Today’s question is deceptively simple: What does healthy mean? Before we go on, take a few seconds to define healthy food for yourself.
Some popular ideas about healthy food
Some rambling thoughts about those ideas
Cooking is a form of processing. So is soaking, leaching, grinding, curdling, fermenting, transporting, storing, and cooling. We’ve been modifying plants since the beginning of agriculture. That is agriculture. The ancestors of most of today’s edible fruits and vegetables would have straight-up murdered you.
The taste and texture of foods can—and will continue to be—modified to make them as close to addictive as legally possible. Are they actually addictive? That's another discussion.
Excess calories pose a far more significant risk than small amounts of natural sweeteners.
Too little iron will cause fatigue, too much will cause organ damage. Too few calories will sap your energy and shorten your lifespan. So will too many.
Processing (yes, including cooking) makes it easy for you to access those calories. Which might be good or bad (see above).
Getting calories from a healthy source may bring some extra nutrients along for the ride but they won't negate those calories. Factor that into your daily intake.
The only ways that a specific type of food will be the problem is if it will kill you (allergies); make you miserable (intolerance); or if it is something that you just cannot control your eating of (calorie management—mostly). Carbs—or at least certain types of carbs—may meet one of the above criteria. Otherwise, carbs are different assemblies of sugars that come along for the ride with different types of nutrients. It’s pretty hard to pigeonhole them.
Palaeolithic humans got less screen-time, fewer processed foods, and way more deaths from infection, flu, parasites, and chimpanzee beat-downs (per capita).
The (so-called) good ole days were a disgusting, lawless, time with zero access to streaming movies.
Some action steps
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