Healthy Eating Confusions

Are we sure we know what healthy eating is? Do you eat foods or nutrients?

Let's start with this question: What's wrong with these honey products? "Tortilla with natural honey added", "Honey coated cereal", "Chocolate honey brownies", "Orange juice with Omega3", "Candies enriched with vitamins", "Bread fortified with DHA", "Energy drink with natural herbs", and the list goes on without an end.

Perhaps it's not a matter of right or wrong, but they do bother and set me thinking about the kind of foods we are drawn to today.

By throwing in just one healthful element and brandishing them on the packaging, these "enriched processed foods" seem to have made a huge leap in elevating their less healthy, less desirable status. Ironically, as consumers become more educated about natural food and yearn more for healthier choices in their diet, food manufacturers at the same time become more aggressive in marketing their processed, refined foods, leading to a lot more deception and misconception about wholesome, functional foods than ever. The craze for health food is somewhat accompanied by even stronger but awfully questionable marketing and advertising efforts. What a paradox!

Question how much value these healthy additives would add to the quality of highly processed foods. In fact by bingeing more of these foods than usual because of their healthier, more appealing propositions, consumers are actually putting themselves on an even more erroneous path of eating.

This may sound ridiculous, but when it comes to healthy eating, apparently many of us have moved away from the idea of eating "foods" and become much preoccupied with eating "nutrients" by faithfully popping a vast array of supplement pills by the handful - Vitamin E, protein, zinc, beta carotene or whichever newest nutrient that becomes most popular. Perceive and eat foods whole, don't mentally deconstruct them and reduce every food to just one essential nutrient. When eating an orange, think of the goodness of the fruit you are benefiting and not just Vitamin C. And when eating honey, appreciate the goodness of the natural sugar, and not the just the energy-giving carbohydrates you are gaining. In this way, we wouldn't tumble and fall easily into the nasty trap of believing that sugar-laden, highly refined cereal is great for our body just because food labels say "it's a great source of fibre and studies have shown that fibre can significantly reduce the risk of cancer".

End of "Healthy Eating Confusions" Back to "Back to Get Started on Healthy Diet".