4 ms·

Nobody said picking out healthy foods is hard. Anyone can point to some fruits, vegetables, rice, and boneless/skinless chicken breasts and say "those are healt

Nobody said picking out healthy foods is hard. Anyone can point to some fruits, vegetables, rice, and boneless/skinless chicken breasts and say "those are healthy". But this isn't about that. This is about comparing the relative nutritional value of foods that aren't as easy to categorize. Like trainers always say, the best workout plan is the one you'll do, and the same is true of diet. Most people won't be happy very long eating "Mainly plants. Not too much." They will inevitably deviate from that diet. That doesn't mean they'll have to eat unhealthy foods, but they will need a way to judge the relative nutritional value of foods that aren't "mainly plants" in order to make good choices. At that point, nutrition does become fairly complex.

smallnamespace 10y ago
Most cultures have a default regional/national cuisine that is time-tested, well-adapted to the local flora and fauna, and is reasonably healthy. That means most of the complexity gets elided -- just eat and cook however all your neighbors/family eat, and you'll be fine, because other people have done all the hard work of figuring out what works well. The most striking thing about America is how absent traditional food culture is -- how it's been progressively supplanted by industrialized food to the point where people are afraid to cook. One way to fix this is to pick a reasonably close cuisine and just implement it. E.g. decide that you really like to eat Italian, buy an (authentic) Italian home cooking recipe book. It will be more expensive, because we're not in Italy, but the combinations will probably be healthy.