An article on the food product website, The Greater Goods, asks, “We’ve all repeatedly heard the term ‘quality ingredients’ in both restaurants and ready-to-go meals at the supermarket – but what does this even mean for the food we are consuming? Is there a standard for quality ingredients, or is this just a term that is thrown around with no real meaning behind it?”

While their article focuses on freshness and processing as key parts of what influences a food’s quality, the question I’m more interested in is, ‘What are the fundamental principles behind a food’s quality?’ For example, what makes organic food inherently better than non-organic food? Or, is all organic food created equal?

Most health advice today seems to be based on impassioned rhetoric influenced by power, money, or belief. If you can convince enough people that your new diet is the One True Way of Healthy Eating, suddenly, you’re a celebrity.

Quality ingredients

After thinking about it for a while, my proposition is that: The highest quality ingredients are those that contribute the most to human health. And I’ll define a healthy person as, someone whose body is performing optimally while being free from illness and injury. This means an unhealthy person is, someone whose body is performing sub-optimally in the form of illness or injury.

However, to be healthy we don’t need to consume the highest quality ingredients all of the time. Let’s take agourelaio as an example. Agourelaio is first-harvest olive oil, which is made from the first olives they pick from the trees. It has a strong flavor, unlike average olive oil, and a bright green color. Agourelaio has been known to have powerful healing effects for thousands of years. Today we know that it contains a high amount of chemicals like polyphenols, an antioxidant. But, it’s also really expensive.

Instead of consuming costly foods like agourelaio all of the time, you should eat stuff like that when your body becomes unhealthy. Or (if you’re wise) take them occasionally to prevent becoming unhealthy.

Modern foods

So how does this definition apply to debates about modern processed food? Well, the question is: Do these new foods contribute to human health, or do they degrade human health?

After all of the research I have done, I would argue that yes, many of these modern foods degrade human health. I can’t explain the entirety of that evidence in this one post, but I hope this standard will help you in determining what is healthy and unhealthy.

The thing to realize about most of these ingredients, though, is that none of them (unless you have a severe allergy) are going to harm you immediately. Rather, they work slowly over time, as your body does everything it can to keep you alive. That’s why it’s not deadly to eat modern foods occasionally, though many people who aren’t used to them may experience minor effects quickly.

“The highest quality ingredients are those that contribute the most to human health.“

An Inclusive Diet

Personally, I like a lot of what the Weston A. Price Foundation has to say about healthy eating. They like to encourage people to create an inclusive diet instead of an exclusive one. Under their model, many different types of diets can be healthy if you eat quality food (as defined above) or prepare food correctly (transforming it into a quality food).

Most special health diets nowadays like to exclude things. Think paleo, vegan, reducing calories, or the carnivore diet. Or, like how some people say you can’t eat nightshades like Tomatoes.

What the Price Foundation would say is, ‘Yes, while paleo, vegan, and other diets can be helpful to get rid of food sensitivities, those aren’t the diets everyone should eat. Instead, you should focus on eating high-quality versions of foods you like to eat.’

As for nightshades like Tomatoes, they would say that because some people have leaky guts from eating bad food, their bodies can’t process the natural toxins in nightshades, so they should avoid them. But for people who don’t have that problem, nightshades are totally fine.

One way the Price Foundation can help you eat better versions of the food you like to eat is by giving you healthier ways to prepare your food. For example, instead of eating white bread that has low nutrients and natural toxins called phytates, you could eat sprouted whole wheat bread that has more nutrients and the sprouting gets rid of the phytates.

Summary

Instead of being held captive by the latest health fad, we should get back to the basics and really consider the fundamentals of healthy eating. I suggest that people should focus on judging food by the standard of ‘Is it health-promoting or health-degrading?,’ rather than depending upon ideas that demonize entire food groups.

Note

• This post was inspired by a conversation I had in the comments of this article about a “nutritional” drink.