The Myth of Healthy Foods

It’s liberating to realize that there’s no such thing as any one specific “healthy” or superfood, but rather that your best odds at living a healthy life is to eat as many diverse not unhealthy things as possible, and hope you did it right ten years from now.

This isn’t a great solution, and it would be great if we received more timely feedback and positive/negative reinforcement from our bodies (then again, maybe our bodies don’t plan very far ahead anyway). But until we figure out a better solution, there’s no sense in obsessing over making sure you take your daily dose of goji berries or spirulina because they’re touted as healthy. Just eat different things that are generally well known to not be bad for you.

Anything else, such as obsessing over one type of food (my mom likes to drink a homemade mixture of roasted cumin seeds, lemon and water every day because she says it’s “healthy”), is really just marketing and/or misinformation.

Variety is healthy.

Monotony is not.

Which probably explains why we sometimes get sick of the same food if we eat it every single day: our body wants us to change it up. This way it increases the chances of getting different nutrients that your conscious self might not even be aware your body needed.