Seems like a simple question, on the surface. Then, I tried to give an answer, and realized that I can’t come up with a short, simple, media-friendly sound-bite. Well, actually, I can, but it requires a long elaboration.
Here’s my short sound-bite on what good nutrition is:
Good nutrition is a habitual way of eating that results in you having good objective health, subjective health, and meeting your performance goals.
Original source: here.
Sounds simple? Well then, let’s complicate things a bit.
Let’s talk about the first part: good objective health. How do we objectively know if you’re in good health? The standard stuff – blood work, urinalysis, anthropometric measurements (waist circumference and body composition), etc. If those tests show you’re good, you have one third of the equation.
I know – some of you are thinking: “but if my objective tests show that I’m in good health, isn’t that enough? Why is it only one third?”
The reason that it’s only one third is because I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve seen that have asked me “my blood tests come back normal. Then why do I feel so crummy?”
Part of that is that not everything gets measured with objective tests. For one thing, doctors only measure what they deem “basic” or “necessary”, which may be governed more by insurance than by physiology. And the other part is although we know a lot about physiology and health, we don’t know everything. So for a lot of things, tests simply don’t exist yet to measure them.
That’s where the second part of my definition comes in: subjective health. Subjective health is how you feel. How your energy levels are, your symptoms, and more. My staff and I use a 321-symptom questionnaire to assess this. After all, if someone has had a certain symptom for a long period of time, they might consider it normal, because after all “doesn’t everyone have that?” Usually, the answer is “no.”
And the third part of my definition: performance goals. This one has the widest variability. For the average person, his/her performance goal may be just to get through their workday, with enough energy left at the end of the day to play with their kids/grandkids, play golf/tennis, etc. For another person, this may be to participate in a marathon, and for another person it may be to look good on stage nearly naked. All these performance goals would necessitate good nutritional approaches, even though the first 2 criteria are met: good objective health, and good subjective health.
And of course, let’s consider the first part of the definition: habitual way of eating. This is what you do normally. Not as an exception. The implication of this is that any single meal, or small group of meals don’t mean all that much in the grand scheme of things. You can’t say for instance that pizza is a bad food. It’s a single meal, and you don’t have any insight into how often this person is eating pizza, in what quantities, and what they are eating the rest of the time. Likewise, you can’t conclude that a single meal with salad is “good nutrition”, because it’s a simple snapshot.
Original source: here.
For example, with our pizza-eating friend, if they eat pizza daily, and the rest of their meals consist of decidedly unhealthy foods, we can say that person has bad nutrition. But if our pizza-eating friend eats it once in a blue moon, and the rest of the diet is pretty dialed in, and meeting the other 3 criteria (objective health, subjective health, performance goals), is it really that bad?
The other implication of our definition is that there’s no single diet that really fits it. You can eat a lot of different diets, and as long as those diets are meeting our 3 criteria, they’re all healthy diets. It’s not like there’s only 1 correct diet, and every other diet is wrong.
After all, if 10 different diets fit our criteria of objective health, subjective health, and performance goals, who’s to say that one is better than another? Yes, there may be a theoretical basis of the superiority of some ways of eating over others, but as Winston Churchill once said “no matter how elegant the methods, occasionally you have to look at the results.” Same thing here: no matter how sound the theoretical basis of a given way of eating, if it produces those 3 goals (objective health, subjective health, performance goals), it’s a good way of eating. If it doesn’t produce those 3 goals, it’s not a good way of eating.
