Forget the dietary guidelines — Marion Nestle will help you figure out what to eat

The book is by Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University. Nestle retired at some point in the past decade, but you wouldn’t know it. How could she stop teaching us when parsing what food to eat — if you’re trying to be healthy and/or make more environmentally friendly choices — has become harder by the day? Mind you, the nutrition facts of life have not changed much. The advice Nestle consistently offers sounds a lot like what Michael Pollan urged two decades ago: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

But, as Nestle points out early in the new edition of her 2006 book, “What to Eat,” which is now called “What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters”: “If Pollan’s advice seems absurdly oversimplified, it is surely because the devil is in the details: so many places to buy food, so many products to choose from, and so much contradictory advice.”

Sometimes the well-meaning nutrition establishment has been at the root of this contradiction and confusion (think of their anti-fat/pro-carb stance in the 1990s, which they’ve since reversed). More recently, the federal government has contributed to the confusion with the release of their Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which Nestle described as “cheerful, but muddled” as well as “contradictory.” But Nestle explains in her book that our confusion and lack of comprehension can also be traced to food companies, who have only one goal: “to sell food products no matter what they do to or for your health.” This leaves well-intentioned consumers swimming upstream, beating back the current of food that is not very good for us (although possibly marketed or labeled as such), and that we are being urged to eat in great quantities.

What’s changed and why are we all so confused?

So why do we need an updated version of Nestle’s aisle-by-aisle guide to understanding everything from nutrition labels to baby food, GMOs to supplements? There’s a lot of confusion right now about what to eat; maybe you yourself are one of those very confused people. Why are we all so at sea?

Health confusion

There’s the question of various foods’ healthfulness: Is green tea actually better for me than other caffeinated beverages? Are seed oils bad? What are ultraprocessed foods and are they killing me? Is organic food better for me/worth the price tag? (And, actually, is there even a price difference? Nestle treks around to various grocery stores to explore and the results might surprise you!) These questions are, in our daily lives, harder to answer when you factor in deceptive labeling, muddled and contradictory dietary guidelines, MAHA propaganda and a wave of not necessarily well-informed nutrition influencers chirping in our ears. Nestle lacks the quippy outrage of a Dr. Jessica (who does excellent debunking of problematic influencer “science”). Instead, she will talk you through these questions calmly, giving you the full backstory, and sometimes ending in a conclusion that lacks a single, clear directive. An example would be Nestle’s discussion of how to balance the nutritional recommendation to eat more fish with the reality of many fish being full of mercury or raised on unsustainable fish farms. Spoiler: If you were expecting a tidy answer, there isn’t one.

Too many choices

Then there’s the question of choice overwhelm in a grocery landscape that has changed a lot. Nineteen years ago, when the first edition of the book came out, plant-based milk was merely soy milk or rice milk and mostly living its life on the fringe. Now when you look for plant-based milk, you can choose from a vast array of pea milk/coconut milk blends, oat milk options and almond milk permutations, among others. The term ultraprocessed foods was not common parlance — mostly we talked about “junk food” (to this day, many remain confused about what’s what). “Functional beverages,” from mushroom coffees to ashwagandha teas, didn’t exist as a grocery category. And maybe most significantly of all, nearly everyone bought their groceries in person back then, at a brick-and-mortar store. The aisles we peruse today are often virtual.

What’s worth a higher price tag?

Navigating real or virtual supermarket aisles lousy with choices and inscrutable labels (marginally helpful at best, duplicitous at worst) is daunting, especially in this time of record-high food prices and economic insecurity. As of September 2025, grocery prices were up 29 percent since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the average pastured organic egg currently costing two or more dollars more than a conventional egg, choosing a specialty label should be a well-considered decision. Choosing what to pay a premium for is perhaps more loaded than ever.

Marion Nestle is here to help

As The New York Times opined last spring in a glowing profile, Nestle was made for this moment, even if it sounds especially onerous for a “retired” 89-year-old to have to update a book of this size (around 800 pages).

One of the many things that sets Nestle apart is her levelheaded insistence on discussing food and nutrition in the context of the whole diet, focusing on broad patterns rather than obsessing over particular nutrients or individual ingredients. That puts her squarely at odds with many self-proclaimed experts on social media, who tend to laser-focus on one nutrient (usually protein) or demonize individual ingredients like seed oils. In addition to looking at the full nutritional picture of our diets in a nonhysterical way, she does not shy away from politics. After all, her seminal 2002 book was called “Food Politics,” and that remains the name of her regularly updated blog. When looking at nutrition, she consistently factors in critical influences like policy, environmental sustainability, animal welfare and labor.