‘Try to eat really well, 80% of the time’: nutrition expert says healthy eating is easier than you think | Well actually

Finally, some good news: eating well is more straightforward than you think. “There’s a lot of good science out there, and it mostly agrees,” says Stanford University’s director of nutrition studies and professor of medicine Christopher Gardner from his office in Palo Alto – beaming, bronzed and the picture of health.

In the age of social media and wellness grift, we’ve overcomplicated the question of what to eat, he says.

In 2023, Gardner was invited to serve on the US government’s dietary guidelines advisory committee, reviewing the official guidelines for healthy eating and recommending updates. “It was quite an honour to be asked,” remembers Gardner. It was also “a tonne of work”.

Gardner was more than up for the task. He has researched nutrition for more than 30 years, regularly advising official bodies on the latest science and conducting his own gold-standard studies on everything from fermented foods to fish oil.

But when, after two years of work, the committee submitted its 400-page report, it was summarily dismissed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the Trump administration’s new health secretary, and his team.

Now Gardner’s view is that expert advice is more necessary than ever for navigating the noise around nutrition. His new book, Food Sense, brings together everything he’s learned to give straightforward, science-backed advice on “what to eat and why”.

In a surprisingly optimistic interview, Gardener spoke about what’s being missed in the binary of “miracle foods” and “ultra-processed” ones, the politicisation of nutrition science and how science can help us to make better choices at every meal.

Answers have been condensed for sense and clarity.

Why did you believe this book was needed?

I give a lot of talks and, afterwards, people have often said to me: “Thank you for clarifying, and not talking down to me, and being practical, and acknowledging that I have a limited budget or access to healthy food.” Everyone eats, but there’s so much fearmongering and bickering about what to eat – I thought I could find a way to pull a bunch of this information together, and give everybody a better chance to do their best.

Why is there so much debate over how to eat?

For a start, there are different kinds of science, and it’s never complete. I’ve done 25 human intervention trials, always trying to answer practical questions. For example, we did a study testing whether real garlic or garlic supplements can lower the bad LDL [low-density lipoprotein] cholesterol. The public’s interest, of course, is: “Is garlic good for you?”, but you can’t design a study that answers such a general question. We have to look at a particular dose, population, duration and outcome.

As I advanced in my career, I started being invited to serve on nutritionary advisory committees, such as for the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association. Reviewing papers with other scientists, we almost always found that we agreed: even if we didn’t have all the data we needed, we had enough to say that people should probably eat this or that. What I kept noticing, again and again, was that it really wasn’t hard to reach consensus.

If there’s so much agreement about what we should be eating, why does the advice seem so contradictory?

We’ve all seen the headlines saying that “eggs are good for you” – then they’re bad, then they’re good again. If you’d followed the science, it’s more that we thought this one thing about eggs, then we did more studies and found there was more to the story, and, since then, the advice has been pretty consistent – but it’s hard to attract attention with that. If you want to make clickbait, you can say something quite plausible that’s not scientifically accurate.

I do feel sorry for people with this information overload. They just think, “I give up – I’m going to eat this inexpensive, convenient thing, and to hell with it.” The food industry has done such a good job of passing on responsibility: “We just make what people are asking for, and shame on you if you can’t choose properly.” But how can you choose properly in this context?

Your advice in your book is consistent with author Michael Pollan’s famous 2006 dictum: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Why has that message failed to land?

I love bringing up that quote. I jokingly complain about it all the time: how many citations does he have? None! As a scientist, having to back up everything I say with evidence, I could never get away with that. But when I’m asked to summarise all of the nutrition I have studied and researched, that 20-year-old phrase of seven words really does capture most of what I have found.

We’re definitely overcomplicating it. The interest in the microbiome is a perfect example: you can now find out the particular microbes in your gut, in theory allowing you to “personalise your diet”. The problem is, there are hundreds of gut microbes, and we have not perfectly classified them all as healthy versus pathogenic.

Precision medicine is a really interesting idea, and a goal, but the commercial industry is getting ahead of us: there are now people eating a lot of junk food, then having a “gut shot”. That could help, but you’d be better off eating some veggies, fruit and legumes, and getting that solid foundation that all health professionals agree on first.

What do you make of ultra-processed foods, the latest category to be demonised?

In the US, 60% of the average diet is now classified as “ultra-processed”.

I think Carlos Monteiro, the Brazilian nutritional scientist who coined the term, made a brilliant observation, looking beyond added sugar, added salt, refined grains and saturated fats to the other cosmetic additives in those junk foods; but I think he made a poor choice with the phrasing, “ultra-processed”.

If you think about the transition from groats – that’s the hulled oat kernel – to steel-cut oats, to rolled oats, to quick-cooking rolled oats, to oat flour: they are different levels of processing, but each one is still basically just oats. Dr Monteiro was mostly concerned with the cosmetic additives: the artificial flavours or colours, the emulsifiers, the gelling, the foaming – all the things the industry does to food that is like putting lipstick on a pig.

I think, as [former FDA commissioner] Dr David Kessler said, that this is more about the formulation than it is the processing. Even breads or tomato sauces can be demonised as “ultra-processed”, because they have at least one of those additives. But health professionals are more worried about things like cookies’n’cream “high protein” cereals. Those are already junk foods; I’m not sure that additionally demonising them as “ultra-processed” helps consumers.

You write that there’s no such thing as a super-food, and even dark chocolate should be considered candy and an occasional treat. What’s one rule that does work for making better overall choices?

Try to eat really well, 80% of the time. You’re much more likely to stick with a healthy diet that has room for a few exceptions than if you hold yourself to being exclusive and restrictive. Beyond that, it’s about treating every meal as an opportunity to make good choices. Let’s say you’re the average American, eating sugary breakfast cereals. Immediately, as a nutritionist, I’m going to say eggs are better – but if you’re having eggs with cheese, sausage and bacon, that’s just a saturated fats nightmare.

Another example is coffee. In 2015, it was adopted into the US dietary guidelines as being consistent with better health, even at three to five cups a day. Most people don’t know that. But it’s not mocha-frappa-crappaccino – it’s black coffee, or with small amounts of sweetener and dairy.

What have you found to be effective in changing people’s eating habits?

The science alone often isn’t enough to convince people to change their eating behaviours, but eating in a way that aligns with your personal values can help, and often it happens to line up with health.

If I’m given a choice between a steak or a salad, even if I’m aspiring to eat better, it’s easy to say “I can start tomorrow,” because the only person I’m hurting by choosing the steak is me. But if I understand more about food, I know that my choices are affecting others. It’s not just about cholesterol levels: there are impacts for the person working in a slaughterhouse in dangerous conditions; the production of CO₂, and climate change; and the inhumane slaughter of animals.

There’s more to nutrition than knowing about the biochemical pathways. If you engage with animal rights, human labour issues, the environment and all the different things that food is connected to, it can be easier to make the behaviour change and maintain it: “I did this for a reason, and I can keep doing it.”

Your 2023 study, comparing vegan and omnivore diets in 22 pairs of identical twins, showed wide-ranging, conclusive benefits for the vegan group. Does that mean, in an ideal world, we would all be vegans?

Not necessarily. French fries, Oreos and soda are all vegan, but not nutritious. Also, the term “vegan” can be very polarising. The alternative term “plant-based” is now being used instead, including for packaged foods that aren’t necessarily healthy for you.

I’ve lately transitioned to recommending a “whole-food, plant-rich” diet, which I hope will be interpreted as rich in flavour and variety but not exclusively plants, or necessarily vegan. If people would just eat more plants, that would address most issues.

Ten years ago, the Culinary Institute of America came up with this concept of the “protein flip”, making vegetables, grains and beans the center of the plate, then adding a little bit of meat: a couple of strips of chicken, not a whole breast. That gets rid of the polarisation, of vegans versus carnivores, and even brings people together. You’d have a bigger global impact getting omnivores to eat half as much meat than you would from doubling the number of vegans.

Tell me about your time on the 2025 dietary guidelines advisory committee. How did you feel when your report was dismissed?

Twenty of us volunteered for 10 hours a week, for two years, and produced a 400-page report and a 1,000-page supplementary report. We handed it in in December 2024, just as the administration was handed over to Trump; almost immediately, after Robert F Kennedy Jr took over, he said: “I’m not using any of this.” We were devastated. Like, you’ve got to be kidding me – we had each put in 1,000 hours! We were well aware that we were an advisory committee, and that the government rarely takes all of the advice, but, in more than 20 years, it’s never been completely dismissed.

Personally, I have been very vocal: we were slandered. The government said we had “conflicts of interest”. Technically, that is true: among the 20 of us, there was a long list – for example, one of my 25 studies was funded by Beyond Meat – but many were very benign, and decades ago, all of them had been reported and made public before we did our work. In the committee that replaced us, five of the nine advisers had direct ties to meat and dairy, and stronger conflicts. The hypocrisy was just mind-boggling.

Even more heinous, in my opinion, was that they dismissed our report for using a “health equity” lens, which they said was not appropriate for science. We were tasked with doing that: these were the dietary guidelines for all Americans, not white Americans, so we tried to address any possible differences related to race and ethnicity, or socioeconomic position. Because of the limited available data, I remember making only one substantive change on that basis, and it had to do with dairy consumption for non-white people. We didn’t demonise dairy, though I know it pissed off the industry; we simply changed the wording to suggest it wasn’t necessary to a healthy diet, to acknowledge the differences for racial groups. My experience of the government was that there was repression of science, racism and hypocrisy.

What do you make of the guidelines ultimately produced by Kennedy’s replacement committee?

Most of them were fine. They do include recommendations based on solid science, many carried forward from the past: don’t eat too many calories; have veggies, fruit and whole grains; limit added sugar. But in our report, the most consistent finding was to replace red and processed red meat with beans, peas and lentils. The new committee replaced that with advice to prioritise protein at every meal, including red meat, and put a steak alongside the food pyramid. It was a slap in the face.

But the difficulties go beyond politics – it’s the food industry, lobbying, marketing, social media, all causing more confusion. Although I wish there was less misinformation, it means I have job security forever.

With so many structural barriers to healthy eating, is there any hope for widespread change?

I’ve been convinced that people aren’t widely going to go back to scratch-cooking, so I’ve shifted my research to institutional food settings. I think I can have the biggest impact by trying to work with chefs on making the default choices healthier, and improving the menus offered by universities, hospitals, senior centres, prisons and the military.

We’re going to see how this plays out over the next decade in schools. The current administration has instructed schools to get rid of all UPFs [ultra-processed foods], but schools will say: “You don’t give us enough money for real food.” The government will have to force the industry to make better options and charge reasonable prices; give the schools more money; or, hopefully, both. It costs a lot more to eat well, and it takes more time, but the obvious answer is that our kids are worth it.

I’m actually pretty optimistic. The food environment is so obscene, in so many places, that there is an emerging counter-movement, which I hope my book contributes to.