Good Food vs Bad Food
As you may or may not know I don’t believe there is such thing as a good food or a bad food…As far as I’m concerned there is just food.
Is this a good or bad food?
When I make this sort of statement the common reaction I get is something like this: “surely it’s not healthy to eat candy all day long compared to fruits and veggies and lean protein.”
This is a false premise for the following reason; Eating any single food all day isn’t good for you (and it’s not the claim I am making).
For example you couldn’t exist eating only tomatoes all day any better than you could eating potato chips all day. But I’d bet 100 out of 100 people would suggest tomatoes are a ‘good’ food and potato chips are a ‘bad’ food. This isn’t an argument about the goodness of a food, it’s an argument about lack of variety.
The point here is that you will never encounter a situation when you are forced to choose one food alone to eat for an entire day or longer. This is an interesting thought experiment, but it will never happen in real life…or at least you pray it will never happen.
The other reason I say there is no good or bad foods is because of volume or quantity.
If a potato chip or candy is a ‘bad’ food, does that mean even 1 chip is bad? Or one piece of candy?
As with any food the devil is in the dose, not the food itself.
The following two statements are scientifically correct and demonstrate why it’s impossible to label something as good or bad without considering quantity, and variety of other foods.
a) 1 bag of potato chips isn’t going to cause any measurable health problems, however it would be impossible to survive eating potato chips alone.
b) 1 tomato isn’t going to cause any measurable health problems, however it would be impossible to survive eating tomatoes alone.
In both cases you cannot survive. You will need a variety of other foods to survive…so which is the good food and which is the bad food? The answer of course is neither, because neither a potato chip or a tomato has enough nutrients for a human being to survive.
The point is that you and I require a certain minimum variety of food and nutrients in order to survive and avoid deficiency.
At the end the day food is just the sum of its parts (macro and micro nutrients). Overloading your diet with any one nutrient is going to cause problems. Conversely striving to eat a variety of food is probably the best option for ensuring that you get all of your required nutrients.
Hence my position: There are no good or bad foods…there is just food.
John
23 Responses to “Good Food vs Bad Food”
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February 12th, 2010 at 6:34 am
Yeah but which one is better? Overeating with chips and candy? Or overeating with chicken breast and tomato or broccoli.
I have seen a Tv spot wiht eating disorders. A guy eat only potato chips and pizza and he was lean, not fat, but all of his health marker was a disaster.
And i am sure in 10 years you will be healthier eating only chicken breast, brown rice and tomato, than eating chicken, potato chips and candy. (and i am sure leaner too)
But I see your point and I agree that no food is evil.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:03 am
100% agree with you John. Man i wish i could think of these thought patterns on the days where the healthy police (my co workers) confront me on a weekly basis. I’ve noticed if i at least use the word ‘variety” once in an encounter that will suffice to keep the healthy police at bay for at least a day or two.
John is there any ONE food out there you can think of that has enough micro nutrients to be the most humane ‘primal all rounder’, that humans could survive on for long periods of time?
L
February 12th, 2010 at 9:05 am
Lachlan,
There isn’t really one food that does it all…milk comes close, or I suppose infant formula…
February 12th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Wood,
Neither is better, both will overload you with whatever nutrients it has and leave you in a deficiency state for everything else it is missing.
And I would be skeptical of everything you see on tv.
JB
February 12th, 2010 at 9:11 am
Arguments concerning diet and health markers are irrelevant and invalid if you don’t take into account confounding variables such as the activity of an individual and their lifestyle. You have to take into account that when people consciously change their diet to what they consider healthy, they often change other parts of their lifestyle as well, including eating less (especially if the food’s never any fun) and exercising.
If you kept all the other confounding variables the same (calorie count and activity level), as long as one consumed all the micro/macro nutrients that a person requires, no measurable health marker would be different between two people. The thing most people don’t realize is how difficult it is to become deficient in these nutrients. These nutrients function on a threshold and not a continuum, meaning that if you get enough, you’re good to go, and “extras” don’t help (your body won’t use them anyways).
All foods have different nutrient compositions, and you don’t need to eat “enriched whole wheat brown bread” every day if a donut every morning and a piece of fruit or some veggies every now and again does the same thing. Plus, in the latter example you get to have a donut! Every day! If your diet is varied enough such that you don’t end up on a TV show about how limited your food selection is, chances are it’s varied enough to get everything you need. You don’t even need to vary within a day and you certainly don’t need to look for “complete foods”.
If a “healthy” food is something that measurably contributes to your health (if you have a better definition please state it), and no food by itself can accomplish this, then it follows that no single food is healthy! That’s the point (and a syllogism).
February 12th, 2010 at 10:20 am
yeah i dont buy anything on TV
Srry still hard to turn on that switch in my brain after years of fitness thing i heard and read.. But i try hard
February 12th, 2010 at 11:52 am
some cultures have proven that a diet consisting of
only meat will ensure survival.
trav
February 12th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Im glad my quote “surely it’s not healthy to eat candy all day long compared to fruits and veggies and lean protein.” helped for the new post, LOL.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Diet = Variety + Quantity. Simple enough.
A diet is a combination of foods. It’s about the combination. Eating a combination of broccoli, salmon, blueberries, and beans are better than eating a combination of Skittles, M&M’s, soda, and french fries. So in that sense, there can be good or bad diets (combinations of foods,) or at least better or worse diets. But there are no magical foods. And if you overeat on whole foods like beef, pork, rice, wheat, butter, cream, etc., and become overweight, well, obviously that’s bad, too.
Of course, I’ll take the broccoli, salmon, blueberries, beans… with a little ice cream, too.
February 12th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
This is really all semantics. Good food/Bad food is the easy way to classify the generalizations. You could categorize extremes all day long: Good food/bad food = Quality nutrients/poor nutrients = Good Fats/Bad Fats = High calorie/low calorie…in the end it just depends on the context of the query.
February 12th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Chris,
Are you a Lit major? I love the fact that you brought up the word “semantics” to describe what John is talking about. My buddies and I used to argue over semantics and related issues all the time in Lit classes in college (we were dorky enough to continue the arguments in the cafeteria too!)
I think that John and Brad are on the right track of breaking down the dialectic between “good food/bad food”, “healthy/non-healthy”, etc. In my opinion, what it boils down to is quantity and frequency. The two old adages, “Variety is the spice of life” and “Everything in moderation” should be the mantras of the diet industry. But if they were, then corporations couldn’t sell their highly specific and controlled products. From what I understand, John and Brad are advocating is a return to this type of thinking in terms of what people eat PLUS a recognition that calories in must be less than calories out in order to lose body fat.
February 12th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Chris,
Good point, and this is the problem with health claims on food and supplements. The claim is context dependent…so marketers get away with making health claims without context. Tricky stuff and lots of money is made and lost based on semantics and context.
JB
February 12th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
Jonathan,
You got it. Once you see what goes into food, how it’s processed, and all the controls, inputs, and various industries that are involved we quickly realize that all food has some form of man made processed stamp on it in one way or another. You could even make the argument that everything we eat right now has the modified stamp of 2010…meaning that all the changes that have occurred in our soil, water, atmosphere, food processing industries, food production subsidies, fertilizers, laws regulating food production and scientific intervention are present in anything we eat right now. (to some degree)
Most of our food is genetically modified…most of it only exists because of modern agricultural technology…all of the pollutants and elements that we’ve put into our biosphere exist in the food as well.
Looking at things this way show us all how futile it is to categorize something as healthy, or natural, or organic, or artificial. I’m just hoping people catch on to this at some point.
JB
February 12th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Jordan,
The only caveat I will add to your assertion of good and bad diets is that it is all dependent on your goal and definition of health. What if I were allergic to broccoli, couldn’t stand the taste of salmon and have an emotional reaction to blueberries that makes me depressed because it was the last food I saw a loved one eat before they died! Perhaps the only thing that makes me happy is skittles, M&M’s and french fries.
I think we’re all assuming that ‘healthy’ means living as long as possible in the absence of disease…but clearly this isn’t that important to some people, and it’s my belief that it’s not my place to tell them otherwise.
JB
February 12th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Mike,
It was a good one and started a great discussion.
JB
February 12th, 2010 at 7:08 pm
John,
I have a totally off topic question lol, I recently started taking creatine to supplement my current weightlifting regimen, problem is i can’t stand the texture of it, any dust that settles due to it not dissolving makes me gag like crazy if i can feel it. So, I have found that mixing it in hot water and getting it to dissolve entirely makes it easy enough to take, is there any way mixing it with the hot water will destroy it or make it ineffective?
Andrew
February 12th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Andrew,
Dissolving creatine in hot water is perfectly fine and wont affect it at all…In fact they dissolved creatine in coffee in some of the original research that proved how effective it was for strength and muscle building. so by all means, dissolve that grainy dusty crap in any hot beverage you wish!
JB
February 12th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Hey John I just wanted to tell you how much you, Pilon, and Brad have kinda changed my views of nutrition and taught me how my thinking was flawed and how to analyze scientific material. I used to think in terms of “good” food and “bad” food, I was the “health nut” of my family. I never really needed to loose fat, my fear was mostly dieing b/c like you said in the phi life podcast I thought somehow I could distance myself from death through food. Anyway long story short I stumbled upon Eat Stop Eat and that led to Adonis. What you guys said at first seemed unreal to me but, as I sat there and thought about it I saw the truth in your words. I did my own research and it confirmed what you guy said. So I guess I just wanted to thank you for cutting through all the crap out there and showing me the freedom I always had. And in a bit of a side note i found that i really liked learning about nutrition so I plan on taking some college courses to see if it is something I may want to major in.
February 13th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I agree. I just meant that it’s the combination of foods that we eat that provides the nutrients that we need. Salmon, blueberries, and broccoli do provide more nutrients than Skittles and M&M’s, but I would agree that there are other goals, contexts, health issues, individual preferences, quantities of food, etc., to contend with. Along with your examples, a low carb/ Paleo guy wouldn’t want to eat the beans, a vegan wouldn’t want to eat the salmon, health conditions like diabetes, etc. Your last point is a very important one. We shouldn’t impose our values on other people. Totally agree with that.
February 13th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Jordan,
A thought experiment for you. What provides more nutrients, an M&M or a blueberry?
JB
February 14th, 2010 at 10:15 am
I feel like I’m falling for a trap here, lol. But I’ll bite anyway and say blueberries.
February 14th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Why?
March 9th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
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