Once Again Lyle McDonald's Spot on (Good vs. Bad Food).

Lyle McDonald

Finally type of behavior seems to occur more prevalently in people who tend to divide foods into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories (a category that many popular diets and dietary approaches tend to promote). ‘Good’ foods become equated with healthy and, altogether too often, can be eaten without consequence (i.e. weight gain). Researchers call this the ‘health halo’ by which supposed ‘healthy foods’ have a halo of invincibility around them In the same vein ‘bad’ foods are equated with being unhealthy and this categories are not only absolute but cause us to do some of those strange mental gymnastics when it comes to how we approach our food intake.

You can find examples of this all over the place where people assume that ‘healthy/good’ foods can be eaten in uncontrolled amounts whereas the tiniest amount of ‘unhealthy/bad foods’ mean that the diet has failed, the dieter is immoral and weak, and health will simply be destroyed (this is seen at the greatest extreme in a psychological condition called orthorexia whereby people see food as a moral choice judging not only themselves but others by the foods that they choose to eat). You can see some good examples of this in the comments section of Straight Talk About High-Fructose Corn Syrup: What it is and What it Ain’t. – Research Review. 

Which basically segues into today’s paper which examines a behavior pattern that is often seen whereby folks tend to get fixated (or perhaps ‘blinded’ is a better word) by the concept of ‘healthy’ foods and end up missing the forest for the trees when it comes to their food and caloric intake. There is also evidence that people who are (or at least state that they are) more ‘weight conscious’ are even more prone to make these kinds of mis-estimations which was a secondary aim of the study."