Your stomach is not a see-saw

I don’t like the phrase “balanced diet”. 

(At this point, I should give you a slight warning that this post may come across as a bit pedantic. I’m not talking about the content of the “balanced diet”, just the way it’s described and perceived. Hopefully I explain why adequately. It’s also a longer post than I had expected, but you don’t need me to tell you to stop reading if it isn’t interesting.)

I’m suspicious of the phrase “balanced diet” because the only foods which go on about it are the bad ones. I’ve never seen an apple in a supermarket saying “Please, enjoy me as part of a healthy balanced diet”; only the sugary processed nutrition-devoid foods like mars bars (I used to love them, but thankfully my tastes have improved – see
https://alexmay.co.uk/2013/10/im-chocolate-snob-and-you-should-be-too.html). It’s the same as the inclusion of “please drink responsibly” on alcohol adverts, the only drink which you can drink irresponsibly. 

The classic idea of ‘balance’ is the see-saw: it’s all about the average. If you want a see-saw to balance but you have a fat person on one end and a thin person on the other, that doesn’t work. Either take weight away from the fat person or add weight to the thin person)

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. If you’re walking along a tightrope (or even the street) with a heavy bag of shopping on one side and nothing on the other, you’re unbalanced.

Applied to food, the idea of a balanced diet is that you balance out the good and the bad. This simply does not work with food. If you eat a snickers bar, you can’t make up for that by also eating an apple; that just means you’ve eaten a snickers and an apple. It is addition, not counter-balancing.

The “balanced diet” rhetoric is used because it’s the only way that the bad foods can be included; if the government advice were to “eat healthily” then it’s harder for bad food to have a place in it. I imagine that the reason the government advice is this way is due to lobbying. Unhealthy foods make loads of money from their unhealthy food and are able to spend lots more on advertising than the government. Presumably, the government decided that instead of a war against unhealthy food they would be better of to work with bad food corporations in a pragmatic way, hence the balanced diet rhetoric. In return for promoting a model of eating which allows the unhealthy foods some place, the unhealthy foods work with the government a bit by saying “this can be enjoyed as part of a healthy balanced diet” on all of their foods. I’m not sure if this is government pragmatism or a corrupt decision due to lobbying and influence from the bad food companies, but either way, that’s where we are.

(Aside: This pragmatism is the same as the government’s advice to eat “5 a day”. 5 portions of fruit and vegetables is not the magic number and really a scientific number: the more portions the better, it doesn’t stop (or have decreasing returns) after 5, and other countries are much higher (apparently the Japanese are advised to have 13 or more)

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. 5 was chosen because it’s an achievable target: most people eat two or three so might attempt to make it up to 5, bit if they were told to have ten they are less likely to actually try.)

You might say that people don’t really think in the ‘balanced diet’ way, and don’t actually think that eating the apple makes up for the snickers they have. You may be right. I’m not sure, but I think that some people do. Many times I’ve heard people say something along this line, or heard parents coaxing kids into eating something healthy with the promise of something unhealthy afterwards. Really it isn’t a question of whether people think like this in a binary sense but how many people think like this (ranging from 0-100%), and I think that it is enough people do that it makes a difference. Even if this isn’t the case, I think its a farce that bad foods can make a claim to be an acceptable part of a good diet.

As I’ve already said, food doesn’t work like a see-saw. Your body does not take an average of the food it eats; it takes in all of it. Eating an apple clearly does not remove the fact that there is already a snickers bar in your stomach, and so the ‘balance’ idea is completely off.

So instead of talking of ‘balanced’ diet, we should instead talk of a ‘healthy’ diet

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. Instead of trying to eat in a balanced way, matching good and bad, we should try and eat in a healthy way. There are two objections I would expect to hear against this (though I’m sure there are many more) which I will counter to help me expound my argument.

Objection 1: “The notion of “healthy” is empty/vague”. To some extent, I agree with this. There is lots of conflicting advice about what is “healthy” and what isn’t. One of the reasons it conflicts is because “healthy” is all relative, and this isn’t recognised in the discussion (especially in journalism, which is terrible at writing about science anyway). “Healthy” is a matter of degree. It is about trying to improve yourself from a less-healthy place to a more-healthy place, not about trying to tick all of the boxes on some ‘healthy’ checklist. And this should be the aim of our diet: not about trying to balance bad with good, but ababoutout trying to improve the totality of what we eat. Whereas balance talks about trying to make two things equal, healthy says that we should increase the healthy part of our diet and decrease the unhealthy part; we aren’t trying to balance a see-saw but make it tip more towards the healthy side.

Objection 2: “All things in moderation”. This objection is along the lines that I’m not really saying anything of interest. If we look at the content of an ideal balanced diet, the one recommended by the government, this is similar to the content of a healthy diet. A healthy diet is one which has lots of good stuff and not much bad stuff (all relative) – and yes, it should be balanced with a range and variety of things. Eating only apples is not healthy, and balance is necessary to make sure you eat all of the different things you should eat. However, I see this objection as a bit of a word-trick. The ‘balanced diet’ as advertised to us is saying “if you eat enough good stuff as well as consuming our bad products, you’ll be alright”, not just “you should have variety in what you eat”. Both are meanings of the phrase “balanced diet”, and only the overall “balance” label is what I am objecting too, not that the content of the diet should be balanced. Even if the content of the two perspectives of diet is the same, I think that the label of “healthy diet” is a more useful one with which to discuss the content.

Like I said earlier, I’m talking about the way we talk about diet, not what’s actually in it, which is obviously far more important. Somebody who actually does eat a “balanced diet” would also eat a “healthy diet”, and I’m not saying that what is inside the “balanced diet” model is bad. What I am saying is that the way it is presented (“balanced”) is misleading, and that we should drop this label. The potential benefits of this are:

• Bad foods can no longer claim to be part of what we should eat (I’m not saying we don’t eat them, just that we know that when we eat them we are being unhealthy). 
• We can stop the thinking that you should eat the apple and the snickers bar.
• It helps us to understand ‘healthy’ better, by accepting that being healthy is a matter of degree. We don’t reach a balanced part where we cannot improve and can almost always be more healthy.
• Crucially, probably the best benefit, is that I think that the label can help with the content of what we’re suggesting. I think it would be easier and more effective to market a “eat healthier” campaign focussing on smaller incremental improvements instead of just saying “be balanced”.

PS. There are two more objections I might hear against this. One is that I’m not saying anything interesting and talking about labels is empty waffle. I’m aware of that and that isn’t what I’m saying. The second is that I haven’t talked about what healthy is/isn’t and have talked vaguely about “bad foods”. This is intentional: talking about what is “healthy” is a whole minefield in itself, I might write about it in the future. But it also leaves the labels of healthy and bad to be replaced and changed depending on what what is healthy and bad relative to how healthy you are at the moment.

PPS I tried to use footnotes but they’re the same colour as the background, so it didn’t really work. If you’re paying enough attention to notice the gaps where three invisible numbers are you might also read this, so use ctrl + f to see them.

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I’m ignoring the possibility of moving the two people different distances from the middle of the see-saw, which in reality would make it balance but that doesn’t fit the metaphor (moments only apply to physical balance)

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I am aware that the two are often seen together as “a healthy balanced diet”, but that tends to be on government sources instead of the packaging of bad food.

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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/may/25/healthandwellbeing.health

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