The NY Times surveyed Americans and a panel of nutrition experts about which foods they thought were good or bad for you. Everybody agreed that apples and carrots are healthy food. Everybody agreed that soda pop and cookies are unhealthy foods. Where the experts and the generic public disagreed is where things got interesting. Check out the graphic below, in which I have altered the original a bit (click to enlarge):
Although the NYT did not say this, I would label the foods that were considered healthier by the general public than nutritional experts as heavily-marketed and usually branded. These are foods that businesses would like you to think are much healthier than they really are. This would include granola bars, coconut oil, frozen yogurt, SlimFast shakes, and highly-processed orange juice. You often associate them with a specific brand like Nature Valley granola bars or Tropicana orange juice.
Along the same lines, I the foods that were considered healthier by nutritional experts than the general public are under-marketed and under-appreciated. These include quinoa, tofu, sushi, hummus, and shrimp. Not surprisingly, these items are less processed and I can’t even come up with a brand for quinoa or tofu. Sabra for hummus, I suppose.
Finally, hovering in the 50% range for both groups are things like steak, pork chops, whole milk, and cheddar cheese. These seem to be the “not junk food, but only eat in moderation” category.
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Am I missing something? Butter is mentioned in the text description of the “???” circle, but it’s way outside it.
Good call on the marketing vs. non-marketing.
The ambiguous circle drives me nuts in my household. Clearly steak is better for you than pizza, right? Yet it’s always a struggle to get my husband to understand why steak and a side of vegetables with butter on it is a healthier dinner than ordering pizza.
Make the pizza at home rather than order it. Honestly lot of folks say no time for cooking but then have to watch TV, play with their phones and what not.
There’s a lot of general food confusion here as well, even on the part of the nutritionalists. Granola and oatmeal in their retail forms are relatively close to each other by ingredients aside from Granola having nuts that are usually considered healthy – this is because the oatmeal the majority of people eat has tons of sugar. Granola even tends to have honey where oatmeal uses processed sugar. Peanut butter has also been shown to be not that healthy, and again, that which most people eat has excess sugar. Orange juice is, quite simply, not healthy (very high sugar content, no-low fiber, low relative nutritional value), and the fact that 60% of nutritionalists still tout it as healthy is disturbing.
Some of the items at the very top made me think that this ranking is also very american and based on the historical pushes by the FDA/USDA – milk, whole wheat bread, eggs, chicken, turkey, corn – even steak being as high as it is. You certainly wouldn’t see this same pattern in other countries, and it would be very interesting to see how that varies by region.
This is interesting, and just shows that even the “surveyed” nutritionalists don’t all know what they are talking about. This makes me question the whole thing. Coconut oil is one of the healthiest fats out there. It may be highly marketed, but a) I personally buy no particular brand, only quality, and b) it’s also highly nutritious, and even healthier than olive oil because olive oil degrades quickly and becomes harmful when heated too high. Coconut oil is much better for cooking because it can tolerate higher heat. The nutritionalists that do not know all of this need to go back to school, especially with the amount of research that’s been released lately on the benefits of coconut oil, and the fact that most commercially available olive oil, unless it is truly organic from a reputable brand is actually cut with canola oil, which is very harmful. Also, butter should be way higher on that list and orange juice might as well be next to the can of soda. I agree with the points that Dev made as well.
Well said. When I saw skim milk as an “under appreciated health food” I knew something was off.
Nutritionists aren’t scientists or public health experts or medical professionals, they are merely people taught what is “healthy” by their school in order to get certified. That is, nutritionists know the guidelines, so if the guidelines aren’t right, the nutritionists are wrong. The guidelines said for years that cholesterol was bad, fat was bad, and sugar and carbohydrates were what we should be eating, and what we got was skyrocketing obesity and Type 2 diabetes. While the guidelines still shun them, the evidence that people need to watch their saturated fat is also now widely understood to be based on poor science. Same with salt restriction (at least for most people). In general, Jonathan’s mantra to eat at home with food you make that is less processed is good advice, although I think that also means avoiding industrial seed oils and when eating animal products, pay for ones that lived outside on a more natural diet (i.e. pastured). But check out Good Calories, Bad Calories or Big Fat Surprise for a great primer on skepticism of nutritional authorities. P.S. Great post.