What’s heartening to know is that the whole mess really can be boiled down to two basic rules…
Fill your daily diet with real food, that is, carbohydrates that look as if they actually came out of the earth. Eat whole corn kernels, for example, instead of corn flakes. Reach for a whole orange instead of orange “vitamin water,” or even orange juice. Choose brown rice, not white rice. The less processed and refined a carb is, the healthier – and better for your waistline – it tends to be.
Steer clear of fake carbs. By fake, we mean food that is more a product of factories than of the soil. Fake carbs are foods that have been so overly processed – fiber stripped, nutrients stripped, water squeezed out, fat added, salt added, sugar added, calories added – that they are something “our great-great grandmothers would not have recognized as food,” writes Michael Pollan in his excellent book In Defense of Food.