We are, as a society, obsessed with questioning whether an individual food is “good” or “bad” for us. But with the exception of things like poisonous mushrooms (that I wouldn’t classify as “food”), no food is bad for you.
The last time I saw a headline promising a verdict on a particular food, it was about cheese, but you know the type. Coffee is or is not bad for you; dairy is or is not bad for you; eggs, butter, soy, fruit juice, whatever. Bat the moment when you are asking if a specific food is bad for you, however, you’re already asking the wrong question.
Food cannot be healthy or harmful on its own; it is the general picture of how you eat that affects your health. The basics for a healthy diet they are very easy to search and you probably already know them. Eat nutrient-rich foods, less processed things when possible, consume a reasonable number of calories and limit sugars and saturated fat (ideally less than 10% of calories each).
What are you really asking yourself? Do you like cheese and want to taste it without guilt? You can just eat the cheese. Are you worried about eating too much cheese? We will, add the damn calories.
I wonder if we like to hear that foods are “good” or “bad” so that we can have an instant emotional reaction when we buy or eat them. You can choose to watch a horror movie instead of a comedy just for the wave of emotion; likewise, you may like to eat chocolate thinking “this is good for me, so it’s okay to enjoy it” or feel a certain emotion in “this is terrible for me, I’m being so bad now”. It might not be so much fun to eat a piece of chocolate thinking “eh, just one more food”.
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What science says
Each time a study on a particular food is published, it is always limited in scope and indirect in methods. Sometimes, researchers feed the animals with food or, more often, with a chemical component isolated from it (or sometimes even for people) and measured some specific result of your biology. Other times, large groups of people are asked to fill in food frequency questionnaires, and conclusions are drawn from these people’s health outcomes, such as their weight or longevity or their heart disease rates.
But in neither case are we really testing something specific about the food. In the case of questionnaires, researchers are asking a question more or less like: What are the health outcomes that people who eat a lot of cheese have in common?
There are many hidden variables in this issue. For example, do people who eat a lot of pizza, either because they are too busy to cook or because they are too poor to pay for more sophisticated delivery, dominate the cheese-consuming population? These studies are not like drug tests, in which you can randomize people and assign them to groups with or without cheese. We all have different diets, and the best a study can do is to make generalizations about different people who eat different diets.
And when we look at the results, they usually vary from study to study. A study may find that people who eat a large amount of a certain food live a little longer than those who do not; another may find that they are slightly 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 think not. “Good” and “bad” are summary and decisive judgments about what food does to our health. It cannot be “good” and “bad” at the same time, even if the two studies have been well done and their conclusions more or less accurate.
In the end, the only thing we can really judge is whether we are eating well in total, and there are many ways to do this. No food has magical properties that replace the rest of your diet. So, let’s stop judging foods as if they could be “good” or “bad” on their own.