As a society, we are obsessed with questions about whether an individual food is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us. But with the exception of things like toxic mushrooms (which I would not classify as ‘food’), no food is bad for you.
The last time I saw a headline promising a verdict on a particular food, it was about cheese, but you know the type. Coffee is or is not bad for you; dairy products are or are not bad for you; eggs, butter, soy, fruit juice, whatever. By the time you ask if a particular food is bad for you, you are already asking the wrong question.
Food alone cannot be healthy or unhealthy; it is the whole picture of your eating that affects your health. The basics of a healthy diet is pretty easy to look at, and chances are good that you already know it. Eat nutritious foods, less processed goods if possible, hit a reasonable number of calories and limit sugars and saturated fats (ideally to less than 10% of the calories each).
What are you really wondering? Do you enjoy cheese and do you want to enjoy it debt free? You can just eat the cheese. Are you worried about eating too much cheese? Well, add the dang calories.
I wonder if we want to hear that food is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ so that we can have an immediate emotional response to buying or eating it. You might choose to watch a horror movie instead of a comedy just for the rush of emotion; similarly you can enjoy eating chocolate while thinking “it’s good for me, so it’s good to enjoy it,” or get a certain excitement out of “it’s awful for me, I’m so bad now . ” Maybe it’s not nearly as much fun to drink a piece of chocolate while thinking, “just another food.”
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What science says
Every time a study on a certain food appears, it is always limited and indirect methods. Sometimes the researchers fed the food, or more often an isolated chemical component thereof, to animals (or sometimes even for people) and measured a specific outcome of their biology. Other times large groups of people are asked to fill it out food frequency questionnaires, and conclusions are drawn from the health outcomes of the people, such as their weight or longevity or their heart disease.
But in no case are we actually testing something specific on the food. In the case of the questionnaires, the researchers ask a question that reads as follows: What health outcomes do people who eat a lot of cheese have in common?
There are many variables hidden in the question. Do people who eat a lot of pizza because they are too busy cooking, or too poor to take more attractions, control the cheese-eating population? These studies are not like drug trials, where you can randomize people and assign them to cheese or no-cheese groups. We all eat different diets, and the best a study can do is to make generalizations about different people eating different diets.
And when we look at the outcomes, it often varies from study to study. One study may find that people who eat a lot of a certain food live slightly longer than those who do not; another may find that it is likely that they are overweight. Is it really fair to say the first study showed that these foods are ‘good for us’ and the other ‘bad’? I do not think so. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are a summary judgment on what foods do to our health. It cannot be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ at the same time, even if both studies are well done and their conclusions are more or less accurate.
Ultimately, the only thing we can really judge is whether we are eating well overall, and there are many ways to achieve that. No single food has magical properties that dominate the rest of your diet. So let’s stop judging food as if it can only be “good” or “bad”.