I've always found the various debates, fads, and gimmicks related to healthy eating interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the word "healthy" is problemat

I've always found the various debates, fads, and gimmicks related to healthy eating interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the word "healthy" is problematic due to its ambiguity. It means very different things to different people. If you're overweight, then it means whatever helps you lose weight. If you have high blood pressure, it means whatever helps you fight high blood pressure. If you're a bodybuilder, it means whatever helps you build muscle and burn fat. If you're an athlete, it means whatever helps you perform the best. For many people, it means whatever helps them live the longest. Or feel the best. Or look the best. In other words, it depends on your goals. Given so much room for interpretation, it seems downright irresponsible for anyone to write an article about healthy eating without making explicit their particular definition of "healthy". But alas, it happens more often than not, and no one seems to notice or care. Second, as far longevity and diseases go, diet is only one of many significant players. Among other things, our mortality is affected by our genes, macro and micro environments and exposure to various chemicals, exercise and physical fitness, medical treatment quality, stress, relationships, etc. It therefore stands to reason that there are diminishing returns to how your diet affects your life expectancy -- beyond a certain point, continuing to eat "healthier" will have a near-negligible effect on your health compared to other factors. And yet people remain obsessive about fine-tuning their diets based rumors and inconclusive studies, even as they continue to sit at stressful desk jobs for 9 hours a day in smog-filled cities. I wonder if it's because diet is (or, at least, seems) easier to control than competing factors? Or maybe it's that deliberately putting substances into our bodies all day every day is an intuitively health-related action?