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.
There's so much wrong with that post that it's hurting my brain.
I don't know how you got from "fruit is bad" to "you can only eat vegetables" but that must have been a sweet trip. You do know there's other foods, right? Like plant oils, meat, dairy, and chocolate cake.
And if that wasn't hurting my brain enough, you think vegetables don't have calories? So you've never heard of the potato, have you? Or carrots, sweet potato, beetroot...
I think that's true for anyone aiming at being healthy. I'd say that eating meat and not having any nutrition knowledge is even worse. If you don't know anything about nutrition, sticking with fruits, legumes, grains, nuts, seeds and greens is a pretty safe choice.
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.
We actually do. In simple terms, if you eat more than you can use, you will gain weight. It is slightly more complicated. I can explain more, but the web will do a better job than I can.
The talk about leafy greens is that, we know they are low calorie, have essential vitamins and minerals, and provide fiber. Thus, they are definitely good for you. They don't harm you, they provide sustenance and other benefits and so your statement that we don't know what is healthy is just false.
> "You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" is an ignorant claim deserving of ridicule.
Wrong. It's a pithy rule of thumb that -- while obviously imperfect and not to be taken literally -- makes it easier for busy people, people with kids, and people uninterested in researching every single thing they eat to protect themselves in a society where the industrial food industry puts all kinds of horrible shit in mainstream 'food'.
Personally, I prefer Michael Pollan's "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
But what both of these sayings actually mean is: Don't blindly eat the garbage that the industrial food complex tries to sell you. Eat stuff that you are pretty sure is a healthy thing to eat.
Natural broccoli? Sure. Genetically engineered insect-resistant broccoli? Might want to default to no on that one, until you have time to look into it. Locally-produced cornflour-and-water tortillas? Sure. Sandwich bread made out of yoga mats? Hmm, might be okay, but why not avoid it until your buddy wcummings does a bunch of internet research and persuades you that it's safe.
You have it backwards. No food is inherently “good” for you. Most people are better off skipping meals until they absolutely need nutrients. There’s toxins in all food.
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.
Tell me about it, sometimes I think that it'd just be better to stop eating altogether. It seems that, for each and every food, someone will tell you it's terribly harmful and you shouldn't be eating it.
In the end, I've decided to follow some dietician's advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
It might be obvious to some, but for reference the title (and associated tweet) is a reference to Michael Pollan's oft-quoted advice for eating healthy: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
The article talks about high water content vegetables, not high quality grain and beans. It does not seem so unlikely that foods that almost don't provide calories are more harmful when compared on a calorie basis.
(Of course on the other hand no one eats 25 pounds of lettuce and broccoli a day)
Here are some current mainstream media misconceptions regarding health and nutrition. Admittedly, most of these are already acknowledged as wrong in the same way that "all saturated fat is bad for you" is wrong, with the exception of #2:
1. Lots of cardiovascular exercise (eg running) is good for you.
2. Anabolic steroids are extremely risky and will likely kill you dead.
3. You need to eat throughout the day.
4. Whole eggs are bad for you because of the cholesterol.
5. Salt is bad for you even if you don't have high blood pressure.
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.
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