Most of us probably think we have a pretty good idea of what a “balanced diet” looks like. And many of us may be wrong.
“I don’t like the term,” says Dr. Matthew Landry, assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine. Landry said it can give people an outdated or oversimplified idea of what healthy eating looks like.
Some of the people he has counseled as a nutritionist believe that a balanced diet means “balancing good foods with bad foods.” The thought bothers him.
“If you get 60 minutes of exercise during the day, that doesn’t mean you can smoke a few cigarettes,” Landry says. “Likewise, we shouldn’t tell people that they just need to have vegetables on their plate and that they should eat foods that aren’t very nutritious.”
Dr. Matthew Landry is an assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine. Photo: www.theguyititian.com
Dr. Shilpa Bhupathiraju, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, says finding balance in your diet is more than just adding up the numbers.
“If I told you, ‘I need to get milligrams of a certain nutrient,’ you’d think, ‘So, what does that mean?'” Even for an experienced nutritionist like her, imagine that It’s difficult.
