Define "healthy" food...

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  • yopeeps025
    yopeeps025 Posts: 8,680 Member
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    This thread was great entertainment with lots of ups and downs.
  • JeffseekingV
    JeffseekingV Posts: 3,165 Member
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    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    MrM27 wrote: »
    Wow, are there people who really don't know what a empty calorie is? Soda is a empty calorie, it gives you zero nutrients that your body can use. Depending on what ice-cream you buy, it can have things like protein and calcium (from the dairy). So, some might consider it empty because it's usually seen as a treat, but it's not a completely empty calorie if it has dairy, soy, or something else in it with some nutritional value.

    Don't forget genes, they play a pretty big role in how long you live. That is why grandma can smoke till she's 100 but the guy down the street died from lung cancer at 35.

    Obviously what is "healthy," is debatable, but if you only ate Doritos for a month you would probably feel a bit *kitten* by the end of the month and might even have a vitamin deficiency or two. If you don't look outside of Western societies where we tend to eat a variety and everything is fortified then it might seem like it doesn't matter. But, take a look at populations with limited food supplies and it matters to them. You really can have a vitamin or nutrient deficiency. There are people in America who die from malnutrition, just not very many. As long as there is some variety in your life then you are probably good, even if that variety is Taco Bell one day and McDonald's the next. There are a lot of studies that show excessive consumption of some things can cause earlier death in some populations. But, of course, genes play a role and the debate of which matters more is still plenty there. Nutrition is a newer science and there are a lot of variables.

    Malnutrition Death Rates by Country:

    http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrition/by-country/

    Ever drank a coke pre or post training? I'm going to assume you haven't.
    What ice cream has no calcium or protein?

    You used the example that if we only ate Doritos for a month then we would feel bad and have a deficiency or 2. Now, who eats only Doritos all day every day and nothing else. It's amazing how often you people use extreme examples like this to prove no point. A point you don't have. It's ridiculous. Let's say this, don't you think it would be just as bad if someone at pure broccoli all month, nothing but broccoli. You opened your statement by saying you were surprised at the fact that people don't know what empty calories are but you don't even understand nutrition so should you really be that surprised?

    From a nutrient value only, I'd probably be better off eating broccoli than Doritos all month.

    Really? Because Broccoli provides us with all of the nutrients we need?

    No. Because broccoli will stand a better chance at providing more nutrients we need vs doritos. That's just a guess on my part. But I never said either would provide all nutrients we need and never implied it. The issue here was eating ONE food for a month. Doritos or broccoli.
    Get out of here with you ridiculous argument.

    You know what? Why not address the question when you get called out instead of attempting to flame yourself out of the question poised to you. It was you that that presented the question.

    Let's say this, don't you think it would be just as bad if someone at pure broccoli all month, nothing but broccoli

    Well let's see, where will you get dietary fat and protein from?

    Then you said:
    It is debatable. the fact that broccoli doesn't have dietary fat doesn't mean it's the worse choice of the two over a month's time.
    You really think it's debatable that it's unhealthy to go without protein or fat for a month or 2?

    Broccoli has protein. And yet again, you misunderstood the question. The question is this. Which of the two if you ate for a month, would you be better off with at the end of the month. The question isn't if one would be an unhealthy choice. The question is which would be more healthy or unhealthy for you.

    Neither one. Because if you ate a diet of a 100% broccoli or 100% doritos for a month or two you probably end up in the hospital with either. That's why neither should be done and both comparisons are ridiculous.

    I disagree that one wouldn't be better than the other. You continued the argument, then once cornered, you went off on another tangent. Congrats. After considering the last two nutritional labels, I'd go with broccoli. but in reality, I wouldn't eat just one.

    But you know what? Because of this, you now know broccoli has protein. :)

    Right, you think you're teaching me something? I'm going to eat 30 servings of broccoli in order to get my protein requirements. While at the same time getting no fat. Makes sense. Please try again if you think an all broccoli diet for a month or 2 wouldn't land you in the hospital. You really are clueless.

    I'm the clueless one. Who here didn't know broccoli didn't contain protein? :) And what data do you have that shows that eating broccoli would land you in a hospital after 1 or 2 months? I'm not saying it wouldn't, I'm asking for how you are coming to those time frames

    I didn't know broccoli contained protein ? Ummmm, yeah okay. If that's what you want to think. I don't know that you are the one that thinks either one of those 2 examples would be acceptable for a month, 2 months, whatever. Then you ask for studies showing that. Lol. You are clearly just trolling at this point.

    Hahaha. You said "wow, just wow". That was supposed to mean how much protein broccoli has? Come on man.

    Yea that's exactly what wow just wow meant. Lol. If that's what you think it meant then I clearly chose the proper response to your post with that one.

    The backpedaling is strong in this one.

    Oh yes because your lack of understanding that wow was the best response to the level of derp your postes is why you would see it as back peddling. It's okay, I can't blame you for being you.

    No. I just stated broccoli has protein. You stated "wow, just wow". Explain exactly what you meant.

    But we all know you thought it did not have protein and your just backpedalling. Not only that, you are ignoring the question about how you know that eating broccoli for 1-2 months = hospital. Take your time on this one
    You really need me to explain to you that wow just wow was in response to you believing broccoli is an high or even acceptable source of protein. Lol. Derp derp derp. Now you ask why I say eating alunch broccoli for a month or 2 would land you in the hospital? Oh please, your trolling skills are so sad. Yes, everybody thinks I though broccoli had zero protein. Lol.

    Why? I just asked you exactly what you meant.

    You are just backpedaling even more. Yeah I asked you for proof that eating it for 1-2 months would land you in the hospital? Why? Simply because you said it would. Now where is this proof? Hell where is your the explanation of your statement? You won't even offer it.
  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
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    550 comments or so. I will never catch up.

    So my opinion...

    No one food is healthy or unhealthy. A complete diet can be healthy or unhealthy, but not one food. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong.
  • ndj1979
    ndj1979 Posts: 29,139 Member
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    JoRocka wrote: »
    ndj1979 wrote: »
    JoRocka wrote: »
    a month of broccoli?

    good lord- i would hate to be the plumber for THAT house!!! OIY
    Because it is extremely high calorie, high sugar, and high fat for little volume and not a great deal of nutritional value. To be honest I didn't choose the ice cream metaphor, and don't find ice cream to be nearly as unhealthy as, say, a can of coke, but in comparison to a bunch of kale YES ice cream offers less nutritional value.

    so much sadness and wrongess here.

    also this: kale vs ice cream?
    seriously?

    no questions- the kales' in the trash- it's rubbish awful food. You want to talk about 'unhealthy' anything that tastes that bad before you put int your pie hole should never be considered healthy- much less a "super food"

    PS Eff you women's health for making kale a thing.

    seriously. die.

    me thinks you are a closet kale lover...

    I've had it like 2-3 times and I cannot.even.

    between the fact it tastes so awful and the huge "OMGHERD kale" reaction people get all ga-ga for in health food circles- it makes me stabby.

    all right calm down ...go do some squats or something to get all the aggression out :)
  • MakePeasNotWar
    MakePeasNotWar Posts: 1,329 Member
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    JoRocka wrote: »
    ndj1979 wrote: »
    JoRocka wrote: »
    a month of broccoli?

    good lord- i would hate to be the plumber for THAT house!!! OIY
    Because it is extremely high calorie, high sugar, and high fat for little volume and not a great deal of nutritional value. To be honest I didn't choose the ice cream metaphor, and don't find ice cream to be nearly as unhealthy as, say, a can of coke, but in comparison to a bunch of kale YES ice cream offers less nutritional value.

    so much sadness and wrongess here.

    also this: kale vs ice cream?
    seriously?

    no questions- the kales' in the trash- it's rubbish awful food. You want to talk about 'unhealthy' anything that tastes that bad before you put int your pie hole should never be considered healthy- much less a "super food"

    PS Eff you women's health for making kale a thing.

    seriously. die.

    me thinks you are a closet kale lover...

    I've had it like 2-3 times and I cannot.even.

    between the fact it tastes so awful and the huge "OMGHERD kale" reaction people get all ga-ga for in health food circles- it makes me stabby.

    More than one person has told me that seasoned kale chips were a tasty alternative to potato chips. I guess I am naive, because I went out, bought some kale, rubbed it with oil, added my seasonings, etc., baked it for however long the recipe said (I don't remember), and you know what? It didn't taste like potato chips. It tasted like %$#^ kale!

    I don't know if I can ever learn to trust again.
  • ndj1979
    ndj1979 Posts: 29,139 Member
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    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    Kalikel wrote: »
    Your choices, my choices, some other guy's choices will be different, based on our health, desires and abilities. But all the thinking we all do - even whether we think the same things! - will have no effect on the food itself.

    The food doesn't change.

    "Food is different based on context"...It's just a bizarre concept.

    But the problem is that "healthiness"--at least in the way that I am using it, as in "is beneficial to eat" is not an inherent property of food but depends on the circumstances. If you need to gain weight, almost anything edible might be healthy. If you've eaten nothing but broccoli for a week, broccoli is not healthy. In particular, there is no food that is so beneficial that you would want to say that it could make up an entire diet. Whether a food benefits your health or not depends on the overall diet. Oatmeal is quite healthy, IMO, but getting 90% of your diet from oatmeal is not ideal, IMO. Bananas are fabulous, but the banana only diet seems idiotic to me.

    But thanks to another poster I now get how you are using the term and it makes more sense to me, although I don't really think of food so much that way, but in connection with an overall diet. (This is because I think the desire to rank foods and all that is really bizarre and impossible. How on earth do you even start to compare chicken and zucchini or some such. And why?)

    you are wasting your time with snoop froggy frog ...
  • Sarauk2sf
    Sarauk2sf Posts: 28,072 Member
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    It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that some foods are not healthier than others.

    It would be similarly ludicrous to suggest that someone cannot be HEALTHY and eat UNHEALTHY foods sometimes.

    However, a person cannot be HEALTHY and eat ONLY EXCLUSIVELY UNHEALTHY foods. (capitals for emphasis, not sass.)

    Here is my simplified example:

    Op said something along the lines of "I've hit my macros/micros for the day, why can't I have a donut?" No one is saying you can't. Go right ahead. Enjoy.

    But if donuts were ALL you ate, you'd get pretty sick pretty quickly even if you ate them within a calorie limit. Now, in the context of WEIGHT LOSS, you would still lose weight eating 1000 calories of donuts per day and nothing else. But you would also be hungry, iron deficient, calcium deficient, protein deficient, etc.

    If you eat a relatively balanced diet there is absolutely no reason you can't indulge in unhealthy treats. But suggesting that in the abstract a can of coke is as healthy as a bowl of raw kale is downright silly. I think most of the people suggesting this are trying to use semantics to make a controversial argument and fluff some feathers.

    Someone a while back brought up the recommend diet for women during pregnancy, and it was dismissed as "well that's one of the only times it is reasonable to consider those things." I understand pregnant women need a greater amount of certain nutrients, like folic acid, etc, but I don't understand the logic of dismissing the implications of eating a better diet during pregnancy. Think about it this way- if you wouldn't want it going into the body of your growing child, why would you want it going into your own body? My personal answer? I don't, but I'm still going to have treats occasionally when I want to.

    Also, and this is an aside to the main point, given that this is a weight loss website I think it is important to note that it is MUCH easier to overeat on UNHEALTHY foods for most people. Most (not all, but most) people to not become obese by eating a diet comprised solely of HEALTHY foods. That is something that I think deserves consideration in this debate.

    This whole debate is a little like saying the following: Is smoking healthy? NO. Can a smoker BE a healthy person? YES. What determines whether or not that individual ends up dying at a young age of cancer? Who knows, it is a toss up. Some smokers will live to be 100. But many of us feel like we'd rather not take the risk.

    How are you going to hit your macros/micros by eating only donuts?

    For that matter, you would have a pretty hard to explain how you do that by eating apples all day.

    No-one is suggesting that a can of coke is as healthy as a bowl of raw kale.
  • PRMinx
    PRMinx Posts: 4,585 Member
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    Hornsby wrote: »
    550 comments or so. I will never catch up.

    So my opinion...

    No one food is healthy or unhealthy. A complete diet can be healthy or unhealthy, but not one food. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong.

    Yes but, more importantly, would you rather eat only broccoli for one month or only Doritos?
  • PRMinx
    PRMinx Posts: 4,585 Member
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    JoRocka wrote: »
    ndj1979 wrote: »
    JoRocka wrote: »
    a month of broccoli?

    good lord- i would hate to be the plumber for THAT house!!! OIY
    Because it is extremely high calorie, high sugar, and high fat for little volume and not a great deal of nutritional value. To be honest I didn't choose the ice cream metaphor, and don't find ice cream to be nearly as unhealthy as, say, a can of coke, but in comparison to a bunch of kale YES ice cream offers less nutritional value.

    so much sadness and wrongess here.

    also this: kale vs ice cream?
    seriously?

    no questions- the kales' in the trash- it's rubbish awful food. You want to talk about 'unhealthy' anything that tastes that bad before you put int your pie hole should never be considered healthy- much less a "super food"

    PS Eff you women's health for making kale a thing.

    seriously. die.

    me thinks you are a closet kale lover...

    I've had it like 2-3 times and I cannot.even.

    between the fact it tastes so awful and the huge "OMGHERD kale" reaction people get all ga-ga for in health food circles- it makes me stabby.

    More than one person has told me that seasoned kale chips were a tasty alternative to potato chips. I guess I am naive, because I went out, bought some kale, rubbed it with oil, added my seasonings, etc., baked it for however long the recipe said (I don't remember), and you know what? It didn't taste like potato chips. It tasted like %$#^ kale!

    I don't know if I can ever learn to trust again.

    Anyone who compares kale to potato chips needs to GTFO. And I like kale. But they ain't no chip.
  • BigT555
    BigT555 Posts: 2,068 Member
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    Hornsby wrote: »
    550 comments or so. I will never catch up.

    So my opinion...

    No one food is healthy or unhealthy. A complete diet can be healthy or unhealthy, but not one food. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong.
    i just want to point out the irony here...
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    edited January 2015
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    Uhhh...wow. Setting aside the obvious 'healthy' and 'not healthy' aspect of asparagus versus pizza, 'healthy' foods are foods that do not harm your body.

    Seems a reasonable definition, except I'm not quite sure how a slice of pizza harms your body. Let's take my homemade pizza with wholewheat crust cooked in some olive oil, tomato sauce with tomatoes from my garden, lots of veggies, some olives (I love olives), cheese (but in moderation), and some lean ground beef with spices. (Hmm, I need to really make this.) How does eating this--especially just one slice as part of an overall balanced diet*--do you harm?

    Indeed, if we are going to play the "what if you only ate X" game, I'll eat the pizza and you eat the asparagus (my pizza has some asparagus, so I get both), and see who feels better in a month.

    *To be fair, make the pizza a commercial slice, say mushroom, black olive, and spinach. It's not great to eat tons of--high calories, low protein--but will eating a slice as part of an overall balanced diet harm your body? I really don't see how.
  • JeffseekingV
    JeffseekingV Posts: 3,165 Member
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    PRMinx wrote: »
    Hornsby wrote: »
    550 comments or so. I will never catch up.

    So my opinion...

    No one food is healthy or unhealthy. A complete diet can be healthy or unhealthy, but not one food. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong.

    Yes but, more importantly, would you rather eat only broccoli for one month or only Doritos?

    The main question is what is "healthy" to you/me? the doritos thing is a side discussion
  • PRMinx
    PRMinx Posts: 4,585 Member
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    PRMinx wrote: »
    Hornsby wrote: »
    550 comments or so. I will never catch up.

    So my opinion...

    No one food is healthy or unhealthy. A complete diet can be healthy or unhealthy, but not one food. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong.

    Yes but, more importantly, would you rather eat only broccoli for one month or only Doritos?

    The main question is what is "healthy" to you/me? the doritos thing is a side discussion

    I was making a joke. Lighten up, yo. It's only Tuesday.
  • Mr_Knight
    Mr_Knight Posts: 9,532 Member
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    My definition of "healthy" food is simple - does eating it in a normal serving amount cause me difficulty in meeting my macro and calorie goals? If the answer is yes, then I consider it "unhealthy".

    Of course, that can change over time and circumstance - the more active I am, the smaller the universe of unhealthy foods gets because there's just a lot more room for fun & games.

  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
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    PRMinx wrote: »
    Hornsby wrote: »
    550 comments or so. I will never catch up.

    So my opinion...

    No one food is healthy or unhealthy. A complete diet can be healthy or unhealthy, but not one food. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong.

    Yes but, more importantly, would you rather eat only broccoli for one month or only Doritos?

    Why the hell would I do either? I take it someone went to extremes somewhere in this thread. Imagine that. People who make those types of comparisons have 0 logic. They are ignored.


  • Need2Exerc1se
    Need2Exerc1se Posts: 13,576 Member
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    JoRocka wrote: »
    ndj1979 wrote: »
    JoRocka wrote: »
    a month of broccoli?

    good lord- i would hate to be the plumber for THAT house!!! OIY
    Because it is extremely high calorie, high sugar, and high fat for little volume and not a great deal of nutritional value. To be honest I didn't choose the ice cream metaphor, and don't find ice cream to be nearly as unhealthy as, say, a can of coke, but in comparison to a bunch of kale YES ice cream offers less nutritional value.

    so much sadness and wrongess here.

    also this: kale vs ice cream?
    seriously?

    no questions- the kales' in the trash- it's rubbish awful food. You want to talk about 'unhealthy' anything that tastes that bad before you put int your pie hole should never be considered healthy- much less a "super food"

    PS Eff you women's health for making kale a thing.

    seriously. die.

    me thinks you are a closet kale lover...

    I've had it like 2-3 times and I cannot.even.

    between the fact it tastes so awful and the huge "OMGHERD kale" reaction people get all ga-ga for in health food circles- it makes me stabby.

    I was raised eating kale and love it. But I also kind of hate that it's become a "superfood" too. The prices for it at the grocery are outrageous now.
  • JoKnowsJo
    JoKnowsJo Posts: 257 Member
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    Spinach is the now food again "over Kale" where have you people been? Thanks everyone for a great read... It made my day :D
This discussion has been closed.