Jon Kabat-Zinn, promoter of Mindful Meditation, says that no one can listen to your body for you. To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.

That's just what researchers found when they looked people who ate a diet of only unprocessed food: They were listening to the signals their body gave them.

It turns out you can instinctively choose the amount of healthy foods you need to get sufficient intake of micronutrients and satisfy nutritional needs.

The big surprise wasn't that it's healthier to eat unprocessed foods. It was that the amount of food those people naturally ate added up to almost 50% more by weight than what was consumed by the study subjects who ate highly processed foods.

Yet the unprocessed foods supplied around 330 fewer calories a day.

This shows that when you eat natural foods, your built-in "nutritional intelligence" steers you toward a nutrient-rich diet, so you can eat a greater quantity of foods without packing on pounds.

Unfortunately, today's processed foods block that intelligence, and people don't instinctively opt to eat the foods they need to be healthy.

Instead, an ultra-processed diet drives them to opt for more and more processed options, adding excess calories and creating nutritional deficiencies that endanger health.

If you like the idea of eating as much as you want and staying healthy, gobble up the information in my books "What to Eat When" and "The What to Eat When Cookbook."