Are there “good” and “bad” foods?
Today’s post comes from Matt Priven, MS RDN
Modern conversation about food often describes certain foods as “good” while others are deemed “bad.” This often gets transferred on to the individual who is either being good or bad for a food decision they are making.
“I was bad last night because I ate [insert food here] for dinner, so I’m going to be good and just have some [different food] today.”
But what do we really mean when we invoke these labels? Having spoken to literally thousands of people about their views on food I can tell you that most people are asking themselves one (or more) of the following questions when they are determining if a food is bad :
Is this perceived by others (friends, family, social media, a healthcare provider) as an “unhealthy” or “dangerous” food?
Do I feel that this is a food that will have an undesired effect on my body shape?
Would eating this food make me feel guilt or shame (even if I’m not sure why)?
Foods that are labeled as “good” pass the above test. They may be perceived as healthy or “clean.” Crucially, they don’t sound the anxiety siren around fear of weight gain or other undesired body changes.
In answering the big question here I think it’s important to separate out a discussion of healthfulness from a discussion of morality.
To touch on healthfulness for a moment, let’s remember that nutrition is a young and evolving science. We are indeed learning certain lessons about which foods promote aspects of our health. However, we still have a lot to learn and some really fundamental questions are still being asked about what healthy eating even is. But this fact doesn’t stop most people from feeling confident in knowing intuitively which foods are good and which are bad, which brings me to morality.
Whether we know it or not, we are often guided by morality when we label foods as good or bad. ‘Is a donut a bad food?’ is like asking ‘is stealing a bad behavior?’ We turn to a felt sense of rightness and wrongness, of sin and holiness, that relies necessarily on a binary, black and white framing of the universe.
We also can’t deny the moral question at the heart of our concern about the effect of a food on our body shape. When we catastrophize and worry about the weight we are going to gain by eating a donut we are once again revealing a moral judgment: that weight gain is bad and not gaining weight is good.
Now I could write for days about the problems with our modern consciousness about food (and bodies) and how to move towards a richer way of living. But I want to wrap this short-form blog post up with some questions for reflection. Really try to think about your answers fully and dig deep into any initial gut responses you may have.
If you didn’t label foods as good or bad, how would your eating change? Next week? Next year? Ten years from now?
If you gave up the black and white framing about good and bad foods, what would you be losing exactly?
If you no longer feared weight gain when making food choices, how would your life be different?
How do you determine if you’ve been good or bad, aside from your food choices? What about the behavior of others?
Do the guardrails you’ve erected to guide your food decisions actually serve their intended purpose?
And finally, If you’d like to explore your own relationship with food in depth, you are welcome to reach out for personal nutrition counseling with a member of our team.
For more on this topic, check out the Nutrition For Mortals podcast episode “Are there actually good and bad foods?”