Avocado and Pomegranate Salad With Cumin-Lime Vinaigrette

© 2008 Miri Rotkovitz

If you've resolved to make 2009 the Year of Eating Healthier, know that done right, it may prove one of the most delicious years yet. By "done right," I mean ditching the fad diets, hyper-restrictive eating patterns, and obsessions about individual nutrients. It's time for a saner approach to food and health, and one that doesn't resort to scientific reductionism.

There's much to say about the nutritional merits of this Avocado and Pomegranate Salad With Cumin-Lime Vinaigrette, for example. It's loaded with antioxidants, heart-healthy fats, and disease-fighting phytochemicals. But in a sense, all of that is beside the point, because -- news flash! -- in case you'd forgotten, we eat food , not Vitamin B6 or Alpha-linolenic acid.

As Michael Pollan distills things in In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, the smartest way to eat is according to his oft-quoted credo: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Pollan isn't suggesting we subsist on bunny food, but that we focus on the incredible diversity of real food -- as in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, perhaps wild fish and game -- instead of the slickly-marketed, dubiously-fortified, highly-processed foods that dominate American supermarkets. The beauty part is that real food, well-prepared, is so pleasurable to eat. Eat well, and the nutrition takes care of itself.