The Truth About "Bad" Foods (Finally)

Yes, Virginia, French fries are fattening

I know I wrote once—okay, I wrote many times—that there are no “bad” and “good” foods, and that labeling them that way can be unhealthy. A magical thing happens when you say something is bad: suddenly, you want it more. Call it our naturally greedy human nature.

Thus, my dietary philosophy was for years aggressively laissez-faire. Rather than swearing off certain forbidden foods forever—and then feasting on them in moments of weakness—I believed in leaving things alone, and letting them achieve a natural balance. I saw it in action in my kids, with the result that they often left “goodies” unfinished for the simple reason that they were full. They knew the delicious (and not-forbidden) food would be available to them again tomorrow, if they so desired, so why get uncomfortably stuffed? Have you ever seen a dieter who has momentarily fallen off the wagon not scarf an ice-cream sundae down to the last rainbow sprinkle? She’s thinking of tomorrow, when she will vow to never ever again touch Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. 

But you may notice I use the past tense here. While I still think there's truth and logic to what is called the Blown-Diet Syndrome, I can’t deny this additional truth any longer: there ARE bad foods! And they’re killing us! A huge study from Harvard’s School of Public Health last month spelled it out yet again, in greater detail. Weight gain over the years (and the average is 17 pounds over 20 years) was highly associated with a handful of foods. Leading the charge were French fries, potato chips—in fact, potatoes in any form—and sweetened drinks.

In today’s “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times, Mark Bittman writes an impressively researched and persuasive analysis of fixing our disastrous and deadly diet by taxing the hell out of “bad food.” I’m beginning to be convinced. Soda, for instance, is getting cheaper in relation to other foods; fruits and vegetables are getting more expensive. Bittman suggests using the revenue resulting from taxing “sin foods” like French fries and sugary drinks to subsidize selling healthier staples—fruits, vegetables, whole grains—for lower prices, and everywhere. Walk into a 7-11 and buy some salad greens and tomatoes for tonight’s dinner. Use some of the tax revenues to pay for the billions in healthcare that are made necessary by obesity-related disease: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, you-name-it. Beat the cheap-and-crappy food manufacturers at their own game by making the “bad” stuff harder to get and the “good” stuff easier.

I still feel—hell, I know, from the research that’s been done in the last couple of decades—that different people face different challenges when it comes to gaining and losing weight; that experts feel there are dozens of different kinds of obesity, and some kinds are highly driven by powerful biological forces. That it is not simply a matter of will-power, as the food-morality people would like to think. Hunger, appetite, satiety are monitored by all kinds of complicated chemical and hormonal systems—and someone else’s experience of neuropeptide-Y (a neurotransmitter that mediates appetite, among other things) may be vastly different than mine, making it considerably more difficult to resist that order of fries.

However. Having some fries with a steak au poivre once in a while is one thing. Wolfing down fries every day as a matter of course is another, and it will make you fat. Science and common sense have joined hands—this is stuff everyone really knows, at heart, and now it’s been proven. Yogurt is “good” for you (according to the Harvard research, it’s the food most associated with not gaining weight as you get older); French fries, potato chips, and sweetened drinks like soda are, relatively speaking, “bad” for you in anything other than very limited amounts. It’s time to admit it, and eat accordingly.