What Makes A Food “Unhealthy”
And one golden rule to distinguish what’s healthy from what’s not
Granted, the word ‘unhealthy’ does not convey any sort of objective truth. Scientists and researchers have been documenting the effects of food and diets on weight loss and diseases for centuries, but studies are never concluded in terms of healthy and unhealthy. Scientific papers are excellent at conveying their objective findings, but they are often difficult to translate to daily English.
The field of nutritional sciences strives to constantly improve dietary guidelines and recommendations. It is their duty to deliver accurate information to help us navigate through the cacophonous dieting scene and identify which foods to incorporate into our diet and which ones to leave out. In short, they are responsible for distinguishing healthy from unhealthy.
While that seems like a tall order, something unhealthy is nothing more than a substance that removes benefits and delivers harm to the body. Unhealthy foods are overall not conducive to maintaining health. Consuming something unhealthy leaves us worse off in either the short-term or the long-term.
Although some specifics may differ, like wholewheat products, which can be perfectly nourishing to you and I but dangerous to people with gluten intolerance (or Celiac disease), generally speaking, foods that fall into the unhealthy category won’t be vastly different between individuals.
In the book, The Obesity Code, physician and author Jason Fung explains how certain kinds of food groups specifically lead to obesity and diabetes. The book, which assimilates an array of long-term cohort studies and large controlled trials unearths how society’s fear of fats has been blown out of proportion through decades of suboptimal translation of factual research findings to actual practical advice.
Along with many other modern dieticians, Jason Fung concludes that the yardstick for ‘healthy’ is natural whole foods. These include foods that are naturally occurring and go through minimal processing, like whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, animal fats, and dairy.
The idea behind this is that through millions of years of evolution, our mammalian digestive tract has been designed to best suit the digestion of naturally-occurring foods. It makes sense. For one, these foods are generally high in fiber content, which streamlines the digestion process and aids the absorption of essential nutrients. They are also low in artificially-made sugars, which reduces lipogenesis — or fat formation — and keeps our physique lean.
Crops like fruits and vegetables absorb vitamins and minerals from the soil, which is transferred to us when we consume them, keeping our micronutrient balance in check. Lastly, naturally-occurring fats stimulate early satiety, prompting us to stop eating earlier and ultimately consume less.
The simple understanding of this notion lays the foundation for many of today’s most famous and successful diets in terms of promoting health and weight loss, such as the plant-based diet — a diet consisting of foods derived from plants and minimal amounts animal products, the Mediterranean diet, which focuses on vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans, and moderate amounts of fish and dairy, and the paleo diet, which closely simulates our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ dinner menu.
Research has demonstrated over the years that these diets do not only promote good cardiovascular and metabolic health but also boast a respectable weight-loss profile.
On the polarising end of the spectrum are highly processed foods. These include pre-packaged and highly preserved products such as breakfast cereals, canned goods, sugary snacks, calorie-dense drinks, and instant meals. With every additional minute a food spends under processing, more valuable nutrients are stripped away from them. At the same time, dangerous additives like sugars and preservatives are added into the mix.
Food companies do this with financial benefits insight, and they do so relentlessly, adding tons of sugars into fizzy drinks and snack bars to not only give them longer shelf lives but also make them more addictive and convenient for consumption. Unless governments start demoralizing such behaviors, it’s hard to see diet-related health problems disappear from society.
One way to distinguish whole foods from their processed counterparts is to ask yourself ‘does this food look natural?’ Foods that resemble their true form in nature, such as fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats are easily categorized as natural, while the naturalness of pre-packaged products can be harder to determine.
As a rule of thumb, if a product attempts to boast some sort of health claim on the packaging, that’s often a good reason to question the nutritional aspect of that product. Additionally, the ingredients list should give some useful telltale signs. One sign that a food is natural or minimally processed is a scant ingredients list. Natural foods do not contain additives. Generally, the shorter the better, but also look out for flowery terms that may hide the nebulous nature of some of these ingredients, including added sugars (anything that ends in ‘ose’) and even ‘natural’ sweeteners.
While there seems to be plenty of debate with counting calories, it’s wise to check the nutrition facts to eyeball the total amount of energy you’re consuming relative to an average day’s worth of meals (around 2000 calories). You’ll be surprised to see some snacks boast >1500 calories per pack, but divide them into convenient serving sizes in order to appear less nefarious. The rest of the list is less telling however since it’s difficult to determine if the sugars or fats are natural or added. In this department, a little bit of common sense does help.
Additionally, the large majority of nutritionists will advise keeping your drinks calorie-free. Water, coffee, and tea — unsweetened — are considered natural beverages. Studies have also demonstrated lower overall mortality risk with coffee consumption, which can also help suppress hunger and promote weight loss.
In broad brush strokes, processed means unhealthy. Nothing made by nature is inherently unhealthy, even trans fats from dairy products are better than highly processed unsaturated fats. Natural foods or whole foods, as they have become known in the general dieting sphere, is the closest consistent embodiment of ‘healthy’.
