“Healthy Snacks You Actually Crave!” This Is Healthy Eating?
Yes. This is a relief. We are in the midst of what used to be called “diet season.” Yet we are not getting an onslaught of advice about Atkins, paleo, vegan, or an assortment of obscure dietary approaches for fast weight loss. Instead, we are getting tips for healthy eating – such as this advice to devise “healthy snacks you actually crave.”
Call us a curmudgeon or a cynic, but devising foods to crave is not likely to be advice for eating patterns that will actually make a person more healthy.
Propaganda
RDN Linn Steward is an experienced recipe analyst with genuine concerns about ultra-processed foods. But she sees this advice as mostly “propaganda” – aimed at promoting the idea that big food companies are intent upon marketing addictive foods. It’s the concept motivating a lawsuit against the food industry for causing Bryce Martinez to develop type 2 diabetes and MAFLD.
Whether you call it propaganda, dogma, or just strong beliefs, Steward has a point. This advice and the series it comes from seem unlikely to improve anyone’s health.
Emulating Ultra-Processed Foods
Especially if you buy into the notion that ultra-processed foods are noxious and addictive, the advice to seek out homemade versions of such foods to snack upon and crave makes no sense. It is just not plausible that snacking plus craving equals healthy eating.
“I Know It When I See It”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said that an intelligible definition of obscenity might not be possible, but “I know it when I see it.” This bit of folk wisdom seems to apply to popular notions about “healthy eating.” Some people are not concerned with it whatsoever. But those who are concerned have firm beliefs. They know it instinctively.
The Elusive Definition for Healthy Eating
The trouble is that those beliefs vary and consensus is very difficult to find. The scientific advisory committee for the 2025 edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans spent two years trying to come up with clear and valid recommendations. These are smart people who worked hard at it. And yet, many people are eager to say that they got it wrong.
But the fact is that food is complex. Dietary patterns are even more complex. And then trying to figure out the health outcomes that genuinely result from different patterns of dietary behavior is a further layer of complexity.
So there are many ways to enjoy food healthfully and many patterns for eating that are demonstrably unhealthy. Simple definitions for healthy eating – like eat food, not too much, mostly plants – sound great in the abstract. But in real life, it gets complicated.
The result is that our definition of healthy eating may not be your definition of healthy eating. And a unified definition of healthy eating for all will likely never exist.
Click here for the Times series on healthy eating. For further perspective on public perceptions about healthy eating, click here.
Popcorn, photograph by Renee Comet for NCI / Wikimedia Commons
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January 11, 2025
