Perception vs Reality

Replies

  • geneticsteacher
    geneticsteacher Posts: 623 Member
    I'm not surprised. The average American seems to equate healthy with the latest fad food. Granola bars are a good example of a food my nutrition students all rated as healthy, until we actually looked at the ingredients and nutrition facts for the bars - and these were all adult students, ages 24-60, returning to school to complete their bachelor's degrees in business.
  • ponycyndi
    ponycyndi Posts: 858 Member
    The teachers at my son's elementary school told him granola are "healthy". They are candy bars with puffed rice in them.

    But at our house, there are "good/bad" when it comes to food. It's just breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. Treats are eaten in reasonable portions, like everything else.
  • RoxieDawn
    RoxieDawn Posts: 15,488 Member
    I read this and then I got down to this part of the article"

    'We developed our list of foods in consultation with nutrition experts and Google search trends. Our public poll was conducted online by the Morning Consult and included 2,000 registered voters. You can read the full results here, with crosstabs here. Our survey of nutritionists was sent to the membership of the American Society for Nutrition, a professional group for nutritionists. Not every member completed the survey, but 672 nutritionists did. We view our expert survey not as a scientific measure of all nutritionists, but as a useful if imperfect measure of what foods professionals consider to be healthful."

    I have nothing to say after reading this part..
  • RodaRose
    RodaRose Posts: 9,562 Member
    The nutritionists are all over the place.
    Where does this leave a well-meaning but occasionally confused shopper? Reassured, perhaps: Nutrition science is sometimes murky even to experts.

    Your overall diet probably matters a lot more than whether you follow rigid rules or eat just one “good” or “bad” food.     Our colleague Aaron Carroll has published a list of common-sense rules for healthful eating, which represents a good start.

    We also asked our experts whether they considered their own diet healthful, and how they described it. Ninety-nine percent of nutritionists said their diet was very or somewhat healthy. The most popular special diet type was “Mediteranean”; 25 percent of our nutritionists picked it. But the most common answer, even for experts, was “no special rules or restrictions.”

  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,371 Member
    Eh I'm kinda surprised that whole wheat bread is so much up there... I mean, most whole wheat bread still has regular flour in it.

    And corn? I always thought it was considered a 'filler' that doesn't have much nutrition. Weird.

    Not surprised about orange juice and granola, considering all the sugar in them.

    Laughing at the coconut oil and all the people who think it's so healthy. Guess not?

    Don't you touch my kind bars and bacon though (but I don't get why Kind bars are rated lower than granola bars, considering that they have nuts...).
  • markrgeary1
    markrgeary1 Posts: 853 Member
    edited July 2016
    They never define "healthy", without a definition we're all talking about people's perceptions of healthy, not the(undefined) reality of what is healthy.

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