I was wondering what’s worse, eating unhealthy / bad but within daily intake limits (lack of nutrients but no weight gain) or eating healthy but too much kcal (getting all necessary nutrients but also weight gain)?
I think eating healthy but too much is better than eating unhealthy and within limits, but I’m curious about other people’s thoughts on this.
I assume that by “healthy” you mean better quality food, as in more nutrient dense/whole ingredients
If you’re a grown adult? Too many calories is more detrimental. Regardless of food quality - if you’re overweight or obese, it doesn’t matter what you ate to get there, you’re still at a higher risk of health issues just from over consuming calories. You could be killing it with the micronutrients, you could be eating high protein - doesn’t matter.
This is more of an anecdotal thing, but there is a professor who did the Twinkie Diet. He was so adamant about proving that calories matter, that he went into a calorie deficit eating twinkies, and basically, packaged sweets. Not only did he lose weight, but his blood tests improved.
If you’re a small child, as an example - eating fewer nutrients is far more detrimental than eating more calories. If you’re grown, in your 20’s/30’s, you can get away with eating poorly, to a degree - it’s not good to be deficient in anything, but you can come back from it. but if you’re a child? Doesn’t work that way - you can’t come back from certain deficiencies, and the consequences can be a lot more permanent
We have actually found human remains, with physical evidence of a poor childhood diet in the bones. The fact that they can look at adult human remains and know that they had nutrient deficient diets in childhood, says a lot
Why compare it? Junk Food comes with a lot of stuff that’s unhealthy but so does being overweight. Sumo wrestlers eat extremely healthy non-processed food, but they still get the typical problems from being overweight, like diabetes, heart problems etc.
Eating healthy but too much is way better. It is not even comparable.
I will give you an example:
100 kcal meat, 100 kcal sugar
100 kcal meat: build and protect your muscles, important nutrients for your brain and hormonal system, energy for your body
100 kcal sugar: not even energy for your body, it’s just stored as fat and makes your body unhealthy
The source of this: