Good Food, Bad Food, Who Knows?

You’ve probably heard about the changes to food guidelines that flipped the food pyramid, with more focus on protein and less focus on whole grains, among other things. As is often the case, I have a hard time with these broad categorizations, and thinking about it reminded me of an exercise I did a while back.

Good food or bad food?

The exercise was to look at certain foods and ask, is this good or bad? Some items to consider were chocolate, pasta, hamburgers, and a salad, but the answers weren’t necessarily straightforward.

Trying to pin these foods down brought to mind a Zen story about a Chinese farmer who had good luck, or maybe bad luck.

In the story, the farmer experiences a series of events that his neighbors all want to identify as good luck or bad luck. But the farmer refuses to agree, saying instead, “Bad luck, good luck – who knows?” Sure enough, something “bad” led to something “good”, and vice versa.

To me, it feels like that goes on all the time with food “experts”. For instance, eggs. At one point, eggs were considered horrible, but now they’re good. Or in earlier years, all fat was demonized, then some became good, and now some people wonder if saturated fat is even all that bad.

The world of nutrition, therefore, becomes very confusing and almost arbitrary. Who knows, indeed, if a food is good or bad?

Who decides what’s good or bad?

During the exercise, though, I realized that someone did know. Me.

That is, I know for myself, if I’m being mindful, how eating a certain food affects me physically. My decision of whether a food was good or bad, therefore, was not based on nutritional content or what others claimed. Instead, my answer came from two things.

One was whether I thought the food tasted good, and the other was considering how it made me feel physically.

For example, one of the images was of a burger, fries, and a big cup of a mystery drink, presumably soda. I’m not a big soda person, but sometimes I like a little, so I considered that neutral.

The burger and fries, though, if done well, could be very tasty, so on that front they were good – but only in moderation. Too much would sit heavily in my stomach and make me queasy.

Find your own answers

But I can only answer those questions for myself, and it can also change over time, which is what makes the good and bad approach so tricky.

Instead of trying to put things in these black and white boxes, I’d encourage everyone to pay attention to their own body’s needs, so we can all make up our own minds about whether something is good or bad – for ourselves.