To think there is a poor understanding of a healthy diet?

I’m sure we all know brown rice is healthier. Just because other countries eat a lot of white rice means very little as they add plenty of veg and fish ( for example ) to their generally healthier anyway diets.

An issue with brown rice if an awful lot is eaten is the arsenic in it which is on the rise due to many polluting factors. Health line note we would have to eat a lot of it though.

The excerpt quoted from Diabetes UK earlier was somewhat selective by the OP.

Diabetes UK also say ”Some people eat fruit infrequently, but have larger portions when they do eat them, which can mean the carbohydrate portion in one sitting is quite high. It is easy to consume a lot of dried fruit, grapes and tropical fruits in one go, for example, and this can have a bigger impact on blood glucose levels.”

They also warn that you need to spread out fruit intake over the day, and to be wary of smoothies or dried fruit.

A lot of their information about cutting out sugar is suggesting people cut out refined sugar sources first. My DM was recently diagnosed as diabetic and I can tell you now, she was advised to be careful with her fruit intake (she likes satsumas, grapes, and pineapple - all very sweet!)

@BIWI has been a fantastic font of knowledge on the dieting board and absolutely knows her stuff. And also, she doesn’t lecture people….

I switched to low carb/keto and the difference in my body is remarkable. Not just the weight loss - I’m no longer bloated and my ankles/legs have stopped swelling up and retaining water. It happened literally overnight, before I lost any weight.

I have discovered my body is so much happier with fewer carbs and little/no sugar.

The diet you suggest OP would have be puffing up instantly and feeling sluggish, bloated etc.

I appreciate you’re passionate about the subject OP but nutrition is nuanced and there are various ways to eat healthily. What is healthy for me might not be right for someone else, and that’s ok.

I agree but
Re your last paragraph .
Do people constantly need to be spoon fed though. My cooking sounds a lot like yours. Lots of stews with veg and different beans etc
I didn’t need to be told how to cook these though. I looked it up for myself or just experimented with flavours.
My sons came back from Morocco and loved their tagine dishes so I looked up the basic spices and added those to make a whole new type of stew for us.

I don’t think we can keep blaming others for our own failings. If people don’t cook it’s probably because they just aren’t that interested.

^^

That's all true, @TempestTost, and it's all part of the reason some kind of basic, common-sense food education would be desirable. For instance, lots of young women buy burgers, cooked or frozen, because they believe it takes special knowledge to make them. Mate, you just squash a handful of mince and then fry it!

I'm a good but very, very lazy cook (I have a health-related excuse) on a restricted budget. There's no way I'd make that soup described upthread but it doesn't take much time or money to throw some frozen veg/tinned tomatoes in with whatever I'm making. Slow cookers are the lazy cheapskate's saviour. Most exotic dishes are just stews or fry-ups with different seasonings, there's no real need for sauces in jars or overpriced meal kits.

Sure, properly prepared international or designer dishes are better - and there's a world of enjoyable, healthy 'real' food in between that and factory-made fillers. It's possible to make a wide variety of well-balanced dinners that take less than 40 minutes to make and don't cost much. I know, I've been doing it for years; I just wish everybody knew their own personal version of the same. They can't if no-one tells them, though.

Absolutely great article and in terms of cancer lots of research on the benefits particularly of
broccoli and
heated tomatoes

but thats an aside. It’s worth noting that an obsession with everything that goes into our mouths creates exactly that…..an obsession
this in itself can cause stress
which
can support the growth of cancer
So really it’s about doing what we can but eating a piece of cake or a donut is not always the big deal that articles sometimes suggest when obsessing about it can do more harm

Sorry OP, but you are coming across as preachy and holier than thou.

I prefer to eat simple foods, much like my parents and grandparents did, with treats to add some joy, rather than stick to a restrictive - and often expensive - diet. They lived to their mid/late 80s with minimal health issues, at the same time enjoying what they ate and not obsessing over everything being "healthy"

Oh, not ANOTHER thread about food and eating! So tedious!

Personally I’d say your pulse and veg quota is low.
Other countries recommend 10 portions min with no minimum or maximum on pulses.

Seeds also can be all types
Other things like using olive oil ( tbsp min a day etc )

Lots of people know all this but many ( most ) people chose to eat what they enjoy which often is not the above.

Nuts make me sick so l cannot eat them. The non-nuts, peanuts and coconuts will make me nauseous by their smell alone - l am very intolerant to them. They may be very healthy but not for me. In my family, we tend not to eat as much fruit as we should but we eat lots of vegetables. Surely this is enough.

I think there are a lot of mixed messages around food, not just in terms of diet advice, plus a lot of lifestyle pressures.

In terms of pressures, many people just don't have much time. People no longer go to bed with the sun, and stay up late snacking, people live in their cars and eat on the road, people don't get enough sleep.They make so many decisions in the day they have no energy for more. All contribute to cutting corners.

And then, we treat cooking real food like it's complex. We expect a ton of variety in meals, for example. Our ancestors ate less processed food, but realistically, their diets were often pretty similar every day with changes relating mainly to food availability. You didn't cook the same food ten differernt ways, you had one or two methods. if you were taking a lunch in your pocket, it was probably the same thing every day. People didn't expect food to be exciting or exotic or creative for the most part.

Cooking real food is a lot more intimidating and takes more energy when you think you need it to be those things.

I agree with you (and the majority in the poll) OP. Similar to the advice here
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/diet-and-cancer/what-is-a-healthy-diet

I think most people DO know what constitutes a healthy diet, it’s just cake is infinitely more yummy than a salad.

I agree, but based on the OPs diet and her apparent strong focus (obsession) on nutrition, I doubt she would allow herself to indulge in cake unless of course she had carried out a thorough analysis of it first and she was absolutely sure it passed nutritional requirements / standards

michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

I agree most people do know, @mondaytosunday, but I don't know what 'most' constitutes. A surprisingly high number of people think stuff like low-fat, flavoured yoghurts and (industrial) coleslaw are healthy foods. I don't quite get how they've remained stuck in the 1980s, given half of 'em weren't even born then. I can only surmise it's the result of advertising - but manufacturers are no longer allowed to claim foods made of additives are 'healthy'.

It feels rather cruel to shoot them down when they've made an effort. We could probably do with some mass-coverage PSA advertising on diet - and many other things, come to think of it. But that kind of expenditure isn't compatible with the current state of our economy 😢

There are tons of blogs, videos and books, etc, talking basic common sense. There are even more talking bullshit, unfortunately. I'd count OP's strangely prescriptive announcements among the latter. At least it forms part of an ongoing conversation, I guess!

"Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." This is really all anyone needs to know. Food in this advice means what you great grandparents would recognise as food, so not ultra processed.

Not convinced,
Posting lengthy posts about nutrition at almost 2am iis hardly normal behaviour, I think you need to think a bit more about your behaviour as you do seem to have an unhealthy obsession

I think you'll find that people across the world, in very different climates, thrive with differernt diets.

Hi, sorry if I'm misunderstanding but is it something else that you're referring to and not HbA1C? Because a normal A1C is 6.5 and below.

I like nuts but am trying to lose weight and find it hard to stop at one small portion.

I have spent the last 15 years trying to lose two stone + and eat a nutritious diet, and I've always done lots of exercise - unfortunately it's purely quantity not quality when it comes to weight loss and I simply couldn't just eat the tiny amounts required to lose weight for long enough. I'm now takjng mounjaro and can actually manage to eat fewer calories.

Funny this comes up now.

Yesterday we had a health lecture on work facilitated by an actual medical doctor with a Fellowship in Endocrinology and Diabetes from the UK. She did not say that eating fruit was bad but she did say that it does have the same impact on your blood sugar as any other sugar. Of course, the fibre in fruit does somewhat mitigate the spike and can lower its glycemic load but when it comes to things like mangoes, bananas and pineapples, for instance, they are simply too sweet to be consumed in large amounts to be considered healthy.

Minimum three portions of fruit? Never heard of that. I thought seven (up from the old five) portions of fruit and veg with fruit being NO MORE than three. And variety is key. Eat the rainbow.
Many people can’t tolerate seeds.
Wholefoods is important - the less processed the better.
I think most people DO know what constitutes a healthy diet, it’s just cake is infinitely more yummy than a salad.

You sound very much like you could have orthorexia, have you considered this

Thanks, OP, and at least I agree with you on the fibre/bread/doughnut question!

You may have some idea how much I WISH doughnuts were nutritionally identical to wholemeal bread ...