The following Mark's Daily Apple articles were written by Mark's system and are narrated by

Brock Armstrong.

Welcome to Mark's Daily Apple Best of 2014, Volume 1, Food and Nutrition.

Featuring, Do You Really Need to Eat Vegetables to Be Healthy?

Is gently cooked food better for you?

Why the omega-3-Omega-6 ratio may not matter after all.

And is processed meat actually bad for you?

No. Is processed meat actually bad for you? Do you really need to eat vegetables to be healthy?

The idea that vegetables are an essential part of the healthy diet has been hammered

into our collective consciousness by every authority out there.

Parents, teachers, scientists, government

health experts all stress the importance of eating your veggies. Problem is, they also told us

that butter would kill us, margarine would save us, animal protein would give us cancer, and

animal fats would give us heart disease. They said we should jog for an hour a day, three days a week,

that deadlifts would hurt our backs, and that we need to wear shoes with good arch support.

Basically, conventional wisdom gets it wrong an awful lot of the time, so what should we think about

the CW regarding vegetables? It's a fairly common query I received from readers. Do you really need to eat

vegetables, or plant matter in general, to be healthy? Yes, yes you do. Maybe not a huge amount

necessarily, but you do need some. With that out of the way, allow me to address some of the more

pertinent questions I received from readers. See, MDA readers are an astute bunch.

They don't just send me one-line emails with questions in all caps.

They send questions, and then they proceed to lay out very persuasive arguments.

...