Did people from that era consider some food unhealthy, or for example the loaf of bread was the best nutritious breakfast?
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In the 17th and 18th centuries, a healthy diet included simple, natural foods. People mainly ate fruits, vegetables, meats, and grains. Fresh bread, porridge, and stews were common. People of that time believed in the virtues of wholesome, plain food.
As for unhealthy foods, they weren’t quite as aware as we are today. They often thought rich, heavily spiced or sugary foodsᅳlike pastriesᅳwere indulgent but not every day food. Surprisingly, a loaf of fresh bread was indeed seen as a wholesome and nutritious start to the day.
In general you need a full balanced diet. What we consider unhealthy are things that makes you eat too much of something. For example you need some carbs in your diet, but not too much. Your body does not have much limits on how much sugar you want to eat so we generally consider sugar unhealthy today because it makes you eat too much carbs. In the 17-18th centuries there were no unlimited sugar. In fact sugars were quite rare and expensive. So people had problems getting enough carbs. Sugar were therefore quite healthy for their lifestyle and resource availability. We even see this up to the 1960s as the food triangle puts carbohydrates as a staple food because the target demographic did not have enough money for a full balanced diet. So eating enough carbs were important to get enough calories. And this was an even bigger issue in the 17th and 18th century as even people with enough money often could not get the food they desired as it was hard to grow, process and transport. This meant that any food was considered healthy as it was better then no food.
There were some local health issues though. If you eat lots of cheep food because you can not get better food then you are subject to various health issues. For example rabbit is easy to catch but would cause a very protein rich diet making you sick. It was therefore sometimes considered unhealthy and you had to get people to also eat vegetables. Basically rabbit stew is bad, rabbit and potato stew is good. There was also issues with diseases. This is why pork was often seen as unhealthy.
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