For example, vegetables are generally healthier than meat because they contain more nutrients, less fats e.t.c. Why do certain food categories have properties that make them healthier than others?
In: Biology
One aspect is that whole veggies and fruits are harder to digest. Fruit has lots of sugar, but your body has to work to get it, can’t digest the fiber, etc. Processed sugar will absorb readily and quickly, shocking the body. So even though two foods could have the similar content, they can have drastically different effects on your system.
>vegetables are generally healthier than meat because they contain more nutrients, less fats e.t.c.
That would be an unhealthy practise rather than type. For example, the opposite of health, which is to do ‘un’ health would be to damage you directly. For example something like gatorade can be argued it has ‘more hydration’ but the lack of drinking that over water doesnt make water unhealthy. However eating only meat can lead to scurvy which is an unhealthy practise. The difference between practise and actual poison has people pointing fingers at regular foods which have been safe for years(protein, carbs, fat).
One thing that does direct health damage, in any dose and is well known is alcohol. Enough of it makes people vomit it out and yet they do this regularly which makes you question the actual importance of health to most.
Nutrition is a balancing act. You need sufficient calories to live and grow. You need protein for certain raw materials, fiber to regulate digestion, and various vitamins and minerals in small amounts. You also need enough so that you don’t feel hungry. But you don’t want too many calories either, and almost everything has some calories. Some other substances, particularly sodium, are also bad to consume in significant excess.
Unhealthy foods are ones that don’t help you maintain this balance. They may be extremely high in calories relative to their other nutritional value, making it more difficult to acquire the rest without consuming more calories than needed.
Say you need 2,000 calories a day. You have two foods, a snack with 500 calories and 10% of your nutrients for the day, and a veggie with 250 calories and 20% of your nutrients. If you eat more than two snacks, you can no longer meet your nutrient needs without consuming significant excess calories. Over a lifetime, this causes problems.
Now when you try to figure out the exact nutrients you need, and in what amounts…that gets complicated and there’s a lot we don’t know.
[According to Harvard Medical School](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good), these types of fats help you absorb vitamins
Avacado oil, coconut oil, olive oil, palm oils, & lard.
Without good fat the “healfulness” can slip away.
Grains in general are a very questionable supplement to a human diet, corn for instance slides right through the body, like at a water park, unless we PRE-process some of the grains they are not broken down well during the digestion process.
At the end of the day, some believe if the GOVERNMENT says it’s healthy then it’s healthy or if the MEDIA says something is healthy then it’s healthy. If you really want to know what is healthy for YOU, as i_am_the_cattle mentioned, learn about biology/digestion. From the knowledge you gain you can start modifying your diet by removing unnecessary (unhealthy) components.
I think it’s important to note here that a lot of nutrition ‘science’ is garbage. A lot of it uses epidemiology studies to correlate food with illness/health outcomes, but this is a *terrible* way to decide what is healthy. This is also why something is health, then not, then healthy again: these kinds of studies can be mined and interpreted to get any kind of result you could want.
If you want to know what is healthy, learn about biology/digestion as this is more concrete. You will notice things like meat is a highly bioavailable, dense source of nutrients and high quality protein, including the fat that comes with it. Our brains are mostly fat, and cholesterol is vital to our functioning.
You may also find that the chemicals plants use to defend themselves often have negative effects on the human body. Phytates for example, which are found in grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, inhibit the absorption of minerals like zinc, calcium, and magnesium. You may also need to watch out for things like lectins.
Living things have genetics that dictate what kinds of proteins and molecules are needed to make more of those living things. Some of these things are good for us humans to eat, others are not. In general, genetics aren’t concerned with what is healthy or not, they just have what are needed to survive the exception being some plants do grow fruits with the purpose to be eaten as to spread their seeds.
One interesting thing to note is that we live in a very unusual time when you look at the overall timeline of humanity. Things like fats and sweets were quite scarce when humanity was tribal and food wasn’t always plentiful. We developed taste buds that like these high-energy foods, encouraging us to stock up on energy when we could. It’s only recently that humanity reached a point where we can cultivate and manufacture these things in such abundance that we can overindulge in them, making them unhealthy.
Your body needs certain nutrients to function. Foods that are considered healthy have more of those nutrients and less of the things that cause excess fat such as carbs. Red meat is an example of something you should eat in moderation because it is generally high in fat and other things that can have a negative effect on your body.
A big example would be white bread. The process that creates bleached flower basically takes away all health benefits of the initial wheat grain that it came from, leaving only simple sugars that your body burns quickly and stores as excess fat in your body. If you ate whole wheat bread instead it still has a lot of nutrients in it that your body can use efficiently and create less fat because the complex sugars are what your body burns more effectively.
I want to emphasize “healthy” is subjective.
Lifestyle, climate, and state of your health will define healthy. In our modern day, mostly sedentary lifestyle begs for less-caloric, more vitamin and nutrition dense food. Fruits and vegetable with some protein fits the bill better here.
However if you are living in more food scarce society (idk west Africa for example), fatty meat, vegetables, and butter/oil is healthy choice for you.
If you were living in ice age, you’d need to consume more caloric food to make up for expended energy just to keep your body temperature normal.
I’m general, fruits and vegetables are most common healthy food because they are rich in vitamins and trace elements you need like iodine, beryllium etc
Your body needs two things from your food. Energy and nutrition (vitamins, minerals etc.), you can think of nutrition as building blocks for your body. Stuff your body needs to grow, heal or run the many chemical processes in your body that make life possible. If there’s anything in your food that doesn’t fall into those categories, it simply isn’t processed and discarded as waste.
Unhealthy can come in many forms. Excess energy is a simple one. Running your body requires energy. You need to generate body heat, your muscles need energy to move and so on. But if you take in significantly more energy through your food than you expend, the excess is stored as fat. Which means you grow fat with all the associated health issues.
We express that energy in terms of calories. Sugary or fatty foods like candy, chips, pastries etc. are high in calories and low in nutrition so they’ll quickly turn you fat if you don’t exercise a lot to burn off the excess energy.
And that brings us to the next example of unhealthy eating. Empty calories. When you eat foods that have a high caloric content but a low nutritional content, you’re eating empty calories. You’re providing your body with tons of energy but almost no nutrition. Remember, nutrition is all of the things that are essential to the proper running of your body. It’s like providing your car with gasoline but not coolant, oil, air in the tires etc. ie. it’ll have the energy to move but miss the essentials to do so without slowly breaking down.
And now for a more subtle example. Sugar is very easy for your body to absorb. If you eat a piece of chocolate, your body won’t have to break it down with acid and slowly absorb it’s nutrients while it passes through your digestive system. The sugar is just almost 100% absorbed right away, minutes after eating it.
This gives you an immediate and enormous energy boost that crashes down just as fast because you absorb all of the energy right away and then there’s nothing left.
By comparison, if you eat some green beans, you’re eating a complex food item with a fair amount of indigestible fibre. That means your body has to work hard to digest it and the green bean’s energy is released slowly over time. Providing you with a much more balanced supply without any highs and crashes.
So to make it a little more practical. Unprocessed foods like meat, fish, vegetables, nuts and fruits are nutritionally complex. These are the products of living things that needed many different nutrients in their own right to grow. A vegetable that absorbs many nutrients from the soil to fuel it’s own growth will often have equally nutritionally complex tissues for us to eat.
By comparison, processed foods like noodles, chips, sauces, candies etc. are purpose made. And that purpose is usually not to provide us with nutrition. A lot of snacks are very salty, fatty and sugary because those elements are addictive to us (in the wild extra energy is precious instead of a health hazard). Food items like noodles are meant to be filling (lots of carbs) but they’re not made to supply you with vitamins for instance.
Eating processed foods too often amounts to eating those empty calories we mentioned. It’ll fill you up and likely fatten you up. While at the same time depriving you of all that nutrition you need so badly.
That’s why at the end of the day, a healthy diet comes down to limiting your caloric intake while making sure you meet your nutritional goals. And that usually requires you to eat a good amount of vegetables and protein sources while limiting sources of fat and sugar.
Calling foods healthy or unhealthy isn’t a particularly good way to look at them.
There are a bunch of things you need, nearly all of which you can have too much of.
Calories for example; to little or too much is bad. Both directions will literally kill you if taken to extremes.
So in the midst of an obesity epidemic, high calorie density foods are a problem. But in a famine they’re a lifesaver.
In the correct amounts, every food is healthy. Except trans fats and alcohol. And there some things added to food; preservatives, combustion products, etc that aren’t good.
“Unhealthy” is foods that have too much of what people in our society get too much of, and “healthy” is foods that contain more of what we don’t get enough of.
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