Wondering what to eat? Ask Marion Nestle

I first ran across Marion Nestle in a documentary film. Supersize Me, the Academy-Award winning film from the late Morgan Spurlock, featured a bizarre experiment and simultaneously delicious and torturous experience eating nothing but McDonalds for thirty days. And like any good documentary, it was filled with commentary and testimony from a variety of players, including nutrition expert Marion Nestle. A longtime professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at NYU, Nestle is the sort of calm, pragmatic and infinitely knowledgeable voice that gives deep credibility to any discussion. 

So, what does a person like that eat on a daily basis. The Washington Post recently profiled Nestle and explained: What 89-year-old nutrition expert Marion Nestle eats in a day - The Washington Post

For more than three decades, Marion Nestle has been telling people what to eat.

Nestle, now an emerita professor at NYU, says her time in government opened her eyes to the multi-billion-dollar food industry’s enormous influence over Congress. By the early 2000s, she became a critic of the food industry and an advocate for major food reforms, which she made the case for in best-selling books.

In 2002, Nestle published “Food Politics,” an exposé that argued that the food industry is at the root of many of the country’s nutritional problems. The industry rakes in ever-growing profits by churning out highly processed foods laden with additives, Nestle wrote, and then aggressively markets those foods to children and adults while lobbying against regulations and trying to co-opt nutrition experts.

Over the years, Nestle’s blunt nutrition advice, sharp criticism of food companies and frequent media appearances made her one of the most recognizable names in nutrition. In 2006, she published one of her most popular books, “What to Eat,” which showed consumers how to navigate supermarkets and improve their health by deciphering food labels.

And, in a related piece, The New York Times recently published a feature on 

How to Eat for a Long and Healthy Life. If you've followed this blog for a while, you know that I have been a critic of fast food and a proponent of healthier, more natural eating for ages. Some people note the advice of food writer and social activist Michael Pollan who say, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." And there is much wisdom in that simple sentiment. Too many people are eating things that aren't really "food," at least in a natural, organic sense. My first instinct at the store is to flip a product package over and read the ingredient list. And too often these are filled with mystifying materials unnecessary in food production. Like Red Dye No. 40.

More than any one food, it’s your overall diet that matters, Dr. Hu said. He has studied several different eating patterns — including the Mediterranean diet, plant-based diets and diets based on federal guidelines for healthy eating — and has found that all of them are associated with reduced risks of earlier death.

These diets prioritize a variety of unprocessed or minimally processed foods, including plenty of vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, Dr. Hu said. Beyond that, he added, there’s a lot of flexibility in how to eat for healthy aging. “One size does not fit all,” he added.