As a really good and specific example of a “good food” that is meaninglessly “good”, let’s use “high-fiber” food.
There is widespread agreement among people who study heart and digestive tract disease that “fiber” is healthy, and this has been known for a very long time. After 15+ years of doing my own research on fatness, diet, and digestive conditions with extreme skepticism, I fully believe it to be true that eating a diet that contains a generous amount of foods called “high fiber” is beneficial, but it depends RADICALLY on what you mean by that term.
So what does it mean? Nobody agrees. Has ever ageeed. The various bodies responsible for defining it, describing what it does, and deciding how or if food is labeled as such, and the scientists who have studied it again and again and again do not even agree on what “fiber” is. Like. Literally. There are multiple ways to define it, they change often, and they can be wildly divergent.
Unfortunately some of those definitions include and even recommend forms of “fiber” that are disastrously intolerable and irritating to my gut.
Clearly, eating those forms is not healthy for me, or the hundreds of millions of people worldwide with IBS. Yet I’m pushed to eat “fiber” by every site, pamphlet, and doctor whose opinion I have to tolerate, with virtually no guidance as to what is actually meant by that.
It’s only in the past few years I have seen patient literature talk about the difference between soluble and insoluble fiber, one of the more useful and less technical, easily teachable differences. The difference can mean not being able to eat without excruciating pain. It doesn’t even go into the other substances that can now be considered fiber – fuck you to death inulin – and thus surely “good”, which are often absolutely horrendous for people like me.
So no, I don’t trust that some foods are inherently bad or good. I think they all tend to do different things in the human body, and for some people, food that is “good” does not have effects consistent with what a normal person – one without their head up their ass – would call “good.”
You have to educate yourself. The part of the medical community you engage with as a patient isn’t going to do a very good job of it. Don’t go near diet and fitness websites, and beware anything that classifies “obesity” as a distinct disease, not as a natural variation/tendency or a sign of some other thing.
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