A Balanced Diet

Who decides what you eat? There’s a whole team behind it.

There is an easy way to make people healthy: give them advice about what to eat. These can range from the general “eat five fruits and veggies a day” to more precise and complex recommendations such as “consume 300 micrograms of folic acid a day”.

The first piece of advice is not complicated to follow, and doesn’t put people at risk. In the worst case they may develop awful diarrhoea after eating five watermelons.

Nonetheless, this recommendation is very imprecise. After all, how many grapes make a fruit?

The first piece of advice is probably just aimed at getting people to add diversity to their diet and eat more vitamins — instead of fat and sugary food.

In the second recommendation, the specific molecule and its quantity is precisely stated. But what the hell is a folic acid? And how am I supposed to measure its quantity in my daily meals?

At the scale of the consumer, it’s complicated because most people don’t have the time, the knowledge, or the motivation to check what is actually in their diet.

I eat because it looks good, it smells good, it tastes good! I don’t want to worry about what is in there.