Everyone wants to eat healthy, but “healthy” has no specific meaning. Neither do many other food-related buzzwords that are used on packaging or by influencers. These words and phrases are meant to make you feel good (or bad) about your choices, while providing little or no useful information.
“Cleansed”
“Clean” tops the list. It simply means “the things I want to believe are good,” and it does so by drawing a line of us against them. Are the food is clean, which implies that those Is the food… dirty? Unless we’re talking about a tortilla that fell on the floor, this is one absolutely meaningless distinction.
“Inflammatory” or “anti-inflammatory”
Inflammation is an intricately coordinated process that our bodies use to fight disease, repair damaged tissue, and more. It’s not always a bad thing. But since inflammation is involved in cardiovascular disease, there is a hypothesis that preventing inflammation in general may reduce the risk of certain health conditions.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, and it even has some support, but there are little evidence link specific diets to inflammation, and in turn to health outcomes. Many of our ideas about what constitutes an “inflammatory” food are based on laboratory studies or population-level research that you can’t really reduce the effects of individual foods.
“Real sugar”
Cane sugar is in fashion right now It’s not high-fructose corn syrup, but there’s very little difference, nutritionally, between cane sugar (or beet sugar) and the oft-demonized HFCS. They are both about half glucose and half fructose; HFCS is only “high fructose” in the sense that it has more fructose than regular corn syrup, which is mostly glucose.
And if you’re going to come at me with the fact that HFCS may be 55% fructose instead of 50% fructose, I’m going to ask you how much sugar you’re eating which you think is a subtle change in the composition of five percent of your sugar intake is going to make any kind of difference in the real world.
“Multigrain” and “whole grain grams”
There’s nothing wrong with multigrain bread (I love it), or things that are labeled seven or nine grain or whatever. But multigrain does not mean whole grain. If you’re trying to include more fiber and more whole grains in your diet, you should look for foods that are entirely whole grains, not the refined flours of several different grains mixed together.
These labels bet that you see the word “grain” without really thinking about what it means. The same goes for labels that say they contain so many “grams of whole grain.” We should all be getting about 30 grams of fiber a day, and whole grains are a good source of that. but 30 grams of whole wheat flour (for example) only contains about 3 grams of fiber.
“Net Carbs”
“Net carbs” is a roundabout way of saying that some of the carbohydrates in a food don’t count. The idea comes from a good place, I think: an apple with 10 grams of sugar and 3 grams of fiber shouldn’t be considered equivalent to a handful of sugar-containing Skittles and almost nothing else.
But you don’t need a calculator to tell you the apple brings more to the table, nutritionally speaking, than candy. Reducing foods to their macros is unnecessarily narrow-minded and has led companies like Atkins to create and market low net carb shakes and bars, when you could just mein whatever normal food meets your total caloric needs.
“gut health”
It’s true the microbes that live in our intestines are essential for our health, and that we sometimes suffer harmful effects when their small ecosystem down there it is interrupted.
But this is an area of active research, and scientists haven’t yet been able to pin down the details of what makes one person’s gut “healthy” and another’s “unhealthy.” And we definitely don’t know enough to say that you just need to eat this or that and your gut microbes will be happy.
“Indicted”
Like “clean”, this is a term thrown around mainly to demonize cheaper or more available food, and make what is on the speaker’s plate seem more virtuous by comparison.
even the most scientific attempts to define what exactly qualifies as a “processed” food tends to run into both philosophical and nutritional problems. The NOVA classification considers hard liquor to be more processed than wine, but does that really make wine better for you? It also considers that canned vegetables are processed and frozen ones are not, among other dubious distinctions.
“Volume”
The idea of eating in large quantities is that some foods are more filling than others. So eat a salad or soup, advocates of volumetrics will suggest, because the lettuce and broth will fill you up without adding a lot of calories..
This may be true, but they also aren’t providing much protein, vitamins, or other nutrients that our bodies need. And while you may be able to fool your stomach for a few minutes, your body is too smart to be fooled in the long run. An hour after that simple salad, you’ll be hungry again, and this time maybe you should treat yourself to some higher-density protein, fat, and carbs.
.
