What to eat: food, not too much, mostly plants.(The SkepDoc)

AS I WAS FEEDING THE DOG, IT occurred to me that dogs have a very straightforward relationship with food. Our Labrador's philosophy seems to be "eat everything you can get and as much of it as possible, whether it's food, ice cubes, pine cones, wood, or anything else you can chew or swallow." In two of his more memorable exploits, he ate the head off an ornamental wooden duck and swallowed a Kleenex-wrapped razor blade (requiring major surgery).

Humans have a complex, conflicted, troubled relationship with food. Refueling our bodies generates anxiety, guilt, and irrational behaviors. We follow kosher, halal, or other religious dietary guidelines. We worry about omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants, and trans-fats. We berate ourselves for accepting that tempting slice of chocolate cake.

It was not always thus. In less affluent times, humans were mainly concerned with whether they could get enough food (of any kind) to survive. When food was plentiful, they ate a lot because they might not get enough later. They followed tradition and ate whatever was customary in their culture. Then modern science came along and complicated things.

James Lind started it. He was the British doctor who discovered that citrus fruits prevented scurvy on long sea voyages. That led to the discovery of vitamin C and indirectly to the discovery of other vitamins and nutrients and the obsession with getting enough of all the right components.

When I was growing up, we knew more about vitamins and nutrition than our ancestors did, but life was still fairly simple: Mom's idea of dinner was a meat, a starch, a green vegetable, a yellow vegetable, maybe fruit but more likely a piece of cake or pie for dessert, and whole milk to drink.

Mom wasn't worried about us getting fat. She made us eat everything on our plates because children were starving in Africa (Or was it China?). It didn't matter if you were full or if you retched every time you tasted a lima bean; you had to sit there until every morsel was gone. We didn't even have a dog to slip the offending bits to. Nevertheless, we were never overweight.

Today life is much more complicated. We eat pre-prepared convenience foods, we eat out, we eat fast foods, we snack, we eat in the car. Our grocery stores are replete with labels telling us more about our food than any rational person would want to know. We have a surfeit of choices: low-fat, non-fat, diet, low-sodium, low-cholesterol, fortified, organic .... We have to make way too many decisions.