Is “eating healthy” more about eating good food or not eating bad food?
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It’s both. It’s eating food that has what your body needs with vitamins and minerals, but also avoiding things that cause issues like causing a blood sugar spike or too much salt, etc. You want to eat what your body needs, and avoid what might set off your body’s safety defences.
Heard a news story a long time ago about a student in university or college who caught scurvy. That’s the Vitamin C deficiency disease. Someone didn’t get their fruits and vegetables. Avoiding sweets isn’t enough.
A mixture of both. A well balanced diet is the healthiest, but each person has their own dietary needs. Fad diets usually do more harm than good
Eating “healthy” is kind of a catchall for many ideas.
To eat healthy you need to have an idea of your bodies nutritional needs, calorie needs, and food borne health risks such as allergies.
A healthy plan for a professional athlete will be different for an obese person to lose weight safely.
But, for a general purpose eating healthy would be to eat diet that is balanced in terms of nutritional guidelines and limiting foods that are high in salts, fats, and sugars.
There is no such thing as a bad food, unless you count rotten foods. What we consider “bad foods” are simply foods that offer low nutritional value or have excessive amounts of things that can be detrimental to your health of consumed in excess and not in moderation. For example having a fast food meal occasionally isn’t bad. Eating fast food for every meal everyday will have negative impact eventually.
It can be a lot of things. Both because I’m not a professional dietician and because this is ELI5, I will make some very broad, generalized statements that may not reflect every possible individual case.
If someone is overweight, they probably need to focus on not eating bad food. Lower calorie intake while still getting the nutrients needed to survive.
If someone is underweight, they probably need to focus on eating good food. Nutrient-rich foods that pack more energy and useful stuff into the same volume and may even be high in fat which would make it a poor choice for the first category.
The biggest component to eating healthy is don’t eat too much, but still keep the processed stuff to a minimum. “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”…Michael Pollan.
It’s mostly about *how much* food you eat.
You can easily eat a healthy diet every meal at McDonald’s. However, you need to do so by eating small portions and avoiding empty calories.
It’s also important to recognize that our hunger mechanisms aren’t very effective. They don’t measure nutritional content or calorie intake, but rather stomach fullness. If you eat a lot of high carbohydrate foods (which are processed by your body more quickly that fat or protein), your stomach will empty more quickly. Likewise, if you eat very infrequently in large portions, your stomach will grow to accommodate those portions and you’ll constantly be hungry. On the other hand, you can never be hungry and still starve to death because you’re not getting the nutritional balance you need.
Its easier just to say we lack dietary fiber in our diets. The reason being shipping weight; they want to reduce those costs so they take the fiber out. No big deal right? Its indigestible anyway. Except thats the point, it slows absorption of other things on purpose, notably fructose.
The other thing you could easily classify eating healthy into is food prep and storage. Theres a danger zone of cooking food, know as between 5°C and 60°C, where bacterial growth can occur that is harmful to us. Lesser well known is the type of meats that exist and how we cook these to destroy any possible harmful bacteria/parasites.
Beef is known as ‘internally sterile’ in this regard, so you’ll see the ‘rare’ and ‘medium-rare’ and ‘well done’ as options for it, but never for poultry. The density of the meat is different.
Seafood is also a special case. Those creatures live at much colder(on average) temps and the main source of delaying food spoilage is refrigeration/freezing. However the bacteria evolved to eat them is more resistant to cold, so they spoil quicker because of it.
If we ignore fiber and food prep though, the main health issue with food is widespread overweight/obesity. This is quantity of food energy, not its type. If you eat more kcal than you needed per day, the excess is stored as fat.
Michael Pollan put it simply- “Eat. Not to much. Mostly plants.”
And really, that works. Keep the calorie intake reasonable compared to your activity level so you maintain a healthy weight, then make sure you’re mostly chewing on plants with some other meat or whatever in the mix if you want. Avoid additions- added sugar being the main culprit.
You’ll be fine with that unless something particularly odd’s happening with your biology.
There’s not really ‘good food’ and ‘bad food’. Your goal is to hit your targets for macronutrients (fats/proteins/carbs), micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), fiber, and calories (which come from fats/proteins/carbs).
You have to consider your lifestyle and how much of each category you need, then eat foods that will help you meet those goals. Exceeding goals also isn’t really a good thing.
The problem in the US and many other countries is that people eat too many calories and too few of the other calories – therefore, for an average person, a lower calorie food that’s high in micronutrients and fiber would be considered ‘good’. A higher calorie food that’s lower in micronutrients and fiber would be considered ‘bad’.
However, whether or not that food is ‘good’ for you depends on how much micronutrients and fiber you’re currently getting – if you already get enough, then there isn’t any benefit in getting more. It also depends on your calorie expenditure. For most people, this is fairly average but there are some outliers (particularly sedentary people or professional athletes for example)
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