Episode Transcript
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Welcome to Nutrition For Mortals, the podcast that says life is too damn short to spend your time and attention worrying about your food choices.
So let's take a deep breath and join us, two registered dietitians and friends, as we explore the world of nutrition with a special focus on cultivating a healthy and peaceful relationship with food.
My name is Matt Priven, and I am joined as always by my co-host and the best dietitian on planet Earth, Jen Baum.
Hi, Jen.
Hello, good morning.
Good morning, how you doing?
I'm good, I'm super excited.
This is like our first full length episode.
I am very excited.
So what are we talking about today, Jen?
Yeah, so I'm really excited because we are going to be digging into a question that I think is really important.
And I think it's one that you and I come across quite a bit in practice.
And that is, are there really such things as good and bad foods, right?
So very often I'll have people come to me and I'm sure it's the same for you.
And they ask the question, is this food good for me?
Or is this food bad for me?
Or the other thing that happens quite often is that people are already doing that type of categorization when they are speaking about food.
So they may talk in terms of good, bad foods, clean foods, not clean foods, junk foods, healthy foods.
So I think today what we're really interested in is talking about whether or not this categorization is even necessary or helpful when it comes to food and nutrition.
Totally, yeah, you can kind of picture someone staring at a menu in a restaurant, thinking, what is the good choice?
What is the bad choice?
And just feeling kind of stuck in that decision-making process.
And so we're sort of asking the question, is this necessary?
Is this a worthwhile framing when we think about food?
And just to be really clear, we're not talking about is a food delicious?
Like, sushi is good, like that.
That's delicious.
It's so good, but that's a little different than what we're discussing today, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, I guess, what do you think people really mean when they say, is this food bad for me?
Or I believe this food is bad for me.
Yeah, that's a great question.
We've spoken, you and I have both spoken to so many people about how they feel about their food decisions.
And it seems to me that people mean one of three things when they categorize a food as bad.
First of all, they might mean that the food might be perceived as unhealthy or even dangerous for them.
Maybe they feel like a friend or a family member or a healthcare provider or the internet told them that the food was unhealthy, and so now they categorize it as bad.
The second thing I think people mean is is this food going to have an undesired effect on my body shape and size?
So, some people, many people worry about changes in their body, and they project that right on to every food decision that they make.
And so they feel like a food decision might be bad because they're concerned that it's going to influence their body in a way that they don't want it to.
Finally, the third thing I think people mean is am I simply going to feel guilt or shame for having eaten this food because it's violating some rule that I have for myself?
And if someone who's firmly rooted in this good and bad food model thinks a food is good, I think they might be communicating that they feel the food is bestowing some benefit upon them, maybe with their health.
But often I think it's more of this idea that the food simply didn't meet the criteria of being bad.
So it's deemed sort of safe to eat without worry or concern.
Absolutely, and I think we are, as human beings, very prone to categorization.
I think we like to have things placed into neat boxes.
And I think that's true when it comes to nutrition.
A lot of people are really wanting and craving to be able to place food into very neat check boxes and say, okay, I can eat these foods because they're good for me, these foods aren't good for me, and kind of leave it there.
But the truth is that nutrition is so much more complex than that, and while it would be amazing if we could place everything into kind of neat categories, just is really not the case when it comes to the nutrition science that we know about thus far.
Yeah, totally.
It's a unique problem because categorization has been so helpful in human history, being able to distinguish safe from unsafe.
Like, we're the best at that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're great.
We're like categorizing machines.
And for ever, we've had to distinguish between foods as being poisonous or not poisonous.
Right, spoiled, spoiled, or rotten, or not rotten and spoiled.
Yeah, which can be a fine line, you know, right?
And so we've gotten really adept at categorizing food, but now we're in this period of time where it's a little more abstract than ever before.
We're trying to make this decision about whether a food passes tests that are more conceptually challenging than just is this poisonous or not poisonous.
But it makes me think, where did this come from?
How have we been dealing with this?
How long have we been dealing with this?
So what have you found out about the history of this?
Well, I'm so glad you asked, Matt, because one of the things that I'm always...
It's almost like I knew we were gonna talk about this.
It's almost like you knew we were heading in this direction.
One of the things that I am always really fascinated by is how we got to where we are with food and nutrition.
And so I really decided to dig into the history of the language that's been used around food.
And so I'm totally gonna take you on a quick little history lesson.
And some of this stuff was fascinating to me, because even I didn't realize how far back some of this stuff went.
So when I was kind of going back in time and trying to figure out when good, bad language started to be used around food, I did something similar to a Google Timeline search.
And what that kind of showed me was that one of the first ways that food was categorized as bad was this idea of a cheat meal or a cheat food.
And that-
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
And that language actually was first used in the mid-1910s or so.
So we're talking-
Yeah, so we're talking well over 100 years ago, we started to have food being divided into good, bad categories.
Fast forward to about 30 years later, and in 1948, there was actually a article in the Utah Standard Examiner.
And this was actually a column written by a doctor.
People could actually write into this doctor, and he would answer questions.
His name was William Brady.
And there was actually a woman who wrote in because she was very upset that her daughter was eating, quote, more junk than food.
And I thought this quote from that 1948 article was so interesting because the doctor, Dr.
Brady, he writes, what Mrs. H, Mrs. H is the woman who wrote in complaining about her daughter.
Concerned mother.
Yeah, the concerned mother.
He says, what Mrs. H calls junk food, I call cheat foods.
This is anything made principally of, number one, white flour, or, number two, refined white sugar or syrup.
For example, white bread, crackers, cake, candy, ice cream soda, chocolate-malted, sundaes, or sweetened carbonated beverages.
What was so interesting to me is that this is a prime example of white refined carbohydrates totally being vilified, right?
Again, again, we're talking about, what, 80 years ago at this point.
And these, this is totally the type of categories we still see vilify today.
Totally.
So over time, how does this develop?
Because as time goes on, I'm sure it's a lot easier for messages about good or bad foods to spread throughout the culture.
So what comes next after the 40s?
Yeah, so the categories continue.
So obviously we still hear cheat meals, cheap foods, junk foods.
I found the earliest published reference for junk food after that 1948 article came from the Washington Post in 1973, where there was a big headline, how many children are going to fill up on junk foods and be too full to eat a nutritious lunch now.
So this continues to the present where we are today.
And one of the examples that I pulled out was a recent ad, I think that was released in 2010, 2011.
And I want to play it for you, because I think it's an excellent, more recent example of how language categorization around food, good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, has just been perpetuated continually in the media.
And we're just hammered with this information.
And so maybe you can cue that up and we can take a listen.
“Oh, cheesecake.
Okay, what if I just had a small slice?
I was good today, I deserve it.
Or I could have a medium slice and some celery sticks and they would cancel each other out, right?
Okay, I could have one large slice and jog in place as I eat it.
Or, okay, how about one large slice while jogging in place followed by eight celery?
Mm, raspberry cheesecake.
I've been thinking about this all day.
Oh, and you've lost weight.
Oh, yeah, thank you.
You're welcome.
Yoplait Lite, with 30 delicious flavors all around 100 galleries each. Yoplait, it is so good.”
Oh gosh.
So can you, Matt, will you, you know, because people are gonna be able to hear but not see, can you kind of set up the visual for this ad?
Oh, I'll paint you a picture here.
So this is obviously a Yoplait ad, and it is an office environment, and a woman is looking into a refrigerator at a beautiful cheesecake.
I like more cheesecake now.
I know, with raspberries on top, it looks so good.
And she's just, she's eyeing this cheesecake, and she's having this internal dialogue about whether she should or shouldn't eat this food, and sort of compensatory behavior she's gonna have to do, like walking it off in order to justify eating it.
And then somebody walks over and grabs a cheesecake-flavored yogurt, like light yogurt.
That's a totally good substitute for a piece of cheesecake.
Yeah, definitely.
No, it's awesome.
It's even better.
So she's, and then she says, oh, but you're eating this, and you've lost weight.
Of course, that woman just interprets that as a compliment and says, thank you, and walks away.
And then the credits roll.
So what was the fate of this ad?
Because this seems terrible.
Yeah, so this ad is a very extreme example of language around food, and it actually caused a ton of outrage.
NEDA, which is the National Eating Disorder Association, really pushed back against Yoplait, and actually got them to take down the ad, because NEDA really believed that this ad would be triggering to individuals who suffered from eating disorders, or that an ad like this could actually perpetuate disordered eating, which I do not disagree with.
Yeah, and I could see people listening to this going, well, what's the deal?
She was trying to just decide for herself if that was a good decision to make to eat the cheesecake or not.
And is it triggering all, people can't watch TV anymore because they're gonna be triggered?
I get it, I get it, but I think that the big point is that this is just injecting more of this good and bad food thinking into the culture, and just really solidifying that this is how people think about their food decisions as either good or bad.
And I think as we get further along in our conversation here, we're gonna talk about more reasons why that's a problem, and alternatives to good and bad food thinking.
And I think that's really where the gold is.
A lot of people feel like there's no other way.
We have to frame food to this way.
And I think that that's really the eye-opening moment for a lot of people is like, when they realize there's another way to think about food, then they realize how harmful that this framing about food actually can be.
Absolutely.
What this ad brought up for me is, this is a prime example of how many people agonize over each food decision that they're making throughout the course of the day, right?
So this is just one food decision for this woman in this ad, but for many people, they go back and forth in a very similar way throughout the entire course of their day, which could mean thinking about food 15, 20 times and agonizing over it every single time.
At least, right?
And so, you know, how unfortunate that we're at this place where, you know, the choice about whether or not to have a piece of cheesecake could make us feel so bad about ourselves or evoke so much anxiety.
So I totally wasn't going to bring in another ad, but now I want to, since we're talking about ads.
I was actually going to skip this ad, but I found one other amazing TV ad that I think is just incredible because it's from the 1970s.
And it's, again, a very early example of how language like good and bad is used around food.
So if you still have it, will you actually cue up the 1970s cream puff ad?
Yeah.
The way these cream cakes fault themselves, it's enough to lead a girl astray.
Oh my God, that is gold.
Okay, so give people like, describe the visual because it's so hard.
It's so hard.
You have to see it.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know what?
We're going to put a link to this in the episode show notes so everyone in the world can see this because this is the best thing I've ever seen.
So, this is a woman who is about to eat a fresh cream cake, and she describes it as enough to drive a girl astray, I believe she said.
And then a very patriarchal male voice comes in to say, naughty but nice.
Exactly.
Right.
So, funny and lighthearted to some degree, but also, if this grabbed the, in the 1970s, everyone's watching the same five channels, right?
And so, I'm sure a lot of people saw this ad, and a lot of people said, oh, I guess I'm being naughty if I eat a pastry, right?
And there's all sorts of like gendered elements to this.
The word naughty is just a little too much for me.
Yeah, it's like imbued with a lot of like, they're implying something, I feel like, I don't even want to know what they're implying.
Yeah.
But I mean, I guess, yeah, like another great example of how people, all of us, right, have been inundated with this language for well over a hundred years.
And so really, most of us have never existed in a time where language like good or bad or healthy or unhealthy or naughty or nice wasn't used with food.
Yeah, you like that?
That I brought back in naughty.
Let's keep hitting that.
Yeah.
But so, you know, so we've been saturated by it for a long time.
So it's no wonder that most of us tend to put foods into categories all the time throughout the course of our day, our week, our year, right?
It's like a nonstop process that's usually happening for most people in the background, right?
Almost like elevator music playing.
They are constantly just categorizing foods and trying to make choices based on those categories.
Yup, yup, even when you go shopping for food, when you're checking out at the register, there's like a hundred magazines there that are telling you about what food is good or bad or what's going to lead to weight gain or weight loss.
I mean, do you remember that like book series, Eat This, Not That?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, vaguely.
Was that like those like books with like the like big like block letter covers?
Yep, exactly, yeah, there'd be like two hamburgers from McDonald's, one's from McDonald's, and one's from Burger King, and this is the one that you should eat, and this one you shouldn't eat.
Right.
And it was always just a calorie estimation of like, this one's higher calorie, so don't eat it.
Choose this other thing that's lower calorie, right?
But it just permeates our culture in every way.
We're just being bombarded with what is the right decision and what is the wrong decision.
And I mean, it even extends to our profession of dietetics, you know, you and I are registered dietitians and the Academy that is the primary organization that represents us is the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
And their website is eatright.org.
I'll say that again.
eatright.org.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, they chose a domain name and a whole platform that's based around eating correctly as opposed to incorrectly, right?
And so you just can't escape it these days.
I think you make a great point.
And both the examples that you just gave, the eatthisnotthat and eatright.org, both of those are ultra guilt and shame provoking, right?
It goes back to this question of, will I feel guilt or shame for eating a particular food?
One of the kind of three criteria that you brought up in the beginning that people used to evaluate whether something is good or bad in their eyes.
And what's interesting to me is, how could people not feel guilty or ashamed for eating certain foods?
When we have examples like eatthisnotthat, I mean, that's like a shame book right there, right?
And even for eatright.org totally implies that you're doing something wrong if you're not eating, you know, quote unquote, right.
But I think one of the things that is really left out is context, right?
We have to consider context when we're thinking about food.
You know, one of the examples that I like to use is that I'm going to throw out two different foods, right?
I'm going to use kale, and I'm going to use fried chicken, right?
I think kale, obviously something that's typically perceived to be a good food, fried chicken often goes into that bad category because fried foods are bad, they're not good for us.
But the truth is, we have to consider context.
If for example, somebody has only eaten vegetables throughout the entire day, then if they're faced with the decision of kale or fried chicken at the end of the day, quite honestly, the protein, the carbohydrates that are going to come from the fried chicken are likely going to be more what their body needs.
And so we can't just pretend that context doesn't matter.
I think the other thing that tends to happen is that when people are making a decision about whether or not to eat something, let's take cheesecake, since that was in the Yoplait example, they're really making that decision almost like they're in a vacuum, right?
They're like, I'm focusing only on this one food in this one moment.
But it totally disregards that over the course of their day, you know, maybe they ate lettuce and then maybe they had rice and then maybe they had chicken and maybe they had, you know, I don't know, quinoa, right?
So they ate lots of other different foods.
But in that moment, they're face to face with one food.
And that can really be challenging because in that moment, they're not thinking about context.
They're just thinking about, should I have this one food that may be bad for me?
Yeah, I love the I love the example of, you know, kale and fried chicken, because, you know, just to drive that home a little more, I mean, yes, if you need energy, an energy rich food like fried chicken is going to provide that to you.
Also, if you've eaten a lot of vegetables that day, eating a bunch of kale might be unhealthy in the sense that it is just too much dang fiber for your body.
And now you're going to have some digestive discomfort, or you know, you're going to fill your stomach, and you're going to fill it with food that's not going to be energy dense, and it's going to be that much harder for you to sort of catch up on your energy demands later on.
And so, you know, in that context, absolutely, fried chicken is the good choice, the healthy choice, however you want to use that.
You know, it makes me think of another example that I like to bring up to really demonstrate context, which is pizza and caprese sandwiches.
Yeah, right, which sounds silly, but they're the same thing, right?
Like, dough, tomato, mozzarella, cheese, basil, maybe some basil in there, right?
And the ingredients are the same.
And people tend to think about these foods quite differently.
Like, so the context or the associations people tend to have with pizza is like, I've, you know, had a hard week, I'm tired, I'm just going to order a pizza and kind of give in.
And that's going to extend itself to the way that they eat.
And so they might eat more than they feel comfortable with.
There might be some sort of emotional eating or coping going on, that they kind of project onto the pizza.
And a caprese sandwich typically is just like lunch.
You grab it, you know, panera bread or wherever you go to grab a sandwich, right?
And it doesn't get all of that same, you know, framing and association that pizza gets.
And, you know, believe me, I understand there is a difference between the experience of eating pizza and a caprese sandwich.
I enjoy them both.
Pizza wins in terms of like deliciousness and satisfaction.
Yeah, I get that.
I totally get that.
But, you know, a couple points being, one, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, but pizza is so greasy.
The grease was in the mozzarella.
It just got cooked out when you baked it, right?
It's not, it really is the same thing.
I think the other thing people would think is, but I eat so much more pizza than I do caprese sandwich.
So that's what makes it bad.
And my response to that would be, that's not what we're talking about right now.
We're talking about the feeling you get when you think about that food.
And there's going to be some downstream effects on how you behave based on the associations you have with said food.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that gets into a much bigger aspect of this question, which is that most people, when they are applying or labeling food as good and bad, it goes far beyond that, right?
So I think what's happening is that people are ascribing morality to those foods.
So if I eat fried chicken, I'm bad.
I was bad that day.
And if I ate the kale salad, it was good.
I was good, right?
So it transcends the food itself.
And now it becomes a larger question of I'm a good or bad person because I've eaten X or Y.
Right, yeah, I love that point.
I mean, it really breaks this into two pieces.
There's the morality piece of it.
And then there's the separate healthfulness question, like is what I'm eating healthy or unhealthy?
And that's such a wise way to think about this because healthfulness is a science question, right?
That's a nutrition research question.
And so we have to separate that from the morality piece of this because nutrition science is evolving.
We're learning more over time, and sometimes we have research that conflicts with new research that comes out, right?
And so if it was simply about healthfulness, what you ate for lunch yesterday could be good until the study that was published this morning came out, and now it's bad, right?
And so that is a totally separate way of thinking about this.
And I mean, I think we probably both could come up with examples of nutrition research that has conflicted or evolved over the years.
Do you have any front of mind?
Yeah, absolutely.
So to me, the classic example of that is the egg, because of all the questions.
The lowly egg.
The lowly egg, because I get this question all the time from people, are eggs good?
Should I be eating eggs?
And it's no wonder that people are confused.
I found this great article that was called The 50 Year Rehabilitation of the Egg.
Great title, right?
Amazing title, right off the bat.
But the article really went back through some of the history of the nutrition science around eggs.
Just to give you a totally brief overview here, in 1968, the American Heart Association announced a recommendation based on the research of that time, right?
So this kind of decision is coming from the body of research that existed in 1968.
And the recommendation from the American Heart Association was that individuals consume less than 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day and have no more than three whole eggs per week.
Three whole eggs per week.
Okay, so based on the recommendation that we should eat less cholesterol because of the belief that cholesterol contributes negatively to cardiovascular disease risk, they took the leap into saying eggs are a source of dietary cholesterol, therefore keep your egg intake to three eggs a week and no more.
Correct, yeah, I think an egg, like a medium-sized egg, has about 200 milligrams of cholesterol.
So this was a piece of advice saying, try to keep your intake of cholesterol to less than 300 milligrams per day and no more than three whole eggs a week.
I have decided that I'm going to keep a list of sentences that I absolutely love when I'm doing research for this podcast, because one of the next sentences in this article was the following.
Determining how the 300 milligram per day number was chosen back in 1968 remains a mystery without a satisfactory answer, other than it was half of what the estimated cholesterol intake was at the time.
So I just like love the fact that like, they just came up with some numbers, they just divided it, came up with it, and just said 300.
There was no really science happening around making that choice.
It's the scientific equivalent of going, eh, split the difference.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly.
So here we are, 1968, eggs are bad.
Don't have too many, three a week max.
Okay, fast forward, right?
And then over the next, you know, 45 years, 40 years, something like that, more research is done, the body of literature grows around what we know about dietary cholesterol intake and how that impacts blood lipid levels, more research is done around eggs.
And in 2002, American Heart Association, again, right, we're back to the AHA, it actually dropped its specific egg restriction of three to four per week, while still keeping that 300 milligram per day of dietary cholesterol upper limit, right?
So, okay.
That's not confusing at all.
No, no, no, no.
So, this is saying, like, you can eat more than three to four eggs per week, because now eggs are, like, good again, kinda, but you still can't eat more than 300 milligrams per day of cholesterol, right?
Because cholesterol is bad.
Fast forward another 12 years.
Here we go.
It's the AHA again.
They come out and they say, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether lowering dietary cholesterol actually reduces LDL.
LDL is the cholesterol that typically gets the rap as the bad cholesterol, right?
And so, here they're making an announcement that they're not even sure whether or not dietary cholesterol impacts blood lipid levels at all.
Yeah, so the stuff in eggs that we were so worried about may not even do the thing we were worried it was going to do.
And so, we've come a long way from 1968 at this point.
Exactly.
And so, you would think that the story ends there and that eggs are finally good.
But don't jump ahead of yourself because this year, actually, beginning of this year, April or May, an article came out in Circulation that throws all of this into question again, where they did a meta-analysis and that seemed to indicate that cholesterol, including egg intake, actually increases risk of cardiovascular disease.
So, eggs are bad.
Eggs are bad again.
Cholesterol is bad again.
Eggs are bad again.
Yeah, it's all bad.
Yeah, it's all bad.
And here we are.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's no wonder, right, that it's so hard to interpret this information.
Even you and I, who are in the field, have to continually be monitoring what's going on, what's being published, how much evidence is there for us to actually make this recommendation.
But this kind of complex, convoluted example around eggs illustrates how we just don't know.
And that's super important to recognize, as you said before, right, nutrition is a very young science, right?
Compared to some of the other sciences, we are in the infancy of understanding nutrition.
And that can't be forgotten, because there's just often not enough evidence for you or I, or really anyone to say, yes, eating this food is purely bad, and you should never eat it again.
Yeah, absolutely.
And just so we don't leave our listeners with a fear of eggs and their healthfulness, I had three eggs yesterday.
Do you still eat eggs, Jen?
Oh my God, I eat eggs all the time.
Yeah, I eat eggs all the time.
And I think that was a good point for you to bring up, because I don't want people to be worried about eating eggs.
I think the example is more of an illustration about how we just don't know.
And eggs are a good source of protein.
They have a nutrient called choline, which is an essential nutrient that we really need.
They are an inexpensive source of protein, right?
So where other sources of protein can be much more pricey, eggs are typically less expensive.
So eggs are something that I encourage people to eat and enjoy and include in their diet and enjoy as a protein source or as a three-egg omelette if they want it.
Yeah, hell yeah.
And so what we're getting into now is the healthfulness side of it, but we were putting that in contrast to morality, right?
And so morality, I mean, that's like a religious question.
That's like asking, is stealing good or bad, right?
So when we ask, is a food good or bad, we're framing it also as a moral question.
And I think this is so helpful for even for me to be having this conversation, to put this in stark relief and say, yeah, that is a moral question that we're asking.
And a lot of us just have a reflexive answer of, is something good or bad?
We have a gut feeling.
And there's a lot of factors that lead up to that gut feeling about what's good or bad to eat, but it is a gut feeling.
And that is not based entirely on healthfulness and nutrition science.
It's just a reflexive answer, as if you were asking, is it okay to lie, or should we?
Thou shalt not lie, right?
And so, and the other thing it makes me think too, is there's a morality to how we think about body shape and size that can't be ignored in this conversation.
I spoke earlier about how one of the things people consider when they're asking, is a food bad, is this gonna have an undesired effect on my body shape and size?
Well, that also paints certain body shapes and size as morally unacceptable.
And I mean, I think I know you, Jen, well enough to know that you don't agree with that framing.
And I certainly don't agree with that framing, but it is a feeling and a decision making process that people engage in on a regular basis.
And I think it's important just to acknowledge that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think one of the goals becomes trying to see if we can separate morality from our food choices, right?
Because hopefully what we've illustrated so far in this episode is that there's not enough information, there's not enough research, there's just not enough data to even support viewing foods in this way.
And so beginning to start to separate the morality aspect from just the food choices you're making throughout the day is so key and central and helpful.
I think that's a great transition to talking about what are some of the real world problems with good and bad food thinking?
Because we've talked about how this permeates the culture, but let's just kind of get into the nitty-gritty here.
Like, why is this such a problem, really?
What are some examples of how this really manifests negatively for us?
Yeah, well, I think that the impacts of this type of categorization can be significant, right?
So I think when we're viewing foods as good or bad, I think it can increase the likelihood that someone will have a disordered relationship with food.
They may have something that we would call orthorexia, where they are making very, very extreme food choices based on their perceived healthfulness of that food.
It's essentially an eating disorder that evolves because people are trying to be ultra healthy about their food intake.
I think there's often a pretty restrictive aspect of engaging with food that can occur when people are viewing food as unhealthy or healthy or good or bad, right?
I think people tend to make really restrictive food choices, which can impact how much they enjoy food, how social they can be with people around food.
So I really actually think that this type of categorization can impact lots of different aspects of someone's life.
Yeah, it really interferes in people's lives in ways that maybe they don't even realize because they don't realize there's another way to view food.
They feel like this is inevitable.
And you mentioned sort of the restrictive nature of trying to be good and not bad with your food choices.
And I think for a lot of people, it leads to reactive eating, where every food decision is a response to whether or not they feel like they're being good or bad, or whether their previous food decision has been good or bad.
And so people tend to just ping pong back and forth between good and bad behaviors.
And so every food decision is so reactive, and it's really not made from a place of, what's going to make me feel good in my body?
What's going to give me energy?
What's going to be really satisfying to eat right now based on what flavors I've had recently and what might be really novel and interesting right now?
I mean, there's all these other ways to think about food, but when we're stuck in good and bad food thinking, everything is so reactive.
And this framing for food, it occurs to me, also gives corporations a big leg up, right?
Because when you start to frame foods as good or bad, you've created a problem, and now you can sell people a bunch of stuff, right?
I mean, we've all seen products that prey on our guilt and shame about our food decisions, right?
Like, one example I always laugh at walking through Trader Joe's is their reduced guilt line of products.
I haven't been in TJ's in a minute, so I don't know if it's still on the shelves, but there was like a reduced guilt mac and cheese, or like a spinach dip or something.
And it's like, really, that's the tool, the leverage you're going to have over your customer is you eat this and you'll experience less guilt.
We really become sort of at the mercy of corporations when this is how we frame our food decisions.
Right, from the corporation's point of view, it's a smart thing to capitalize on, right?
They're really pushing this narrative of feel better about your food choice by eating this mac and cheese versus the other mac and cheese.
And so from a marketing standpoint, it's really smart.
But the unfortunate piece is that we shouldn't be in a place where we're influenced to feel those strong negative emotions by having a bowl of macaroni and cheese.
Yes, absolutely.
And it has this paradoxical effect, I think, that people tend to overlook, which is when we ask ourselves the question, does trying to be good actually lead to more good behavior?
I think people have an internal and intuitive understanding that a lot of times it actually doesn't.
There's the paradoxical bad behavior, the sort of rebellious bad behavior of like, oh, I don't have the willpower or capacity to be good right now, so I'm going to be bad.
And then I'm going to continue to be quote unquote bad until I get good again on Monday or when this vacation's over, right?
Which really gets into this question of are your decisions being made from a place of not only permission to eat what you want, but unconditional permission, as opposed to conditional permission, where you've put conditions on yourself, saying, I can eat cheesecake if I'm on vacation or if it's the weekend or if I've been good all day with my food decisions, right?
But that's in contrast to unconditional permission.
So Jen, tell me, what do we mean when we say unconditional permission?
Yeah, so I think that's a phrase that you and I use a lot, and we really firmly believe in.
And it's essentially allowing yourself and giving yourself permission to really pay attention to what your body is asking for in a particular moment, listening to the cues that your body is giving you and making food choices based on your internal cues rather than what you and I would categorize as external cues.
So an external cue is anything kind of outside your own body that influences your food choice.
And those could be social media, it could be the packaging on Trader Joe's mac and cheese, it could be the number you saw on the scale.
Whereas unconditional permission to eat is really paying attention to the internal signals of your body and making choices based off of those, because I think you and I would both say that we believe our bodies are the best indicators of our needs in a given moment.
Absolutely, and that is potentially a controversial statement to make for those uninitiated in the concept of intuitive eating.
So I will just say, we're going to talk a lot more about intuitive eating and permission and the distinction between conditional and unconditional permission in the future, and really dig into this.
But I think that's a great way to set it up for the future.
The last point I just want to make on sort of alternative ways to think about food that doesn't use good and bad food framing is just trying to practice moral neutrality with food.
Looking at two foods, whether it's kale and fried chicken or whatever, you know, cheesecake, and I don't know, whatever the heck you want to put next to cheesecake, and just try to zap it of that emotional energy of this is the right choice, this is the wrong choice, this is good, this is bad.
And just look at them just as they are in the present moment, and you can ask yourself, what do I actually want to eat right now?
And that can be a really freeing experience for some people.
It can also be a really scary experience, I understand, for some people.
So we'll get more into some of these intuitive eating concepts in the future.
But Jen, you know how I mentioned earlier that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, their domain is eatright.org?
Yes, I remember that.
The thing I mentioned just earlier?
So it got me thinking, is there an eatwrong.org?
And what was your conclusion?
The domain is available.
So I have purchased eatwrong.org and written a little letter to the Academy based on some of the topics we discussed today.
So if you're listening to this, go check out eatwrong.org.
And let me tell you, all of this work we were doing today, sharing these helpful ideas with the people, really has my appetite going.
So you know what I'm in the mood for right now?
What are you in the mood for?
Fresh cream cake.
The best ad ever.
See you next time.
See you, Matt.
Nutrition For Mortals is a production of Oceanside Nutrition, a real life nutrition counseling practice in beautiful Newburyport, Massachusetts, where we provide individual nutrition counseling, both in person and online via telehealth.
Feel free to learn more about our practice at oceansidenutrition.com.
If you want to send in a show idea, you can email us at nutritionformortals.gmail.com.
Thanks so much for listening, we'll see you next time.
