An important article called “Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health?,” by David Katz and Stephanie Meller from Yale’s School of Public Health, was published in the scientific literature this week, and James Hamblin wrote a story about it for the Atlantic. He titled it “Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner is Real Food.” You know, I would have edited out the word “Real” and called it simply “Food.” Then I would have reviewed for the reader the differences between Food and manufactured calories.

Similarly to a presentation I gave last spring, Katz and Meller compared a number of popular diets, including low carb, low fat, low glycemic, Mediterranean, DASH, Paleolithic, vegan, and others. And they concluded: “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.” Think about Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”

While most everyone else continues to argue about the precise components of a healthy diet, Katz, Meller, Pollan, and Sukol have reached a common conclusion. If you restrict your carbohydrate intake to INTACT carbs, and your fat intake to NUTRITIOUS fats, and your protein intake to HIGH-QUALITY protein, your skin begins to shine within just a few days. Your pants fit better in two weeks. Your energy level improves dramatically. Your double chin begins to shrink away almost immediately. Your risk of chronic diseases falls by up to 80%. It doesn’t matter what you call it.

A few definitions are in order:

1) An intact carb is one whose fiber matrix is intact. These include vegetables, beans, fruits and whole grains. If a carb has had its fiber matrix stripped away, it is a stripped carb. The most important examples of stripped carbs are white flour, corn starch and syrup, white rice, and sugar. Don’t eat those if you don’t have to. Be “carbohydrate selective.” Don’t worry about the glycemic index; it pretty much becomes a non-issue when you avoid stripped carbs.

2) Nutritious fat sources include avocados, olives and olive oil, nuts, dark chocolate, fish, tofu, and the like. There may be more, but for the meanwhile we can all agree on these. Stay away from any fat that was invented in the 20th century, and don’t buy any so-called “food” with the word “hydrogenated” in the ingredient list. If we stop buying it, maybe they will stop making it.

3) Beans, including peanuts, are an important source of high-quality protein. In fact, many cultures consider them magical, probably because they happen to be the rare foodstuff that is a rich source of both protein and fiber. In addition, if you are not vegetarian or vegan, you can also obtain high-quality protein from fish, poultry and their eggs, or certain kinds of meats, as long as they themselves were raised on a nutritious diet of whole intact carbs such as grass or phytoplankton or whole grains, as well as bugs and worms (in the case of poultry) where those, too, have been a significant part of their diet for thousands of years. Otherwise, if you eat processed or industrial protein, you are just concentrating items of low food quality straight up the food chain. Into you.

David Katz speaks the truth when he says that “…We’re paying for ignorance with human lives…” and that “…With [the] knowledge already at our disposal, we could eliminate 80% of chronic disease…” So if you remember nothing else, remember this: “If you focus on real [sic] food, nutrients tend to take care of themselves.”