The vast majority of people who might have access to—or want to eat—dandelion are not malnourished and do not have vitamin deficiencies, and so adding dandelion to their diet will have zero net effect on their health. Swapping some vegetable out for dandelion will have zero net effect on their health. Replacing one doughnut with one portion of dandelion will have zero net effect on their health when compared to swapping out that doughnut for any other reasonable vegetable.
Individual foods are, generally speaking, neither healthy nor unhealthy. Diets are healthy or unhealthy.
Is that really true, though? It seems like you'd be healthier eating healthy salads and a donut, rather than never eating a donut, but never eating a salad, either.
The way I’ve always said it is that individual foods are neither healthy nor unhealthy in and of themselves and our insistence on treating them as though they are is what leads to the ridiculous heralding of new “superfoods” du jour like spirulina, kale, wheatgrass, açaí, chia seeds, ad nauseum.
It’s diets which are healthy or unhealthy, not individual foods. Swapping in kale for iceberg lettuce or açaí instead of blueberries is not going to statistically improve anyone’s health or wellbeing.
No ingredient is healthy or unhealthy. Diet can be that or not. Having more vitamins, or other stuff means nothing. Body thrives on variability not on some optimality based on nutrient amounts.
> Diet and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy. Single ingredient, not really.
That’s false.
There are many ingredients and foods that we could name that are without dispute in and of themselves unhealthy, regardless of general diet and lifestyle.
I have a hard time believing there is any objective definition of “healthy” foods. It seems to me that the healthiness of a food is entirely dependent on the state of the individual consuming it. A can of spam is “healthy” for a person on the verge of starving to death. Likewise, a kale salad is “unhealthy” for a sedentary person that just consumed 20k calories.
I don’t believe there are any healthy or unhealthy individual food items. Rather, it’s the individuals diet that is healthy or unhealthy.
There's not a dietitian on this planet that when asked to define a "healthy diet" would include donuts.
This guy is living in denial if he honestly think this.
No, it doesn't make sense. The consequence is that no food marketing can make (even truthful and not-misleading) claims about the healthiness of the product. Carrots are healthier than Twinkies? Not unless they're a medicine.
Not following your distinction. Are you intimating that b/c the nutrients are in these foods, they might not be absorbed correctly and therefore it would diminish their benefits? (btw- the title was taken almost verbatim from the text)
I didn't think he was advocating eating only doughnuts. Doughnuts are great, unless you eat nothing but doughnuts, in which case the diet is not particularly balanced, nor is it healthy.
Personally, I eat a lower-carb diet of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and other healthy foods most of the time. A few times a year I have a doughnut. Do I have an unhealthy diet because of that?
> But there’s very little evidence that most adults need it. There’s also very little evidence that it’s doing them much good.
Isn't all foodstuff this way? I watched a BBC documentary a number of years ago about a woman who had reportedly lived entirely on crisps (potato chips) for years[0]. She wasn't entirely healthy by any means, but it speaks to the resilience of our biology when you can get by on basically anything provided you get enough calories and a few vitamins.
Once you get past a bit of common sense, the whole notion of "healthy food" and "unhealthy food" often looks pretty ridiculous. It's really not worth time debating the negligible pros and cons of one particular food item.
Disclaimer: I've been drinking a pint of semi-skimmed every night since I was a child... which according to Wolfram Alpha is almost a quarter of the volume of a Gray Whale
Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet.
You jump pretty readily to a conclusion that isn't in what's said. "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.
You can eat nothing but potatoes, which are filled with starch, but a diet filled with plants is much more likely to involve a rich variety of very healthy foods. Some of these foods would be things like spinach, kale, carrots, beetroot, beans, sweet potatoes, blueberries, apples, bananas, strawberries, buckwheat, avocados, courgettes, onions and peppers.
There's definitely starch and sugars in these, but you'd be hard pressed to eat them to anything like a toxic degree. To get them to a toxic degree, you'd need to eat processed food in quantity, which isn't what the maxim, which is undoubtably glib, is suggesting you do.
I agree with your comment about food being used as yet another status symbol, and I generally find that a particularly unpleasant and tiresome way to treat something as essential as eating. I'd disagree that Pollan is the patron saint of foodies, though. He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies. He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group.
Out of interest, what would you recommend as a good, healthful diet? As you can probably guess from my reply, I think Pollan's maxim, which is certainly glib, offers a good working basis for a healthy diet.
What I always wondered about eating healthy is, is it the unhealthy foods on their own that is the root cause, or the fact that unhealthy eaters don't eat wholesome foods?
For example, if I eat McDonalds, but then I also eat a bunch of fruits and veggies, would that mitigate the risk?
Grains are a plant, and people on average eat far too many processed grains, and too few fruits and vegetables. I like the simplicity in this statement, but it leaves too much open to interpretation. Let's not have people feeling good about themselves because everything in a PopTart comes from a plant, for example.
The vast majority of people who might have access to—or want to eat—dandelion are not malnourished and do not have vitamin deficiencies, and so adding dandelion to their diet will have zero net effect on their health. Swapping some vegetable out for dandelion will have zero net effect on their health. Replacing one doughnut with one portion of dandelion will have zero net effect on their health when compared to swapping out that doughnut for any other reasonable vegetable.
Individual foods are, generally speaking, neither healthy nor unhealthy. Diets are healthy or unhealthy.
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