As a society, we are obsessed with questions about whether an individual food is “good” or “bad” for us. But except for 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 particular meal, it was about cheese, but you know the type. Coffee is or is not bad for you; dairy products are or are not bad for you; eggs, butter, soy, fruit juice, anything. Band the time you ask if a particular food is bad for you, however, you already ask the wrong question.
Foods cannot be healthy or unhealthy on their own; it is the overall picture of how you eat that affects your health. The basics of a healthy diet they’re pretty easy to find and you’ll probably already know them. Eat nutrient-dense foods, stuff less processed when possible, reach a reasonable number of calories, and limit sugars and saturated fats (ideally to less than 10% of calories each).
What are you really wondering? Do you like cheese and want to enjoy it without guilt? You can only eat cheese. Are you worried about eating too much cheese? Well, add calories dang.
I wonder if we like to hear that foods are “good” or “bad” so we can have an instant emotional reaction when we buy or eat them. You can choose to watch a horror movie instead of an emotion-only comedy; similarly, you may enjoy eating chocolate while thinking “this is good for me so it’s okay to enjoy it”, or you may have some excitement of “this is terrible for me, right now I’m so “. Maybe it’s not much fun to grab a piece of chocolate while thinking “eh, just one more meal”.
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What science says
Whenever a study comes out about a particular food, it always has a limited scope and an indirect method. Researchers have sometimes fed food, or more often with an isolated chemical component, to animals (or sometimes even people) and measured some specific results from their biology. Other times, large groups of people are asked to fill out food frequency questionnairesand conclusions are drawn from people’s health outcomes, such as their weight or longevity or heart disease rates.
But in neither case are we really trying anything specific about food. In the case of the questionnaires, the researchers ask themselves a question similar to: What health outcomes do people who eat a lot of cheese have in common?
There are many variables hidden in this question. For example, do people who eat a lot of pizza, either because they are too busy to cook or are too poor to afford to eat more elegant food, dominate the population that consumes cheese? These studies are not like drug trials, where you can divide people at random and assign them to cheese groups or without cheese. We all eat varied diets and the best thing a study can do is make generalizations about different people eating different diets.
And when we examine the results, they often vary from study to study. One study may find that people who eat a large amount of certain foods live a little longer than those who don’t; another may find that they are a little more likely to be overweight. Is it really fair to say that the first study showed that this food is “good for us” and the other “bad”? I do not think so. The “good” and the “bad” are summed up and summarized judgments about what food does for our health. It cannot be “good” and “bad” at the same time, even if both studies are well done and their conclusions more or less accurate.
In the end, the only thing we can really judge is whether we eat well overall and there are many ways to achieve this. No food has magical properties that override the rest of your diet. So let’s stop judging food as if it could be “good” or “bad” on its own.