Reeducate Yourself

The rules for good nutrition never really change much. Eat a balanced diet full of vegetables, whole grains, fruits, and other healthy, fresh foods. "We experts agree a lot more than we disagree," says Katz. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture's famous Food Guide Pyramid, which has come in for some criticism lately for not providing enough detail — on the difference between healthy and unhealthy fats, for example, and on the virtues of whole grains — offers reasonably sound advice on what to eat.

Real Simple prefers the food pyramid created by Walter C. Willett, M.D., and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health because it reflects in more detail all that nutritionists have learned from their extensive research. This "Healthy Eating Pyramid" is published in Willett's best-selling book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy (Simon & Schuster, $13, www.amazon.com); like the USDA's version, Willett's stresses balance by prescribing how much of each type of food to eat in a day.

Note the ways in which your eating habits differ significantly from what Willett recommends and you'll see where you might increase your consumption of certain foods (vegetables, for most people) and cut back on others (sugar in the form of candy or soda, perhaps).