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In the New York Times Magazine last week, Michael Pollan wrote an article entitled Unhappy Meals, in which he blasts the prevalent particularly American and reductionist approach to looking at food that turns everything into pseudo-scientific “essential nutrients”.

Instead of this “nutritionism” as he calls it, he counsels a more realistic view of eating, based on what we actually know about food, which is not much. Nutrition scientists have barely begun to unravel the incredibly complex web of connections and interdependences between foods, so to treat nutrition as a solved problem is ridiculous, and should be avoided.

The article is long, but the advice in it is remarkably simple: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. To expand a bit on that pithy line, here are the major points he makes:

• Eat Food, not products. If you great-grandmother wouldn’t know what it was, don’t eat it.
• Don’t be fooled by health claims. Nutritional fads won’t help you since the science of nutrition is so primitive at this point, and the products with the most claims are exactly that, products not food.
• Avoid processed foods. If you can’t pronounce the ingredients, there are more than five of them or if any of them are high-fructose corn syrup, it isn’t food, it’s a product. Avoid it.
• Avoid the supermarket. Supermarkets sell products. Go where they sell food: farmer’s markets, farm stands, etc…
• Pay more for your food. “Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation.” Spend less, get less.
• Eat less meat and dairy. Plants, especially leaves tend to be better for you, but science still can’t tell you exactly why.
• Get traditional. French, Japanese, Mediterranean, whatever. Traditional food cultures spawn books like French Women Don’t Get Fat, modern consumption spawns books like Supersize Me.
• Cook, and Garden. There’s no better way to keep the sodium tripoly-phosphate out of your food than to cook it (and grow it ) yourself.
• Get out of your rut. “biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields,” which is a fancy way of saying your diet is too boring, and you should try something new.