My biology teacher said theres no such thing as “unhealthy” foods. Only eating in regulation, how true is this?
In: Biology
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Your biology teacher is probably exaggerating to make a point. Charitably interpreted, s/he has a good one.
However, don’t take it too literally or too extreme. What is good for you depends on your needs, and they obviously differ whether you are doing hard physical labor ten hours per day or whether you are ambulating between the couch, the fridge and your pc table.
You need sufficient energy (calories), but not too much. Sufficient vitamins, but too much are again harmful. The right types of fats. Also you need enough protein, fiber and essential amino acids. And getting enough of this without getting too much calories is impossible if you live on burgers and candy so that’s why these things can’t be called healthy. Yet in moderation no harm done either.
So any combination of food that provides all this without containing harmful components like too much heavy metals, pathogens, carcinogenic hydrocarbons or other poisons, is healthy.
Fortunately, there are many ways of achieving such a combination, as proven by humans existing for tens of thousands of years all over the planet on widely different diets. We are omnivores.
There are definitely things with little to no nutritional value, like most candies. The odd piece won’t kill you, but if all you have is burgers, beer, and skittles, you’re gonna have a bad time.
They’re right, because what we think of as unhealthy is usually things like salt and sugar, however if you have the correct amount, it’s absolutely fine, they’re only thought of as unhealthy because they are easy to have too much of
Food comes down to three components: Carbohydrates (includes sugar), protein, and fat. You need all 3 to survive. But obviously there are problems with having too much.
of course there are. kerosene and rocks won’t do you much good if you eat them.
there are also toxic foods.
but other than that, yes, there still are. if you fill your diet out with very salt-heavy meals but have a deficiency of something else you are causing a nutritional deficiency which could have been said to be caused by that one salt heavy meal prototype. your only option for that day is then to either eat more salty garbage and get the rest of what you need, which could cause anything from brain damage to liver damage; or face malnutrition.
Your teacher is technically right, as with moderation any food can be part of a healthy diet. Therefore there aren’t really any unhealthy foods, just unhealthy diets.
It’s the glass-half-full version of “Everything’s a poison at the right dose”. True, but generalised.
We’ll in my head, unhealthy and food ate sort of antonyms. If food is anything you can eat then uranium is a pretty unhealthy food. So a food that is technically unhealthy is not something most would consider food, like rocks.
Foods are more or less healthy based on the ratio of vitamins vs calories. So you can get your daily dose of protein from Snickers but it would be thousands of calories.
If all you care about is your weight. You can also live off of Snickers and water (well you won’t starve anyway) as long as you count the calories.
From a robots point of view, losing weight is just math. Calories in <calories out. But there’s a lot more to health than that.
There’s no amount of Doritos or M&M’s that anyone needs to eat. There are better foods to replace all the calories and nutrients they contain. So in that sense your teacher is wrong.
On the other hand, some fat and some sugar in your diet isn’t really going to harm most people. So in that sense your teacher is correct.
But these foods are addictive and have no nutritional value. So it’s hard to eat a good diet of which these foods are a part. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy.
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