Healthy for me has always meant good ingredients and freshly prepared meals. The word has always guided my approach to what I eat and how I cook. Healthy is the reason I became a dietitian. Healthy is the reason I work in recipe analysis.
I grew up in California, a beautiful state blessed with a Mediterranean climate and a growing season lasting almost the entire year. After leaving California, I lived and cooked in Montréal, Vancouver, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Brittany, and now New York. But my approach to healthy never changed. Regardless of the climate, growing season, or a long brutal winter.
Good ingredients and freshly prepared meals was the meaning I brought to healthy when I walked into my first nutrition class in 1994. That decision to go back to school led to my second career as a dietitian.
As a student of nutrition in the early 1990s, I learned about another kind of healthy. I was taught to talk about nutrients and to reference food in terms of nutrient density. I was also taught to measure healthfulness in grams and milligrams.
My professional work experience has been in clinical nutrition, weight loss, and recipe analysis. I acquired a software analysis tool early on and it didn’t take me long to figure out there was a disconnect between how I talked about healthy before my nutrition studies and what I learned about healthy from my nutrition studies. That was when I realized we live in a healthy vs. healthy world.
Fast forward to today. Our dietary guidelines are updated every five years. The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines read like a report card on our collective American failure to follow a “healthy” eating pattern. The results are ugly. Our average score is 59 out of a possible 100. In September 2022, the FDA published a proposal to update the use of the word healthy on food product labels. The stated purpose is to better align product labeling with Dietary Guidelines. The FDA proposal would cover individual products, main dishes, and meals. The estimate is that only 4% of the products on supermarket shelves today would qualify.
The nutrient thresholds for sodium, saturated fat, added sugar reflect evidence based values that support chronic disease risk reduction (CDRR). This acronym captures the spirit of our dietary guidance and food labeling regulations. It’s a clinical approach that redefines healthy food and healthy patterns down to functional nutrient dense components based on evidence of chronic disease risk reduction.
Most Americans do not use the word healthy with the same degree of clinical precision as do our Dietary Guidelines or FDA labeling regulations, a phenomena with the potential to generate significant linguistic confusion.
Linn Steward RDN, Recipe Analyst, Owner, Gourmet Metrics LLC
