"Eat food."

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's the advice of Michael Pollan, (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma), given for free on the cover of his Jan. '08 book, In Defense of Food; An Eater's Manifesto. www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php

Good Cop: With such wisdom, we Americans can now put the billions of dollars we spend on diet aids to other use.

Bad Cop: As with the Dalai Lama's advice to practice compassion, however, it's so much easier to believe it than to do it.

My dinner on the couch the other night, for instance, met only one of the three requirements, and barely that one:
While the contents of the meal--White Rabbit candy (a chewy Chinese toffee) and red wine--indeed once were plants, they were more "food-like" than food, and the amounts I consumed were, alas, not strictly within the limits of calories required to sustain life.