Okay, let’s face it: We like food. We like to eat. And food means a lot more to us than energy and nourishment. Food means family. And comfort. It’s culture. History. Entertainment, celebration. The need for food is knotted into the most reptilian neurons of our brains, but we also treat good food as something sublime, something to be exalted. Food is that no-good lover that always woos us back, and food is the darling dearest we want to spend the rest of our lives with. In almost every way, food makes us.

And mostly, we want to eat well. We want to be healthy. But maybe we’re a little overwhelmed. And maybe we’re a little fed up. We can’t pick up the newspaper without reading a story about a food that was formerly considered good for us, but that we should now really try to stay away from. (Or was it the other way around?) Butter. Chocolate. Red meat. And don’t even get us started on eggs. Then every month, it seems, a new fad diet comes along — Atkins, South Beach, Three-Day, Scarsdale, Russian Air Force — and did you hear that the woman who works down the hall has been on the Cabbage Soup diet for a week, and has already lost fourteen pounds?

So. What are we really supposed to eat? And when, and how, are we supposed to eat it?

To find out, Endeavors challenged four of Carolina’s expert nutrition researchers to come up with a list of ten simple rules — ten things you can do every day to eat better, feel better, and improve your health. We told our researchers that the list should be short enough that it could be stuck to the front of your refrigerator, and that the rules should be simple enough that all of us could follow them, no matter how busy our lives might be. (If the word “rules” gets stuck in your craw, then call them guidelines.) Then I sat down, one-on-one, with nutrition researchers Alice Ammerman, Cynthia Bulik, Barry Popkin, and Dianne Ward, and they each gave me ten rules. After eliminating duplicates, I had a list of thirty-five. Our experts then compared all thirty-five rules and voted for the ones they thought best. The ten rules they came up with aren’t likely to be overturned by any foreseeable scientific study. These rules are sound, back-to-basics advice, even if they contradict — no, especially if they contradict — what the beauty magazines and diet gurus are telling you. So grab a plate: here are ten simple things you can do to take control of your nutritional health.

1. Be active every day.

The only rule that doesn’t involve putting — or not putting — something in your mouth was also the only rule on which our experts were unanimous. And they’re not prescribing a certain number of minutes of exercise per day, or a certain kind of exercise. “I’m always asked, ‘What’s the best exercise?’” says Dianne Ward, who has a background in exercise physiology. “The best exercise is the one that you will do,” she says. “Will you swim? No? Then that’s not a very good exercise. If you’ll walk, great.” Ward says an active lifestyle can keep you healthy for life. “If one hundred years is as far as we can go, wouldn’t we all like to have one hundred really good ones?”

2. Eat more fruits and vegetables.

U.S. government guidelines suggest eating nine to thirteen servings a day. But don’t get bogged down trying to figure out the servings, says Alice Ammerman. Just eat more. Ward says we all need to fall in love with vegetables again, and to figure out how to make them staples in our diet. “Make a pretty color on your plate,” she says. “Get away from the white and yellow stuff, and eat more colors.” And Cynthia Bulik encourages us to think about how fresh vegetables are different from more processed food. “Generally, the farther away you get from the farm, the worse it is for you,” she says. “And note that a potato is not a vegetable,” adds Barry Popkin.

3. Eat more whole grains.

They’ll help you get more fiber and complex carbohydrates, Ammerman says. But check the ingredients, Popkin warns. Governmental labeling regulations aren’t as strict as Popkin would like. “A food company can say, ‘We’re making a whole-grain cereal,’ but half of it can still be refined white flour. So make sure they’re all whole grains,” he says.

4. Limit juices and sweet drinks.

Soda, sweet tea, sports drinks, and…orange juice? Popkin suggests you drink no more than four ounces of fruit juice per day. While fruit juices do contain some things that are good for you, they also pack a lot of calories. “They’re as high-calorie as a soft drink,” Popkin says. Other sweetened beverages — soda and tea, for instance — have no nutritional benefit, Popkin says. “They don’t fill up your appetite; they just add empty calories,” he says. Bulik is fairly vexed by the artificial sweeteners that end up in a lot of the stuff we drink. Artificial sweeteners can be up to six hundred times sweeter than sugar. Bulik says there’s some evidence to suggest that they can actually reset what she calls your “sweet stat” — meaning you end up needing even more sweet things to satisfy your craving for sweets. “So even though that particular substance might not be adding a lot of calories to your diet,” she says, “it can increase your craving for other sweet things.” Soft drinks, she says, are the worst offenders. Now, we’re all human, and not all of us are going to go cold turkey on diet soda or iced white chocolate mocha espresso. But our experts want you to understand that what you’re drinking may be doing a lot more to you than quenching your thirst.

5. Drink more water.

The jury may still be out on how much water we’re supposed to drink each day, but our experts will tell you one thing: by the time you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. Ward recommends that you keep water handy all the time, and drink it frequently. “Also,” she says, “we should get used to drinking water with our meals and snacks, rather than juice, tea, or other sweet beverages.” Kids need to drink milk with meals, she says, and adults should choose water or milk.

6. Surround yourself with healthful foods.

Don’t bring stuff that’s not good for you into your house. “Really, it all revolves around creating an environment where it’s easier to do the right thing,” Ammerman says. On the day I interviewed Ammerman, she had a big box of chocolates — a gift from a student — on her desk. Normally, she’d have a box of clementines sitting there. “It’s easier to not have the chocolate cake in the house than to have it sitting there and then tell yourself not to eat it,” Ammerman says. “But many things seem to be constantly working against us. Would you like a piece of chocolate?”

7. Eat predictable, regular meals.

Bulik calls this eating “on time” and “in time.” It may be nice to garden for half the day on Saturday, but “don’t let yourself get so hungry that you end up bingeing or overeating,” Bulik says. Most Americans, she says, have impaired their body’s innate ability to know when it’s hungry and when it’s full. “We’ve screwed it up through dieting, and through irregular feeding schedules, and that increases the likelihood of us overeating in inappropriate situations,” Bulik says. Ward recommends that we plan ahead, every day, for food intake and for physical activity. What’s for breakfast? A snack later on? Lunch? “If you wait until you’re hungry, it’s unfair,” Ward says. “There’s a survivalist instinct that’s really strong — probably stronger in some people than others — and if you’re hungry, by damn, you’re going to eat something. A handful of jelly beans, whatever you can find.”

8. Control your portion size.

Don’t rely on what the restaurant serves you. “Many of the portion sizes we get in restaurants are actually sufficient for a family of five,” Bulik says. Ward agrees. “We’ve lost the idea of what a realistic portion is,” she says. “It’s not just the french fry. The first hamburgers that came out were a real portion. A portion of meat is three ounces. I mean, how many adults go in and order that little burger?” It’s not hard now to find a restaurant selling a burger that weighs in at a full pound — over five times larger than a true meat portion. A true portion size is related to nutrient value, not appetite or bang for the buck.

9. Forget about fad diets.

“Any diet or program you go on — with the mindset that you’re going to be on it until you reach a certain goal, and then you’re going to go off it again — is a fast track to failure,” Bulik says. “We need to get people to stop trying whatever the diet of the week is, and just focus: go back to basics.” Go back, Bulik says, to the very simple guidelines — such as the ones you’re reading — that work for most everyone. “Change your lifelong habits instead of going on multiple diets,” Ammerman adds. And Ward says, “Diet foods probably aren’t.” She mentions a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat, a humorous commentary on French eating.

“The book said that French women don’t give up wonderfully tasteful, artfully prepared, and decadently rich food — but they don’t get fat. They just take less, and enjoy it more.” And whether French women actually do that or not, Ward says, we need to learn to think that way. Instead of eating a pint of ice cream, she says, “We need to learn to say, ‘I’m going to have this one ounce of chocolate, and I’m going to enjoy this one ounce of chocolate.’ I think we need to learn to eat less and enjoy more.”

10. Cut down on salty snacks.

Try to eat fewer chips, pretzels, crackers, and the like. “They’re another kind of empty, high-calorie, not-very-healthful item that has increased in our diets enormously,” Popkin says. And according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, salt accounts for nearly 150,000 premature deaths every year in the United States, primarily due to complications from high blood pressure.

Simple, right? But what about our experts? Do they find it difficult to stick to guidelines like these? “Oh yes, I love wine,” says Popkin. “I love desserts; I love good food. I eat a lot of vegetables. But I love chocolate, too.”

“It’s a struggle for all of us to manage,” Ward admits. “But I believe that if you eat well, and if you’re active every day, your body will respond well.” You’ll feel better, Ward says. You’ll have a better immune system, be able to get through your day better, and be a little happier. “No matter what wagon we’re on — the cookie wagon, the ice-cream wagon — we all have an episode where we fall off,” she says. “But I think that it’s worth the struggle to stay on.”



Linda Adair is professor and associate chair of nutrition. Alice Ammerman is associate professor of nutrition and the director of the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Cynthia Bulik is professor of psychiatry, nutrition, and eating disorders, and the director of the UNC Eating Disorders Program. Marci Campbell is associate professor of nutrition. Kori Flower is assistant professor of pediatrics. Penny Gordon-Larsen is assistant professor of nutrition. David Guilkey is professor of economics. Pamela Haines is associate professor of nutrition. Amy Herring is assistant professor of biostatistics. Michelle Mendez is research assistant professor of nutrition. Melissa Nelson is a graduate student in nutrition. Samara Nielsen is a doctoral student in nutrition. Eliana Perrin is assistant professor of pediatrics. Barry Popkin is professor of nutrition, the director of the department’s Division of Nutrition Epidemiology, and director of Carolina’s Interdisciplinary Obesity Center. Anna Maria Siega-Riz is associate professor of nutrition and maternal and child health. June Stevens is professor nutrition and epidemiology. Dianne Ward is professor of nutrition and director of the department’s Division of Intervention and Policy. Steven Zeisel is professor and chair of nutrition. Claire Zizza was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and is now an assistant professor of nutrition at Auburn University.