How to to tell if a food is worth eating
5 simple questions you can use
Your great-great-grandparents didn’t “diet”, and neither should you.
They just ate food, and were free of the degenerative diseases that plague us today.
That’s because their food was actually food, and not the fake food that’s common today.
As long as you eat actual food, you’ll be fine. But how do you know what real food is?
This guide will help you figure that out.
5 Questions
I’m not going to tell you what to eat, and neither should anyone else.
People are different, so what works for someone else might not work for you, regardless of how many followers they have.
To find out if a food is good for you, simply answer these 5 questions.
Individually they aren’t that useful, but combine the answers and you’ll know if you should (or shouldn’t) eat the food in question.
The results might not be as obvious as you think.
Was it available 300 years ago?
Anything pre-industrial revolution stands a chance at being healthy food, since humans had enough time to adapt to it.
If it’s newer than that, humans could not have evolved to eat it. Very simple.
This gets you the standard paleo foods— no seed oils, refined sugar, and packaged/processed foods in general.
Basic, but there is a followup question that is more nuanced:
Did your ancestors eat it?
Humans have done a lot of evolving in the past 15,000 years, enough for different ethnicities to have developed unique digestive adaptations.
E.g., many east asians cannot process alcohol. And an observation I’ve made about the most successful carnivore dieters is that they all seem to be Northern European (e.g. Shawn Baker).
Northern Europeans did not eat grains or booze until about 2000 years ago, but Mediterraneans have done so for much longer.
Makes sense that they might be able to digest bread better than Scandinavians.
You don’t have to necessarily cut out things that your ancestors didn’t eat, but it can be very helpful.
Do healthy cultures like it?
If there is no precedent for a food’s use among a healthy culture, you must consider why you’d want to eat it.
Further, if a food is only consumed among unhealthy cultures (e.g. seed oils), then that’s a big reason to avoid it.
This question saves you from the popular trends to eschew entire categories of food because of some half-baked “science” and a few personal success stories.
Such elimination is always concerning because the range of foods that have successfully supported strong bodies is quite large.
If there’s a food (e.g. honey) that someone outside the industrial food system would kill for, then why should it be off limits to you?
How does it make you feel?
Many people make their entire careers off of promoting one food, like green juice or bananas.
And they might be right— that food could have cured their IBS, or Crohn’s disease, or whatever.
But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for you.
If someone says that rice is good, but you get bloated and feel terrible when you eat it, don’t ignore your body’s signals just because they have 100k followers.
Similarly, if someone says a food is bad, and you feel great on it, then what reason is there to stop?
The tricky part here is evaluating whether or not the food truly makes you feel good/bad. That requires a high degree of mind-body connection that many people don’t necessarily have.
Many also don’t know what health really feels like, so it can be hard to tell if something is off. I’ll write more on this in the future.
Who’s marketing it? Who benefits?
“Never buy a food that has its own marketing department”
— someone smart
It sounds cynical, but makes a lot of sense when you consider that no one has ever needed to “market” the staple, healthy foods of civilization.
It’s only when a new food invention is created that businesses have to justify its existence through marketing.
And while not all businesses are evil, it’s important to understand their motives.
For example, Kellogg’s invented their famous cereal literally to lower men’s testosterone.
And most food tech startups invent new products because that is what’s necessary for them to become monopolies, not because the food is healthy.
Many foods are also marketed as “eco friendly” or “ethical”. Whether or not those things are true, it’s important to realize that they are distinct from health.
Look into who is marketing the food and why.
Testing it out
To show you the usefulness of this set of questions, let’s try it out on a few popular foods:
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