Ask a dietitian, “What’s the healthiest food I can eat?” and you may be disappointed by the answer.
It depends.
I know. Not very satisfying.
We like clear answers. Blueberries are healthy. French fries are not. Kale is healthy. Cake is not. Put every food into the correct box and eating well should become easy.
Except nutrition doesn’t work quite that neatly.
There isn’t one universally agreed definition of a “healthy food” that can tell us, by itself, whether a particular food is healthy for every person in every situation.
And when I looked at how major health organizations approach healthy eating, I found a remarkable amount of consistency:
The evidence-based guidance largely points in the same direction.
They mostly don’t try to identify one perfect food.
They talk about healthy ways of eating.
The Experts Don’t Have a Magic Food, Either
The World Health Organization describes healthy diets using four broad principles: adequacy, balance, moderation and diversity. It emphasizes variety and recognizes that the exact makeup of a healthy diet varies with individual characteristics, culture, locally available foods and dietary customs.
Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate looks at the whole meal rather than crowning individual foods. It emphasizes vegetables and fruits, whole grains, protein sources, healthy oils—and variety.
The American Heart Association similarly emphasizes an overall healthy dietary pattern.
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) Eatwell Guide talks about eating a variety of foods in appropriate proportions and points out something wonderfully practical: we don’t have to achieve perfect balance at every single meal. We can work toward it over a day or even a week.
And I particularly identify with Canada’s approach to healthy eating because it makes room for something nutrition discussions sometimes forget:
Culture and enjoyment matter, too.
Humans don’t eat nutrients in a laboratory. We eat food. We have traditions. We celebrate with it. We have favorite flavors. We eat with other people.
Enjoyment doesn’t suddenly become irrelevant when we start talking about nutrition.
Different organizations use different language and emphasize different details, but the underlying themes are remarkably consistent.
In other words, we’re on pretty solid ground here.
Still awake?
I know.
Adequacy. Balance. Moderation. Diversity.
😴
Not exactly edge-of-your-seat reading.
But there’s a reason guidance from very different health organizations starts sounding remarkably similar.
Remember that. We’ll come back to it.
No Single Food Makes or Breaks Your Health
So… is broccoli healthy?
Sure.
But that doesn’t mean you should eat nothing but broccoli.
Broccoli provides fiber, vitamins, minerals and other beneficial compounds. It doesn’t provide everything your body needs.
Neither do blueberries or lentils.
Neither does whatever food happens to be wearing the health crown this year.
That’s where the question “Is this food healthy?” starts becoming less useful.
A better question might be:
What does this food contribute to the way I eat?
A food doesn’t have to do everything.
One food may provide protein. Another brings carbohydrates and fiber. Another contributes fat. Fruits and vegetables bring different combinations of vitamins, minerals, fiber and other beneficial compounds.
And foods don’t simply deposit nutrients independently into a daily nutrition account. What we eat together can affect how some nutrients are absorbed and used.
Which brings us to something very close to the heart of Delicious Lazy Nutrition.
Foods Work Better Together
One ingredient doesn’t make the meal.
Different foods bring different strengths. They can complement one another nutritionally while also doing something essential to everyday eating:
They can make a meal you actually want to eat.
This is part of the thinking behind the Delicious Lazy Nutrition building-block approach.
Instead of demanding that every individual food pass some imaginary test for nutritional perfection, I’m much more interested in what happens when we put the pieces together.
No single building block has to do everything.
Maybe dinner really is a team sport.
Knowing More Means Considering More
There’s an interesting thing that happens when you spend enough time studying nutrition.
You can become less willing to make absolute statements, not more.
The more we know, the more variables we can see.
What does this person need? What are they already eating? How much? What are they replacing? What is their health status? What medications do they take? What are their goals?
Even two marathon runners training for the same distance can need very different nutrition.
One may be underweight and struggling to consume enough energy to support training and recovery. Another may want to reduce body weight without compromising performance.
Same sport. Same distance.
Different needs.
So when a dietitian answers a seemingly simple question with “it depends,” it doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t know.
Sometimes we know enough to understand how much more there is to consider.
Even a Good Thing Can Be Too Much
If something is good for us, it’s tempting to assume more must be better.
Nutrition rarely works that way.
Even water—possibly the least controversial thing we consume—can become dangerous in an extreme enough amount.
That doesn’t make water unhealthy.
It demonstrates something much simpler:
The amount we consume matters, too.
Calling something “healthy” can accidentally imply that we should eat as much of it as possible. Calling something “unhealthy” can imply that it has no place at all.
Real eating has considerably more room in the middle.
Variety Gives Us More Than Nutrients
Different foods provide different combinations of nutrients. Variety makes it easier to cover more nutritional bases without demanding perfection from any one food.
But that’s only one reason I value it.
Food is more interesting that way.
Different vegetables. Different grains. Different proteins. Herbs, spices and flavors. Foods from cuisines we’ve never cooked before. Foods we’ve eaten since childhood.
We don’t all need to eat the same things.
That’s the point.
There are many ways to put together a nourishing diet.
Variety also gives us some breathing room from the constant churn of nutrition headlines.
Eggs are good.
Eggs are bad.
Fat is bad.
This fat is good.
Eat more of this.
Never eat that.
It can make nutrition science look frustratingly fickle from the outside.
But science is a learning process.
As better evidence becomes available, we refine what we know. Sometimes new research confirms what we already thought. Sometimes it adds conditions and exceptions. And sometimes it changes the conclusion.
Refining an answer as we learn more isn’t a weakness of science.
It’s how science works.
And sometimes better science doesn’t give us simpler answers. It reveals differences between people and populations. We learn that amounts matter. We learn that what replaces a food matters. We discover interactions we didn’t know about before.
The more we know, the more nuance we can see.
Fortunately, when we eat a variety of foods, we don’t need to redesign dinner every time another study makes the news.
And our desire for simple answers creates an opportunity for something else.
The health halo.
Put a desirable word on a food—natural, organic, high-protein, vegan, plant-based—and it’s remarkably easy for that one characteristic to influence how we judge the whole food.
Which brings me to one of my favorite examples.
French Fries Are Vegan AND Plant-Based
There. I said it.
French fries can be vegan.
They’re plant-based, too.
Double halo.
They’re still French fries.
That’s not an argument against vegan or plant-based eating. A thoughtfully planned plant-based diet can be an excellent way to eat.
It’s an argument against letting a label do our thinking for us.
A vegan label doesn’t tell you how much protein, fiber, sodium or saturated fat a food contains.
“Plant-based” doesn’t automatically tell you whether it provides the nutrients you’re looking for.
And apparently two halos don’t make French fries broccoli.
We’ll open that particular can of worms another day.
If Everything Depends, What CAN You Tell Me?
Fair question.
After all this talk about context, amounts, combinations, goals and individual differences, “it depends” can start to sound like a very unsatisfying answer.
But recognizing complexity doesn’t mean we don’t have useful guidance.
In fact, underneath all that complexity, some remarkably consistent principles keep showing up.
The internet would certainly be easier to write for if nutrition worked in absolutes.
YOU’VE BEEN EATING BREAKFAST ALL WRONG.
NEVER EAT AFTER 6 PM.
THE ONE FOOD THAT MELTS BELLY FAT.
That last one sounds particularly useful.
Unfortunately for nutrition headlines, humans insist on being different from one another.
Take the advice to never eat at night. There is legitimate research into intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating, and these approaches may have benefits for some people.
That doesn’t mean everyone should go for long periods without eating. Pregnancy, diabetes, medications, athletic training, nutritional status, schedules and many other circumstances can change the equation.
This is where individualized advice matters.
If you’re considering a significant dietary change—particularly if you have a medical condition or take medications—work with a qualified professional who can look at you, rather than piecing together instructions written for thousands of strangers online.
Yes, I appreciate the irony.
You’re currently reading nutrition information written by a stranger online.
Don’t blindly listen to me, either.
There is an enormous amount of nutrition information online. Some of it is excellent. Some of it simply isn’t true. And some may be perfectly accurate while being completely irrelevant to you.
I debunk nutrition misinformation regularly in my clinical practice.
That may be one reason I’m reluctant to give you another absolute rule to add to the pile.
Some Nutrition Advice Has Stood the Test of Time
I’ve spent decades reading about nutrition, and new research continues to fascinate me.
We learn more. We revise ideas. Better tools let researchers ask questions they couldn’t answer before. Occasionally, new findings genuinely change how we think.
And yet something funny keeps happening.
After decades of reading nutrition research, I often finish another round of exciting new findings only to come back to some remarkably familiar advice.
Eat a variety of foods.
Pay attention to portions.
Eat plenty of plants.
Choose foods closer to their original form more often.
Get the nutrients your body needs.
Make room for culture and enjoyment.
Build a way of eating you can actually live with.
Not exactly clickbait.
Remember all that less-than-thrilling guidance from the health organizations at the beginning?
There may be a reason different organizations keep arriving at similar recommendations—and why you’ve probably been hearing versions of them for years.
They’ve endured.
Nutrition science has become considerably more sophisticated. We understand more about how foods interact, how individual needs differ and how context changes recommendations.
Yet variety, balance, appropriate amounts and an overall nourishing eating pattern keep showing up.
Not because nutrition science has been standing still.
Because these ideas have continued to hold up as the science around them has advanced.
They’re not novel. They’re not particularly sexy. And “Eat a Variety of Foods in Appropriate Amounts” probably isn’t going viral anytime soon.
But nutrition advice doesn’t need to be exciting to be useful.
If I Could Eat My Way to Less Belly Fat, Sign Me Up
I understand why dramatic nutrition headlines work.
We want shortcuts.
I’d happily take one myself.
If somebody really discovers a food that melts belly fat, please send it my way.
Until then, I’m going to remain suspicious when someone promises that a single food, supplement, rule or restriction will solve a complicated human problem.
Until we find the miracle, I’ll keep reading the boring stuff.
For the record, I’m an otherwise gainfully employed registered dietitian.
Delicious Lazy Nutrition exists largely because I apparently like nutrition enough to spend my free time reading about it, cooking, experimenting—and then coming here to talk about nutrition some more.
Apparently, this is what I do for fun.
I realize that may not make me sound particularly exciting at parties.
I don’t offer private nutrition services through Delicious Lazy Nutrition. There isn’t a personalized coaching program waiting for you at the bottom of this article.
What I can do here is something I enjoy very much.
I can dig through the research.
I can look at the good, the bad and the ugly instead of requiring every food to be either hero or villain.
I can show you what the evidence says, where it’s strong, where it’s complicated, and where we simply don’t know yet.
And I can try to translate enough of the dry scientific stuff into real life that you have better information to make your own choices.
Because healthy eating isn’t about finding the perfect food.
It’s about putting foods together in ways that give us what we need, in amounts that make sense, with enough variety to nourish us—and enough culture, pleasure and enjoyment to make eating worth doing.
No single food has to carry all that weight.
Sources and Further Reading
- World Health Organization — Healthy Diet
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, The Nutrition Source — Healthy Eating Plate
- American Heart Association — Healthy Eating
- NHS — The Eatwell Guide
- Health Canada — Canada’s Food Guide
Editorial note: This article provides general nutrition education and is not individualized medical or nutrition advice.