapter 4.) If you want nutritional benefit, eat the whole olive, with its additional fiber and other nutrients. By the same principle, eating an apple can be wonderfully nutritious; drinking apple juice is much less so. Eating a freshly grilled ear of corn is a perfectly healthy choice, while eating a salted, fried corn chip—well, not so much.

A good definition of a whole food, then, might be a food that retains all its original edible parts, and has not been altered by the addition of other processed ingredients. Once again, Greger offers a succinct summation: “I like to think of ‘unprocessed’ as nothing bad added, nothing good taken away.”²¹

This is by far the best definition we’ve come across, so with thanks to Greger, we will adopt it for the course of this book. By this measure you can throw your bag of steel-cut oats or rolled oats in the cart with no further thought, but we hope you will pass by the sugary oatmeal cookies without a second glance.

When it’s not possible to eat foods in their completely unprocessed form, make sure the processing is minimal. For example, take the difference between whole wheat pasta, made from whole grains, and white pasta, made from refined white flour with most of its fiber removed. Or the difference between peanut butter, with no added oils, sugars, or salt, and the kind of peanut butter that most American kids grow up on, packed with added sugar, salt, and fat, and with much of its fiber removed. In each example, both are processed, but there’s a world of difference between them. Real foods, eaten close to their whole and natural state, are optimally beneficial for the body.

To be clear, cooking is a form of processing, but it’s also a minimal one. We’re not advocating a raw-foods diet. Cooking is a wonderful human invention that often enhances the benefits of foods, makes them easier to digest, and in some cases releases more nutrients. As a general rule, the foods we choose to eat, whether raw or cooked, should be as close as possible to the way they came off the tree, vine, or root.

Plant Foods vs. Animal Foods

Plant foods grow in the ground or on trees or vines—fruits, vegetables, beans and other legumes, grains, nuts, and seeds. They make up much of what we consider real food—apples, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, rice, almonds, beans, strawberries, lettuce, and so on. For the Whole Foods Diet, we recommend that 90% or more of your calories come from plant-based food. Once again, this is not a vegan diet (unless you choose to eat 100% plants for personal reasons), but it is a diet that includes far fewer animal foods than the Standard American Diet.

Animal foods come from the flesh or organs of animals (including mammals, birds, fish, and insects) or are produced by the animal, such as milk products and eggs. For the Whole Foods Diet, we suggest that 10% or less of your daily calories come from this category of foods. As a general rule, that means that meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, and other animal foods are eaten occasionally, as side dishes or condiments—not as the primary calorie source in every meal. You might add some goat cheese to your salad, eat the occasional omelet for breakfast, add shrimp to your stir-fry, or even treat yourself to a small grass-fed steak to celebrate a special occasion, but your daily staples should be whole plant foods. In some respects, this harkens back to more traditional diets, in which it was common to eat animal foods sparingly or occasionally, on particular feast days, not as the centerpiece of every meal. The Whole Foods Diet revives this healthy tradition.

The best research on health, disease, and longevity clearly shows that people who eat a diet of predominantly plant foods have dramatically better long-term health outcomes than those who eat a diet heavy in animal foods. Some doctors and nutritionists, including some of the people we feature in this book, will argue that this means we should eat 100% plant-based diets. We as authors have all made that choice, but we want to be clear that we’ve made it for personal reasons (which we’ll return to in chapter 13). We remain open-minded as to what future research will uncover about the potential benefits and risks of including limited amounts of animal products in a healthy diet (see here for further discussion). For now, based on our best reading of the accumulated science, our recommendation is that a whole foods, 90+% plant-based diet is optimal for health and longevity.

We’ll return to this topic throughout the chapters ahead and share some of the research and arguments that have led to our recommendations. As you’ll see, observations of the world’s longest-lived populations, along with various other compelling studies, make a persuasive argument for significantly reducing one’s animal food intake, particularly when coupled with the growing evidence for the link between high levels of animal foods and chronic disease. Plant-based diets have been shown to prevent and reverse many of the chronic conditions that afflict millions of Americans, including diabetes and heart disease. Eating more whole plants, in all their wonderful and varied forms, is an undeniable route to health and longevity.

A Whole Food Is More than the Sum of Its Parts

Protein. Fat. Carbohydrates. If you’re someone who pays attention to your dietary choices, these are probably terms you use or think about daily. And they are likely associated with certain value judgments. Protein is good! Carbohydrates are bad! Fat is… well, we used to think it was bad, but these days lots of people are telling us it’s good! When Americans think about nutrition, we tend to think in terms of nutrients, not foods. Along with the three macronutrients just mentioned, there are a host of other substances—fiber, various vitamins and minerals, and phytochemicals—otherwise known as micronutrients. Our foods are judged, and marketed, on the basis of their particular combinations of these substances. That’s why most of us grew up being told to drink milk for calcium or eat spinach for iron. Pollan calls this perspective “nutritionism,” and much of his 2008 book In Defense of Food is dedicated to shedding light on this troublesome ideology and its effects.

As Pollan and many others have pointed out, scientists are trained to be “reductionist”—to break things down into variables they can isolate and study. And while this method has contributed in many important ways to the sum of human knowledge, it has a tendency to obscure even as it reveals. Pioneering nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell sums this up when he writes, “Few scientists are trained to look at the ‘big picture,’ and instead specialize in scrutinizing single drops of data instead of comprehending meaningful rivers of wisdom.”22

The overemphasis on nutrients has a glow of scientific credibility, but in fact it has led consumers down an unhealthy road. When we view various foods simply as combinations of nutrients, we miss out on all kinds of other important information that goes into determining which foods are better choices for health and longevity. To someone who is just trying to “get my protein,” there’s no difference between a highly processed protein powder made from an isolated part of a soybean and the same amount of protein eaten in the form of whole beans. The all-important distinction between whole foods and processed foods is lost when we look at foods only as their nutrient components.

Furthermore, food companies shamelessly use nutrients as marketing slogans, proclaiming the presence of calcium, or protein, or fiber to give highly processed foods a “health halo” while hiding the sugar, fat, and refined flours in the small print on the label.

The focus on single nutrients obscures a critical truth: When it comes to food, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You could attempt to identify all the nutrients within a given food, a blueberry, for example, and put them into a pill, but it would never have the same healthy effects on your body as eating a bowl of blueberries. For a start, even the simplest food is more complex than we are currently capable of understanding in detail. And more importantly, even if we could know what all the parts are, that doesn’t tell us how the whole works. Science has inadvertently shown this to be true, again and again, when it has attempted to isolate a particular nutrient and found that it behaves quite differently in the form of a pill than it does as part of a fruit or vegetable. One of the most dramatic examples involved the antioxidant beta-carotene, found in many fruits and vegetables. Studies showed that higher intake of beta-carotene-rich foods was associated with lower risk of death from certain cancers, but when beta-carotene was produced in a pill form, it appeared to actually increase the risk of mortality.23

The nutrients in your food interact with each other, with your body’s unique biochemistry, and with the entire picture of your diet and lifestyle in far more intricate ways than science can yet comprehend. Foods are not merely collections of nutrients, any more than human beings are merely nutrient-processing systems. “Even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study,” writes Pollan, “a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another.”²⁴ The good news, however, is that you don’t necessarily need to understand it all if you simply eat real food. Your body will break it down into nutrients in the way it has evolved to do.

None of this is to say you should ignore the nutrients altogether—in fact, throughout this book we’ll highlight some amazing nutrient properties of everyday whole foods and the powerful things they can do for your health. Our intention here is simply to encourage you to shift your focus first to food and to eat it in its whole form. Whole plant foods will supply the nutrients you need, both macro and micro, bundled together in beautifully evolved delivery systems that ensure you get maximum benefit.

Become a Whole Foodie

Imagine finding a way to eat that made you feel fantastic—nourished, vital, and satisfied. Ideally, it would be flexible enough to allow for your particular preferences but clear in its basic parameters. This diet would be simple enough to appeal to your common sense, and be backed by irrefutable science. You could just as easily explain it to your kids as you could defend it to your friends (even the most opinionated).

Now imagine being able to maintain a healthy weight without having to worry about portion sizes and never having to go on another crash diet. What if this way of eating could actually prevent common ailments; protect you from heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes; and even reverse existing chronic conditions?

The Whole Foods Diet offers all of this and more. It’s a sustainable, healthy way to eat and live. All of us authors and the many doctors, researchers, and dietitians featured in this book love food. We are foodies at heart, but not just any kind of foodie. We are Whole Foodies. A Whole Foodie loves great-tasting, life-enhancing food. And the best part is that food loves you right back—nourishing your body, empowering your immune system, and boosting your energy. Over the course of this book, we will explore all the many foods, meals, and dietary variations that one can enjoy as a Whole Foodie. From fans of the Mediterranean’s bounty to passionate vegans to protein-loving Paleos, there are many different ways to embrace a whole foods, plant-based diet—with all the health benefits that naturally follow.

Today the options available for a Whole Foodie at just about any grocery store are simply unprecedented. Wonderful foods that will heal and revitalize our bodies call out to us, aisle after aisle. From all over the country and around the world, a paradise of fresh fruits and vegetables whispers its alluring message of health, vitality, and wellness. Nuts and seeds, hearty whole grains, healthy beans and other legumes, fresh-caught seafood, and pasture-raised animal foods are all within arm’s reach.

Yet walk a few feet in the other direction, and the opposite is true. Cheap, seductive, easy-to-eat processed foods are all too readily available—foods that will, over time, break down our bodies and make us sick. Every day good people follow the siren song of sugar, fat, salt, and empty processed calories to a calamitous end. It may not hurt them today, and maybe not tomorrow, but eventually they suffer the unfortunate, often deadly consequences.

The choice you make, several times a day, to eat one type of food and not another, is the most important choice you could possibly make for your own health and longevity. The fact that you get to make it is a privilege, and also a great responsibility. A Whole Foodie embraces this choice gratefully and skillfully, choosing food that heals, food that nourishes, food that energizes, food that gives life. As long as you still eat every day, it’s never too late to begin.

WHOLE FOODIE TAKEAWAYS

• Become a skillful eater—We have historically unprecedented food choices and nutritional knowledge available to us today. Challenge yourself to master the art of self-nourishment.

• Eat real foods—The first rule of any healthy diet is to choose unprocessed or whole foods and avoid highly processed and refined foods. Dr. Greger defines a whole food as one with “nothing bad added, nothing good taken away.”

• Eat more plants—There is a wealth of evidence that those who eat more fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains live longer and healthier lives and avoid chronic disease at higher rates. Aim to get 90% or more of your calories from the plant kingdom.

CHAPTER 1

Are You a Whole Foodie?

Defining the Optimum Diet

It’s Not as Confusing as It Seems

Defining the Diet

WHOLE FOODIE HERO

Whole Foods vs. Processed Foods

Whole Foods vs. Processed Foods

Plant Foods vs. Animal Foods

WHOLE FOODIE HERO

A Whole Food Is More than the Sum of Its Parts

Become a Whole Foodie

WHOLE FOODIE TAKEAWAYS