None of the Foods Are “bad” for You.
As a society, we are preoccupied with questions about whether a particular food is “good” or “bad” for us. But with the exception of things like poisonous mushrooms (which I would not classify as “food”), no food is bad for you.
The last time I saw a headline promising a verdict on a certain food item, it was about cheese , but you know the type. Coffee is harmful or not harmful to you; dairy products are harmful or not harmful to you; eggs, butter, soy, fruit juice, whatever. However, by the time you ask if a particular food is bad for you, you are already asking the wrong question.
Food cannot be healthy or unhealthy by itself; it’s the big picture of how you eat affects your health. The basics of healthy eating are pretty easy to find, and chances are you already know them. Eat foods that are high in nutrients and, if possible, do not process them, eat a reasonable amount of calories, and limit your intake of sugar and saturated fat (ideally less than 10% of the calories of each).
What are you really interested in? Do you like cheese and want to enjoy it guilt-free? You can just eat cheese . Are you worried about eating too much cheese? Well , add some damn calories .
I wonder if we like hearing about “good” or “bad” foods in order to have an instant emotional response to buying or eating them. You might watch a horror movie instead of a comedy just because of a surge of emotion; Likewise, you can enjoy chocolate thinking, “This is good for me, so it’s okay to enjoy it,” or you can experience a certain thrill from saying, “This is awful for me, I’m so bad right now.” It might not be so fun to eat a piece of chocolate thinking, “Oh, just another meal.”
What Science Says
Every time a study of a certain food product comes out, it is always limited in scope and by an indirect method. Sometimes researchers fed food or, more often, its individual chemical component to animals (and sometimes even humans) and measured some specific results of their biology. In other cases, large groups of people are asked to complete food frequency questionnaires, and conclusions are drawn based on the health indicators of these people, such as their weight, life expectancy, or heart disease.
But in neither case are we actually testing something specific in food. In the case of the questionnaires, the researchers ask a question that goes something like this: What are the general health effects of people who eat a lot of cheese?
There are many variables hidden in this question. For example, do people who eat a lot of pizza because they are too busy to cook, or too poor to afford more gourmet takeaways, dominate cheese consumers? These studies are not like drug trials, where you can randomize people and categorize them into cheese-free or non-cheese groups. We all eat differently, and the best thing to do in your research is to generalize about different people who eat different diets.
And when we look at the results, they often change from study to study. One study may find that people who eat a lot of certain foods live slightly longer than those who don’t; another may find that they are slightly more likely to gain excess weight. Is it fair to say that the first study showed that this food is “good for us” and the other is “bad”? I do not think so. “Good” and “bad” are the final judgments that food affects our health. It cannot be both “good” and “bad” at the same time, even if both studies were performed well and their conclusions are more or less accurate.
At the end of the day, the only thing we can really judge is whether we are eating well in general, and there are many ways to accomplish this. No food has magical properties that surpass the rest of your diet. So let’s stop judging products as if they themselves could be “good” or “bad”.