Imagine finding yourself at dinner among people you don’t know, the classic friends of friends: if you want to send the evening to a head, it’s easy, talk about food and ask each of the diners what they think is a food to avoid and what not.
Well, you will get very different answers, and worse, you can even risk arguing about a topic that, after all, should be harmless and above all linked to conviviality , such as food. There are those who demonize refined flours and explain to you that white foods are poison, those who demonize animal proteins, those who saturated fats, who all sugars. Who makes real crusades and boycott many foods of bad multinationals, without wondering if the people who work there are also boycotting. Those who live a real food schizophrenia: on the one hand demonize and develop feelings of guilt with respect to food, on the other hand, when they “go wrong”, they do so by stuffing themselves with foods that they consider absolute evil. This obviously leads to new feelings of guilt, new restrictions and new binges, in a vicious circle.

Who, like a person I know, suffering from a serious eating disorder, prefers to avoid any “eat out”, in fear of being judged for their very restrictive choices.

But precisely because I’m used to hearing all kinds of them, now I’ll explain why demonizing food is (for me, of course), a crazy bounce. Without talking about foods in particular, and referring, in general, to every type of food.
So also snacks, products with palm oil, refined flours, animal proteins and terrible processed meats.
Here are six reasons why demonizing food is wrong.

1) IT DOES NOT COUNT THE ORIGIN, BUT THE CHEMISTRY: when we eat a food, the body “translates” it into chemistry, and in particular breaks down the food to assimilate it, into carbohydrates, proteins, fats, fibers, vitamins and mineral salts. The body does not feel guilty if one day we eat a hamburger and take the protein from the meat or the carbohydrates from the sesame bun. What our body does is to translate what we eat into chemistry and this is true whether we eat a pastry or eat an organic bar with quinoa. The elements are always the same.
The feelings of guilt are instead an added “evil” of our own, which loads the body with unnecessary stress: and stress does much more damage than an occasional biscuit with palm oil.

2) NOT THE EXCEPTION, BUT THE PRACTICE: we can eat French fries once a week, or two a month if we wish, and even a packaged ice cream.  We can insert junk food in a perspective of correct nutrition, as long as our daily diet is also made up of other things: hydrated foods, fruit and vegetables in quantity, foods that offer not only macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins and fats mentioned above) but also vitamins, mineral salts and antioxidants (the latter are not found in multivitamins, but in fresh products).
If eighty percent of our diet includes these things, it’s not clear why we can’t offer ourselves a one-time glass of liqueur or a pastry croissant.