A Question of "What?" Not "How Much?"

Better advice for maintaining health and losing weight, says Neal Barnard, M.D., the author of Eat Right, Live Longer (Crown), is to forget about how much you are eating and concentrate on what you are eating. Barnard is sort of the Ralph Nader of broccoli, a zealot who spends his days bothering regulatory committees, publishing papers and sending press releases about the connection between diet and disease. He grew up in North Dakota, the son of a family in the livestock business. But while he was in medical school, after one particularly gruesome autopsy of a heart-attack victim whose arteries had been strangled by plaque, Barnard decided to stop eating meat.

"Cardiovascular disease," he says, "is the number-one killer disease in America, but it is not an inevitable part of aging. When they did autopsies of soldiers during the Korean war, they found that atherosclerosis had already begun in the Americans — even though they were young and fit — but there was none in the Asians. There's no question it was diet related." After reading Barnard's book, I asked him out for lunch to a Thai restaurant near his spartan offices in Washington, D.C.