Does a balanced diet include fast food? How much ultra-processed food? How many carbs? Do we need to change the above answers with age or when someone is diabetic or has high blood pressure?
Thus, even though almost everyone will agree with the balanced diet statement from the outset, what constitutes a balanced diet will yield a diversity of answers.
* eat as little and never drink: sugar, alcohol
* seek: stuff that feeds you and your gut biome and doesn't cause diarrhea (aka avoid ultra-processed food)
* bonus: at least once a week: fish, salad, nuts, fruits
Sure, thats not nuanced. But the message is simple: If you eat/drink sugar, alcohol or processed foods, then your body will degrade faster and your biological organism will run on pain, inflammation and fatigue.
i thought you want to eat nuts and fruits daily?
There seems to be some confusion here. "Balanced" means balanced in terms of micro and macro-nutrients that the body needs. Not balanced in the ratios of ultra-processed junk food and healthy food.
Your interpretation is yours but how would your interpretation account for research on ultra processed food.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed...
The answer to that is simple: No.
A balanced diet is a healthy mix of essential nutrients. Highly processes foods rich in fat or sugar are not part of it [1]. Most advisories merely acknowledge that a large part of the population doesn't want to stop eating this stuff completely. But the real goal should always be zero.
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-guidelines-and-fo...
Thus leading to my initial point, a balanced and healthy diet are too ambiguous.
> The Eatwell Guide shows how much of what we eat overall should come from each food group to achieve a healthy, balanced diet.
> You do not need to achieve this balance with every meal, but try to get the balance right over a day or even a week.
It does if you know what you are looking for. "Highly processed" is not strictly well defined, but commonly understood as foods with large amounts of added salt, fat and sugar. That's exactly the category of food they talk about in the article as unnecessary for our diet and which should be consumed as little as possible.
> The answer to that is simple: No
Registered healthcare professionals - dietitians - disagree with you, and do so pretty strongly.
omg shut up, this sort of contrarian semantic shit doesn't make you look smart like you intend. everybody knows that fast food isn't a good component of diet. everybody knows how they can improve their very unique and individualized diet. it's like telling a smoker that cigarettes are bad for you.
Some call a balanced diet 80% healthy and 20% unhealthy.
For example the link below is saying that fastfood could be part of a healthy diet.
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/fast_food_can_be_healthy
Edit: Healthy/balanced those terms are quite loaded are not specified as such we could both agree that healthy and balanced diet is good. Yet both us could have a wildy different interpretations on what that would entail.
The goal was to start a discussion and get different viewpoints. And they could all be true.