When people ask if a food is good for you, I bite my tongue, which is a thing I do to warm it up before yelling. I start my harangue by asking what the hell they mean by “good for you?” Do they think blueberries will make them stronger? Smarter? Live longer? Get sick less often? Look at their phone less? Is their understanding of how food works based on the radioactive-vegetable episode of Gilligan’s Island?  I’m assuming here that we all agree on what food is. Food does not include alcohol, fentanyl or Cheez Whiz. For everything else, the truth is that foods aren’t good or bad for you. Whether a food is useful for any person at any particular time depends on your goals. Are you riding in the Tour de France that day? Croissants, pasta, and soda are team-mandated. Weightlifting? Fish, egg whites and lots of protein will build muscle. Losing weight? Vegetables and fiber-rich grains fill you up. Turning America into an autocracy? Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds will fuel the madness. For those of us without goals, it’s not even that complicated. Eat lean protein, fiber, and a little healthy fat at each meal. Finding the perfect versions of each of those macronutrients doesn’t matter. It’s not that micronutrients aren’t important. It’s that if you’re eating lean protein, fiber and healthy fat, you’re getting plenty of vitamins and minerals. Americans don’t get scurvy. They get gout. If you’re worried about food dye in Froot Loops, you have focused on the wrong noun in that sentence. If you’re regularly chugging food dye, it would be equally reasonable to panic if a little Froot Loops got mixed in. You can worry about the hexanes in seed oils right after you work out seven days a week and eliminate dessert. I spent a day listening to people fret about toxins at a Goop event that ended with cocktails.
Anyone putting alcohol into their body, which includes me, forfeits the right to panic about microplastics. If you think male reproduction is harmed by residue in bottled water, you should see how dudes do after a half bottle of Fireball. The trainers I know all have a couple of cheat meals each week in which they have pasta and cupcakes. A little sugar, a bit of food dye, a few hexanes - this isn’t going to make you unhealthy. It’s your habits. The dose makes the poison. Eating too many carrots can give you Carotenosis, which is not at all dangerous but does make rich white people look like they did actual physical labor.
I know I’m not going to stop you from saying, “They keep changing their minds about what I should eat.” Red wine? Eggs? Butter? Dark chocolate? Gluten? Then you quote that scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.  To this I respond: Why are you following cutting-edge nutritional studies? Are you also up on how LUX-ZEPLIN is searching for dark matter in weakly interacting massive particles? You know that a meal of chocolate and red wine is a bad idea, and that tofu and asparagus is a good idea. I barely follow the habits I adopted ten years ago, when trainer Harley Pasternak got me in shape for a GQ article.
I drink too much wine. I eat too many baked goods. But I’m still in good shape because we all eat a small range of things for most of our meals out of laziness, and my go-to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners are built around that protein/fiber/fat rule. I don’t take supplements. I don’t worry about food dyes, artificial sweeteners, or fear ultra-processed foods. I brush my teeth after dinner to discourage snacking. Instead of panicking about trace amounts of chemicals in vaccines, I avoid the stress of working for Donald Trump. Most importantly, I don’t read articles about which foods are good for me. Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here:
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Monday, September 15, 2025
A Definitive List of The Foods That Are Bad For You
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