Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can't pronounce.

The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, "grazing" is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they're eating.

Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).

There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.

If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.