This drives me insane! I swear I've spent half an hour walking around our local corner shop looking for a healthy snack before, and getting so frustrated by how hard it is! 75% of the shop is dedicated to crisps, chocolate and biscuits and soft drinks, and the rest is shared by tins of beans. You find a healthy snacks section, and it's full of non-healthy foods (like flapjack!), or everything costs a fortune.

I hate the way they try to pretend rubbish foods are healthy too. Like adding vitamin C to coco pops, makes them healthy....

As you can see, this is a big gripe of mine too! I feel your pain!!

Remember we are all individuals, with different needs.  One person's "healthy" is another person's "not good for you". 

A thin man who cycles 10 miles everyday needs some sugar and carbs and/or fat in his diet.  He might need salt if he sweats alot!  A growing child who plays sport needs his milk and butter for calcium and vitamin D for his bones to grow strong.  An old lady needs the protein, and calcium in dairy products to keep her bones strong.  A young overweight woman might need high water content foods, fruit, veg and protein from meat, fish or pulses to keep her feeling full, but not the fat in cream and butter or sugar and carbs in high quantities, if she is prone to weight gain.

Know your own body; feed it what it needs according to your age, lifestyle and general health... and listen to what your body likes - a little (with the emphasis on little) of what you fancy does you good!  Eat a balanced range of different foods, different colours, different flavours and you can't go wrong if you stick to the old saying; "everything in moderation".

Advertising has a lot to answer for!! I recently read 'Fat Chance' by Dr Robert Lustig and he compared lots of popular diets and compared them to decide low calorie but balanced diet is the answer 😊 Also enough fibre. So i guess there aren't any 'healthy' foods as such, just 'healthier' choices 😊 

I eat a clean food diet, lots of fruit, vegetables, nuts, lentils, & dairy in the form of kefir, moderate amounts of cheese & starches, & limit anything processed, salty, or artificially sweetened.

I'm vegetarian & don't find eating healthy difficult at all!

The important thing to remember is to avoid sugars.  These have a harmful effect on the body when digestion breaks their constituent parts down into glucose and fructose.  Glucose is good (apart from too much), fructose is bad (leads to fatty liver disease).  All carbohydrates break down into sugars.

Thanks for posting the fructose comparison tables. However, I find it misleading that they use different amounts (like a whole cabbage, looking high in fructose, versus a "cup of shreaded" something); to me it would have been easier to read using the same amount (100g, a percentage).

I also think that the amount of fibre and other nutrients is different in each type of vegetable/fruit. The fibre, pigments, phytonutrients, etc. is not considered. That is why I don't particularly trust the "warnings" of a product being "very high on x", because if it's a whole product, it probably has got something else on it that helps digesting and absorbing that high amount of x.

What I am quite interested about is the quality of the food, not the ingredients per se (I like to know, but I only use it rarely). What I mean by quality of food is basically their qualities such as where are they from, under what stress were they grown (irrigation, fake lights, pesticides, poor soil, etc.) and intrinsic qualities. I have been trying to understand why I feel certain effects with certain foods that matches the theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Macrobiotics. Why do roots make you more "grounded" and green leaves and shoots more "uplifted".

I remember when I was studying Biology and they talked about geotropism (movement towards the earth/soil). Roots have more positive geotropism and shoots more negative geotropism. That is another quality/characteristic of what we are eating, that we don't know how to take into account, but somehow I can feel a difference.

Of course, the cooking style also had an effect, but I wonder if anyone else has questioned that or taken it into account.

So...make meals yourself. Ready-made tends to add sauce, salt and sugar to add flavour. You can pay less and do this yourself if you cook and use herbs and spices. Pulses are a great option and very filling. You can batch make food and freeze it as well, if you need something quick.

I would be loathed to value everything as unhealthy. Our bodies need fat, so there is no harm in eating cheese. Just don't eat a whole block of it.

Same for carbs, and "unhealthy" snacks. Nothing wrong with a chocolate bar, it's when it becomes a regular habit. Would suggest buying fresh fruit for a snack, or crudités and hummus etc. (yes I know hummus is "fattening" but it contains healthy fat and protein).