Men's Health: Eat Right -- 20 Tips

Aug. 3 -- Listening to some experts talk, you'd think healthy eating was more complicated than the arterial map of Larry King's chest. Carbohydrate-to-protein ratios. Phytochemicals. Antioxidants. It's enough to make you nostalgic for high-school trigonometry class.

But don't get out the slide rule just yet: We have an easier way to improve what you eat. Adopt some of the following smart habits. These 20 simple tactics — if you stick to them regularly — will help you get more of the stuff you need into your diet while eliminating the stuff you don't. The best part? Before long you'll be dining like a nutrition expert, without even thinking about it.

Milk Before Coffee

At breakfast, put coffee in your milk instead of milk in your coffee. Fill your mug to the rim with skim milk first thing in the morning. Drink it down until all that's left is the amount you'd normally add to your coffee; then pour your java on top. You just took in 25 percent of the vitamin D you need every day, and 30 percent of the calcium.

Take your vitamins every morning. Study by study, evidence is mounting that a standard multivitamin fills enough of the gaps in your diet to make a real difference. For example, a recent study at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle showed that people who took a multivitamin supplement and 200 I.U. of vitamin E for 10 years were half as likely to get colon cancer.

Drink two glasses of water before every meal. This will do two things — keep you hydrated and make you eat a little less. A Dutch study showed that drinking two glasses of water can make you feel less hungry, possibly reducing your food intake and aiding weight loss.

Heavy on the Sauce

Always order your pizza with double tomato sauce and light cheese. Men who eat a lot of tomato products tend to have less prostate cancer — probably because tomatoes are a rich source of lycopene, a type of carotenoid that's believed to cut your risk of cancer. If you double the sauce on your pizza, you get double the lycopene. Reducing the mozzarella by just one-third (you won't miss it) will save you 20 grams of fat. That's as much as in a McDonald's Quarter-Pounder.