The Real Reasons Healthy Eating is Hard

Recently a family friend gave me her recipe for a delicious banana bread that she makes with just three tablespoons of oil and 1 and a half cups whole wheat flour and absolutely no sugar. Sounds healthy, no? Actually, it's just a start. The dessert bread is still loaded with the carbs from the flour, bananas and dried cranberries she uses to make it palatable.

But that's the whole point. Few people want to eat food that's considered truly healthy. Steamed vegetables just don't taste very good. Steamed or boiled rice is bland. White chicken meat is dry. Fish usually isn't very filling. Add to that the advice that people should drink lots of water -- coffee and soft drinks don't count, even though they have lots of water -- and would-be healthy eaters are looking at a nutritional prison sentence. There is little motivation to eat healthy than to hope that one will be thin and disease-free.

What makes food tasty are three poisons: sugar, salt and and fat. Good chefs know how to disguise these these saboteurs of healthy eating. You can eat a French onion soup and not detect the amount of salt in it, even if you are usually salt-sensitive. Some chefs use duck fat instead of butter. For years we've been warned about the health hazards of trans fats (that come from vegetable sources, by the way, not meat). Boxes of cookies, biscuits and crackers have "No Trans Fats" emblazoned on them. But the fact remains that people go for the cookies, biscuits and crackers because they want food that is tastier than steamed veggies, bland rice, dry chicken and unsatisfying fish.

Another important reason why it is so hard to eat healthy is because healthier food often costs more. There are no fast food chains that sell tasty healthy food. Chipotle claims that its Mexican food is healthy. It probably is, but it's also tasty because it has carbs, salt and fat. Its own website claims that "Foods that are unprocessed and un-tampered with (like at Chipotle) are more filling and nutritious than the synthetic foods you might find at other restaurants."
http://www.chipotle.com/en-US/menu/nutritional_information/nutritional_information.aspx

Tampered food. At other restaurants. Or in decades-old popular snacks such as Twinkies. It's not just the sugar (which was used as a defense for Harvey Milk's murderer), but the chemicals that make food taste smooth and comforting.

Which brings us back to healthy eating. People are told to eat healthy to avoid obesity (a catch-all that includes just being 10 pounds over the ideal weight) and avoiding diabetes (with its present-day wide scope because there is so much money in it) and heart disease and cancer (both of which have no vagueness in their diagnoses). Many heavy set people are stress eaters. High blood pressure, which can cause heart attacks, are often the result of stress (as well as age and too much salt). Many people argue that other diseases are causes by stress. It's next to impossible to avoid stress, but a Reese's peanut butter cup works faster at reducing stress (though not guilt) than meditation, relaxation exercises or vitamin supplements. No wonder that healthy eating can be a losing battle in the worst sense. Breaking up with comfort foods is hard to do.