The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible (“whole” foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein.

Everything in food works together to create health or disease. The more we think that a single chemical characterizes a whole food, the more we stray into idiocy.

Perhaps it is a testament to the power of modern marketing savvy that an obese man with heart disease and high blood pressure became one of the richest snake oil salesmen ever to live, selling a diet that promises to help you lose weight, to keep your heart healthy and to normalize your blood pressure.

Casein [the main protein found in dairy], in fact, is the most 'relevant' chemical carcinogen ever identified; its cancer-producin g effects occur in animals at consumption levels close to normal-striking ly unlike cancer-causing environmental chemicals that are fed to lab animals at a few hundred or even a few thousand times their normal levels of consumption.

It’s never too late to start eating well. A good diet can reverse many of those conditions as well. In short: change the way you eat and you can transform your health for the better.

In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.

One way to identify the optimal human diet, pretty obvious to all but fundamentalist reductionists, is to survey and compare populations as they already exist, and see what they eat and how healthy they are.