The full read
Stripped of the TV-segment format and book promotion, Pollan's formula (repeated for fifteen years now: "eat food, not too much, mostly plants") remains among the recommendations best aligned with current scientific consensus, precisely because it doesn't lean on any single mechanism or demonized food. It overlaps with the evidence on calorie density (eating a given volume of less energy-dense food aids weight loss), on dietary pattern (the PREDIMED trial shows a Mediterranean pattern cuts major cardiovascular events by about 30%), and on ultra-processed food (controlled trials showing it drives overeating, per Hall 2019 and the new 2025 UCL trial). It's not a new scientific scoop, but advice that has held up well across fifteen years of nutrition research, without needing a major rewrite.
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