With so many competing rules about calories, carbs, fat, and processed foods, knowing what to put on your plate can feel needlessly complicated. In Food Is Medicine, physician and nutrition scientist Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., offers a more useful approach. Consider foods along a spectrum, emphasizing those that actively protect health rather than focusing only on what to avoid.
The lowest tier consists of foods to be minimized—which unfortunately today provide the bulk of calories in our diets. These include sweetened beverages, processed meats, and other ultraprocessed products laden with refined grains, starches, salt, and chemical additives. The harms of some of these options, like soda, fast food, candy, potato chips, and sugary cereals, are more readily recognized. Others can be more deceptive: low-fat processed turkey or chicken deli meats and sausages, sports and energy drinks, granola bars, and many zero-sugar refined breads, rice, crackers, and cereals.
We can start with the highest tier. I call these “foods that give rise to life”—foods that, when planted, grow into new plant life. This group includes fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, whole grains, and even many vegetables that, botanically speaking, are actually fruits (anything with seeds, like tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, zucchini, eggplant, avocado, olives, okra, pumpkin, and more). Each of these has evolved over millions of years to nurture seedlings into thriving flora, even in harsh or challenging environments.
