A great Michael Pollan talk at Google, where he questions nutrition in the hacker way: boiling nutrition down to simple rules based on fact. The root philosophy?

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. –Unhappy Meals, NYT

His thesis is bigger than that, though, and his method of deconstructing what we believe about nutrition is interesting. Really, why do we believe what we hear about nutrition when it clearly isn’t working?

NutritionData.com has a nifty Firefox search plugin to search foods in their database. Very handy.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Linked from all over this week, but about the best nutrition advice I’ve read.

I like to spend my winter holiday thinking about the year, and what I didn’t do enough of. Next year, I hope to:

1. Write more. Not just web fluff and links (which is fun), but more real fiction and non-fiction. I love to write, but life and complexity just keep on getting in the way.
2. Do more creative stuff. I have an artistic side, but the geek in me naturally suppresses it. I need to learn better balance.
3. Learn more healthy habits. I love good food, I grok nutrition, and I enjoy exercise. I need a bit more of each (and less of the crap).
4. Learn Ruby/Rails well. Last year I polished my C#, Javascript, and Php skills (as well as time spent with SQL, CSS/XHTML, etc.). This year I need to at least know why Rails isn’t for me. So far I’ve only spent a dozen hours with it, which isn’t nearly enough.
5. Focus. Life is noisy. Work is noisy. Learn to deal with both: I will overcome the chaos.

One thing I like to keep in mind with resolutions is that sometimes a year isn’t enough. Life is a garden, and sometimes crops fail. The key is to keep doing healthy things, and remember that growth takes time, practice, and effort.

Hillbilly Housewife presents its $45/week Emergency Menu for 4 to 6. This is useful for students and the plain-old frugal folk. Includes basic nutrition information for each day, which is in itself a great learning tool.