Most of us probably think we have a pretty good idea of what a “balanced diet” looks like. And a lot of us may be wrong.
“I don’t love the term,” says Dr Matthew Landry, an assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine in the United States. It can give people an outdated or oversimplified idea of what healthy eating looks like, Landry says.
Some people he has counselled as a dietitian think a balanced meal means “balancing the good and bad foods”. That idea troubles him.
“We wouldn’t tell someone that they can smoke a couple of cigarettes just as long as they get 60 minutes of exercise during the day,” Landry says. “So similarly, we shouldn’t tell folks that they should have foods that aren’t really nutrient-dense, just as long as they have some vegetables on their plate.”
Finding balance in your diet is also more than just adding up numbers, says Dr Shilpa Bhupathiraju, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, US.
“If I tell you, ‘You should eat so many milligrams of a certain nutrient,’ you’ll be like, ‘Well, what does that mean?’” Even for an experienced nutritionist like her, that is tough to envision.
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