'Healthy' and 'Unhealthy': food words to get rid of

When foods are packaged up or advertised, they can have some nutritional claims made about them.

They can be specific to certain nutrients.

For example: 'source of protein'; 'low in saturated fat'; 'high in iron'

There are certain numbers, certain quantities, that are required before making these claims.

For protein, the word 'source' can be used when the calories supplied by protein are 12% of the total calories provided by the food. 'High in protein' requires the energy supplied to be 20%. In the case of fat, a solid food must contain no more than 3g per 100g to be called 'low fat' and generally less than 1.5g per 100ml if it's liquid. When you start to think about foods that are increasingly higher in fat, that's where you can start thinking about that green-amber-red traffic light system that is on the front of (most) food packaging in the UK. There are categories for the key nutrients that have associations with poorer health - fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt - with a colour being applied to each depending on how much is within the food.

Random side-thought #1: is anyone questioning the precision of percentage thresholds when it is well documented that calorie labelling can be inaccurate by as much as 20%?! Are manufacturers aware that they could put a 'source of' or 'high in' label on something that's a few percentage points shy of being legitimate, but get away with it because they can't accurately state the calories? With calorie errors clearly being hard to mitigate (or we'd have it nailed by now), can anyone even check? I may look into this...

Foods that have a component seen as beneficial can often be marketed with this at the centre. Possibly a big star on the packet with 'High in X!' ( a 'good' component) or 'low in Y!' (a 'bad' component) written in it. This can be applied as a marketing trick to any food, designed to make it seem nutritionally better for you than it really is. This is called the 'halo effect' or giving a food a 'health halo'.

So, that's some specific stuff about nutrients. I want to get on to general terms and a particular thing that bothers me about them. Call it the entire point of this blog entry, if you like. You should, because it is the point.

Decent, considerate health professionals are careful not to refer to any food as 'unhealthy'. I'm a little bit old school on this topic, so I occasionally have to take a micro-pause just to stop myself saying it and say 'not nutritionally optimal' instead. It's just a bit more of a mouthful to say (pun intended, obviously). We can use the World Health Organisation's definition of health here: "health is not simply the absence of disease" (I have condensed this a little, but the essence is correct). The areas of health that they refer to - and that have to be considered - are the physical, mental and social. What I don't see so much of, are those same health professionals choosing alternative words for 'healthy'. Possibly because the word is just so positive and benign and good....?

More to the point (the point, finally!), I get annoyed by the marketing of 'healthy' desserts / cakes / biscuits etc.

Why do I get so annoyed by it? Because we are expected to be so careful with the use of 'unhealthy' because it's potentially harmful to a person's psychology. It could damage their relationship with food. It could make them feel like they are doing something wrong when they eat a certain thing. That same slap on the wrist isn't so quick to come when you talk about 'healthy' food.

So, if someone wants to say 'unhealthy', they're going to get scolded for not considering the emotional wellbeing of a certain demographic. But if someone says 'this is a healthy dessert' and another person gets annoyed by it, the person claiming 'healthy' can always fall back to

'how dare you?! This food is about joy and pleasure and making people happy, so you

can't stop me saying it's healthy, you insensitive brute!'

But, in reality, this may be a very calculated outcome for the 'healthy dessert' promoter. They have an emotional wellbeing shelter to hide behind that someone who utters 'unhealthy' does not. I believe that there are a large number of people out there that are making the statement fully aware that they are capitalising on people's lack of awareness that things like 'natural sugars' and 'healthy fats' do not have some special properties that override everything else about them. 'Let's throw a ton of dates, honey, coconut oil and activated* cashews in this thing and call it 'healthy'. If anyone has a problem with it, you know what to do.'

Even though we know (and you should too) that 'unhealthy' and 'healthy' can both be meaningless without an appreciation of the context in which they sit, these labels are both still out there.

I'm big on planning. I don't consider a takeaway meal a 'cheat meal' or a cake a 'naughty treat'. I eat them because my diet allows for them a certain number of times and in a certain quantity, before they start to take me away from my goals. I planned for their inclusion.

Oh, the photo is a bit of baking that I did. Chocolate brownies and some small banana and blueberry muffins.

My old-school mentality still wants to say the words 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' (look, I'm sorry, alright?!) but I am sure to remove them using the buffer that is in place between my brain and mouth. I only default to them because I genuinely use them to describe an overall physiological, nutritional categorisation. Letting other people use one term because they have a little virtue signalling but insincere hiding place is bullshit. There you go, a put a swear-word in right at the end. Is this the slippery slope? Is it fu-

*because soaking cashews in hot water is a game changer because, like, science