One of the best examples of a food industry (grains) being able to influence eating habits to their benefit.
Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it three times a day and little else. You get the idea. The problem there is "x is healthy" makes people overconsume it and ignore anything that isn't marked "healthy".
"healthy" eating takes work, study, and moderation.
At the same time, there is also a faction that appears to argue against overly studying or obsessing about nutrition science, saying that if you really just prioritize variety, moderation, and made-at-home, then you're already 90% of the way there.
Ben Goldacre used to have a regular column against misleading health fads, amongst other things, called Bad Science.
He was a practicing GP and whenever asked to give some advice himself he said that people and lifestyles were too varied to give any advice more specific than "Eat mostly fresh fruit and vegetables, cut down on cigarettes and alcohol, and do some exercise".
I think point is less to stay ignorant and more to focus on macro-level changes (water > soda/beer, vary your starches, get sugar from fruit, avoid "filling up" on purely protein) rather than obsessing over this or that micronutrient and trying to boil it all down into a perfect formulation that you consume in a sludgy pancake-batter-tasting "shake" twice a day.
> Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose.
Speaking of things from back in the day, an episode of GI Joe featured this idea (only it was dumping truckloads of apples onto a giant gelatinous blob to kill it).
People can be persuaded to silly things on silly logic.
There was a time after prohibition when the prevailing theory was that vodka was healthier than whiskey because it was clear and whiskey wasn't.
Our educational institutions marched an entire populace right into obesity because the government insisted the food pyramid was scientific, and not the result of lobbying.
Honestly it's a bit wild to me that we ever think we know anything for certain.
Oh, sure. There are lots of things in lots of spirits. Sugars, distillation methods, heart-cut precision can all yield different effects from a spirit, but I can distill a bottle of vodka that's predominately methanols and acetaldehydes from the heads that are perfectly clear, and definitely not better for you than the same spirit from just five minutes later in the distillation.
