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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to read a book. I think you can get away with three steps:

1) This maxim from Michael Pollan: "Eat food [1]. Mostly plants. Not too much." (I personally follow an adjusted version of this: "Eat food. Only plants. Not too much.")

2) Review daily nutrient requirements to ensure your diet is providing you with adequate macro (protein, carbs, fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals).

3) A few months after adopting your new diet, get a high quality blood test that covers markers like iron, B12, etc., and make any required adjustments to what you're eating.

1: "Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize." https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

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And if you eat too many of the wrong plants you get kidney stones etc. etc. Emphasizing variety is very important.

It's almost like a second job to keep up with what you _should_ do. Reviewing daily nutrients is way too much effort for most folks.

No its not, thats the perspective of sedentary person who sees somebody running their 5k every day and is eager to give up before even starting.

Once you grok some trivially simple stuff (macro and micronutrients), few extremely trivial requirements (enough good sleep, stay away from sweet stuff in principle which may be hard in beginning but gets much easier over time, eat to stave off hunger and not to feel full, eat less in the evening), you are at least 90% there which is already enough. You really don't need to study constantly labels, you already know whats good and bad and its an effortless background process in the back of the mind.

It really is trivial and very quick to grok. The hard part for many is discipline, thats a mind game everybody has to fight with themselves and find ways how to manage it without frustrating oneself constantly, and thus give up eventually on whole effort.

People often compensate some deep mental issues, ie anxiety with overeating or eating junk food. Obviously this needs to be tackled first if any long term success can be claimed.

Also, for parents, please don't condition your kids on sweet stuff as some sort of reward. If you have to, use some great fruits like forest fruits and not cakes, ice cream etc. You are not being a good parent at all by doing this, just conditioning them mentally that sweet junk is something special, a prize deserved, which creates pretty bad mental patterns for rest of our lives.

It is like jumping into a TV series that has 10 seasons or a podcast that has 300 back episodes, it seems daunting at first but taken one step at a time it can become very manageable to learn what to be done and how to manage it.

It isn't so much managing daily nutrients but ensuring there is a decent variety of nutrients available at home. There is a lot of trial and error but long term it works out well. And like you said, variety is key!

"You don't need to read a book". Immediately cites a book.

I don't disagree with your assertion on steps, to be clear, just that you aren't answering the actual question. How can you trust Pollan (I'm not saying you can't, just...that's the core question the OP was asking).

The idea is from a recipe book but the advice is just that quote and nothing more.

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