As with all health food advice, your mileage may vary.
Reddit user, u/icetea_69, wanted to know what we should eat more of when they asked:
What "unhealthy" food is actually healthy? (serious)
Reddit Users Share Their Best 'It's A Small World After All' Experience
It's All In The Preparation
Sometimes the food itself isn't unhealthy, sometimes its all in how you prepare it. Turns out when you douse your food in a liter of butter and a barrels' worth of salt it'll lead to bloaty, dreary results.
They Can Be Fun...Or Healthy, I Guess
Tacos can be very healthy depending on what you put in them.
I came here to say tacos. Living in mexico, everyone always talks about tacos like junk food. Like i wanna loose weight, no more tacos orno more tortillas. But they can be part of a very balanced and healthy meal.
Keep It Above Butter Level
Popcorn is overall a pretty low calorie snack as long as you don't drown it in too much butter and salt
Lean Ground Beef And Fresh Ingredients, There's Nothing Better
A burger.
Not a fast food type but a good burger with fresh ingredients is a mighty fine and healthy meal. Protein, bread, lettuce, onion, tomato.
When People Don't Understand What's In The Food
We don't understand a lot of what's in our food. This comes from a constant stream of diet fads and online "health gurus" shouting at us for our attention. Do the research yourself, look at what's in it and what ti does, and make the choice for yourself.
Mmm, Crispy And Slow Roasted....
I know most people already know this, but Pork belly is healthy. I'm no doctor, so I'm not going to attempt to explain why animal fat and cholesterol are actually healthy for you, but there is growing evidence that it's an essential part of the diet. I keep salted pork and non cured pork belly in the fridge at all times, not to mention lard. Instead of using vegetable/soy oil I use pork fat in my cooking.
Ghee Is Putting Olive Oil On Blast
Ghee.
I remember some millennials making faces and turning to subpar olive oil just to seem westernised. Ghee is healthy in small amounts, just like real olive oil. But way better than hydrogenated oils. It won't make yoj unhealthy if you have like 1-2 tbsps/ day.
Fats Are Energy
Well fat in general gets a bad rap... but it's pretty universally agreed upon these days that there are a lot of healthy fats that are important for brain function and do not "make you fat". Also, foods that have these fats may be seen as "unhealthy" to someone on a restrictive diet because they are high in calories, but in fact are super healthy! I.e. avacados, walnuts, flax seeds...
Eating fats alongside vitamin-rich foods (in particular fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K) can improve absorption of those vitamins. To get the most of your multivitamin supplements, they should be taken with a meal, and they will be most effective if that meal has sufficient oil in it to promote absorption of the fat-soluble vitamins. The water-soluble ones will be absorbed pretty easily since we're mostly water anyways.
Who Doesn't Love A Good Potato?
Potatoes get a bad rep because they're "full of carbs" and, of course, how most people tend to eat them. But they're actually a very good way of helping to lose weight, and have most of the nutrients you need.
Potatoes have an incredibly high "satiety index": that is, how full you feel after eating them.
If you plot the satiety index, you'll see a pretty straightforward linear relationship (those high in sugar tend to have a very low index, which is why you can scoff a tub of ice cream and still feel hungry afterwards). There's one massive outlier: the humble boiled potato:
https://nutritiondata.self.com/images/help/fullness-factor.png
Importantly, this is only true for boiled or baked potatoes. Chips score much lower on the satiety index (less than a ¼ of the boiled potato).
If you are trying to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, replacing pasta or rice with a boiled or baked potato is a very good to go about doing it. Its much cheaper than all those diet drinks etc.
When The Best Stuff Is Also A Benefit
Isn't it a treat when the stuff you really want to chow down on all day turns out to not be as bad as you thought?
Well, still, eat an appropriate amount and you should be fine. No one's saying have 15 bananas a day.
It's Food On A Stick. You Can't Beat That.
Chicken doner kebab with herb dressing. It's just chicken meat grilled on vertical rotisserie, so all the fat just drips down and it's served as a tortilla wrap with a big pile of salad veggies and some yoghurt dressing.
"When I was a lad I ate 4 dozen eggs, every morning to help me get large."
food science has more or less squarely determined that eggs are amazing little nutrition bombs and that the idea that eating a serving of eggs is like pouring concrete into your veins was utter f-cking rubbish and kind of terrible science.
People still think they're horrible for you thanks to a decades-long history of them being demonized by fad diets.
Maybe Don't Add So Much Flavored Creamer Too, Huh?
Coffee. It often gets a bad rep ...but, along with increasing metabolism for weight control and can increase adrenaline for athletics and/or for clearer thinking...& much more...Did you know that many of the nutrients in coffee beans make their way into the finished brewed coffee. A single cup of coffee contains:
Riboflavin (vitamin B2): 11% of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI).
Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5): 6% of the RDI.
Manganese and potassium: 3% of the RDI.
Magnesium and niacin (vitamin B3): 2% of the RDI.
That doesn't sound like a big nutritional supplement, but...since most people drink several cups per day — these amounts quickly add up.
An Apple A Day And All That
Bananas. Sure it's 100+ calories, but the fiber helps with sugar release. Same with other sweet fruits. Saying the fruit as a whole is bad due to "sugar" makes the fallacy of saying all sugar is the same. It's not. The sugars in whole fruit get released slowly and steadily in the bloodstream than simple sugars, even though they are both sugars.
Dark Chocolate For Everyone!
Dark chocolate. The darker the healthier
Diabetic here. Sugar free chocolate is trash and literally has laxative in it--but 90+ dark chocolate works great for me. It's a pretty easy choice :)
In Moderation, People. Moderation.
Peanut butter! Criticized for being high in fat- but is also super high in protein and an important part in a lot of people's diets.
Peanut butter is healthy, but is super caloric. The serving size for peanut butter is deceptively small and that's where it can become unhealthy if you have too much
Remember: Everything in moderation. Nothing is truly "unhealthy" for you, so long as you keep in mind that overdoing it on anything can lead to weight gain. Be mindful of what you're eating and, above all, enjoy it.
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