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I like fruit. I like pastries. I eat plenty of fruit and the occasional small pastry. This is a perfectly healthy, balanced diet. Sure, I could choose to never
by gmac 1y ago
I like fruit. I like pastries. I eat plenty of fruit and the occasional small pastry. This is a perfectly healthy, balanced diet. Sure, I could choose to never eat pastries (or to eat pastries with half the sugar in), but the overall effect would be to lower my happiness.
Your approach strikes me as the sort of dietary absolutism that is actively damaging to public health.
The salt thing is a case in point. Perhaps it's theoretically true that we could all learn to enjoy our food with less salt. But this would be very hard, and I'm not convinced that an ordinary amount of salt is very damaging to health (except in the case of some specific health conditions that most people don't have).
But many schools in the UK take your approach: kids get taught to cook meals with no added salt (and also the bare minimum of fat). Everything they make therefore tastes bland and tedious.
The result? These kids don't learn to love cooking or home-cooked food. Instead, they learn that the way you eat food that tastes good is to order it from restaurants and fast food outlets. This is much more expensive and much less healthy than cooking at home using a reasonable amount of salt and fat, and it's a public health disaster.
- lelele 1y agoI'm with you: salt and sugar are the scapegoats of a bad diet.
- Pooge 1y agoThen, in your opinion, what qualifies as a bad diet? You just removed the two biggest factors.
- lelele 1y agoA poor diet is typically one that includes *excessive* amounts of sugar or salt. I agreed with a comment that endorsed sugary foods as occasional treats and salt as a way to enhance flavor. Sugar and salt are inexpensive ingredients that make highly processed foods more appealing, often leading to over-consumption. This not only displaces more nutritious options but also contributes to their negative reputation and, over time, they have come to be seen as unhealthy in any amount. Sugar, in particular, is sometimes portrayed almost as a poison.
- Pooge 1y agoIt tastes bland because our taste buds have adjusted to our salt consumption. I eat with no added salt and my food tastes just fine since I adapted. Over-salting is one of the causes of the most common way of dying. I couldn't say for sure because I don't go to restaurants a lot anymore, but it's not rare to see people salting their dishes without even tasting them beforehand.