The top 10 foods to avoid for health

Are you ready to hear my list of foods to avoid for optimal health?

Drum roll…….

1.      You don’t need to avoid any foods for health

2.      You don’t need to avoid any foods for health

3.      You don’t need to avoid any foods for health

4.      Etc.

As a sports nutritionist who is old enough and ugly enough to have seen these lists get generated week in week out for the past 15 years, I can say that the best thing you can do for your health is to avoid reading these lists.

They will do nothing for you except confuse you more and add to feelings of anxiety around the food that you eat. There are literally no foods that you need to avoid completely for optimal health.

Are certain foods more health-promoting? Sure.

Should some foods be consumed less than others? Or course.

But by eliminating and restricting foods completely, you are doing yourself a disservice and may even be quietly feeding (excuse the pun) disordered ways of thinking about food.

We now know that our overall dietary patterns matter more than individual food items.

So why has there always been a tendency to demonise certain food groups?

It goes back to the origins of nutritional science when diseases of nutrition were almost exclusively caused by a deficiency of one kind or another.

For example, scurvy is due to a lack of vitamin C, and beri-beri was caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1.

So, when researchers began examining diseases of our modern lives (heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity), the same logic was applied to this single ingredient model of lifestyle-related diseases.

First, it was saturated fat and cholesterol that got the blame, then carbohydrates, then sugar etc.

We now know that the most health-promoting (meaning a lower risk of certain lifestyle diseases, such as obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes etc.) dietary patterns have a few things in common.

A diet rich in plant fibre and unsaturated fat (nuts/seeds/avocados instead of cheese and animal fat) has much better health outcomes than a modern Western diet, which tends to be low in plant fibre and higher in saturated fat.

Does that mean that you can’t include cheese and steak in your diet?

Absolutely not!

But it probably odes mean thinking about your overall dietary pattern, biasing most of your food intake towards high fibre foods, unsaturated fat sources. Simultaneously, consider other health-promoting lifestyle factors, like frequent exercise and spending less time sitting down.

Try to avoid clickbait articles that tell you what to avoid to be healthy.

It is high time we adopted a more inclusive approach to our diets rather than focusing on what to exclude.