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People Explain Which Seemingly Unhealthy Foods Are Actually Quite Good For You

People Explain Which Seemingly Unhealthy Foods Are Actually Quite Good For You
Image by stina_magnus from Pixabay

As with all health food advice, your mileage may vary.


Most of this advice can be boiled down to, "eat everything in moderation." Even the healthiest foods can have negative effects on your body if you eat too much of it. However, there's some food contents that can be beneficial for your overall well-being you might not have ever considered.

Reddit user, u/icetea_69, wanted to know what we should eat more of when they asked:

What "unhealthy" food is actually healthy? (serious)

Reddit Users Share Their Best 'It's A Small World After All' Experience

It's All In The Preparation

Sometimes the food itself isn't unhealthy, sometimes its all in how you prepare it. Turns out when you douse your food in a liter of butter and a barrels' worth of salt it'll lead to bloaty, dreary results.

They Can Be Fun...Or Healthy, I Guess

Tacos can be very healthy depending on what you put in them.

Andwhy99

I came here to say tacos. Living in mexico, everyone always talks about tacos like junk food. Like i wanna loose weight, no more tacos orno more tortillas. But they can be part of a very balanced and healthy meal.

Adept-Cheek

Keep It Above Butter Level

Popcorn is overall a pretty low calorie snack as long as you don't drown it in too much butter and salt

MaizeNBlueWaffle

Lean Ground Beef And Fresh Ingredients, There's Nothing Better

A burger.

Not a fast food type but a good burger with fresh ingredients is a mighty fine and healthy meal. Protein, bread, lettuce, onion, tomato.

Wacokidwilder

When People Don't Understand What's In The Food

We don't understand a lot of what's in our food. This comes from a constant stream of diet fads and online "health gurus" shouting at us for our attention. Do the research yourself, look at what's in it and what ti does, and make the choice for yourself.

Mmm, Crispy And Slow Roasted....​

I know most people already know this, but Pork belly is healthy. I'm no doctor, so I'm not going to attempt to explain why animal fat and cholesterol are actually healthy for you, but there is growing evidence that it's an essential part of the diet. I keep salted pork and non cured pork belly in the fridge at all times, not to mention lard. Instead of using vegetable/soy oil I use pork fat in my cooking.

Legitimate

Ghee Is Putting Olive Oil On Blast

Ghee.

I remember some millennials making faces and turning to subpar olive oil just to seem westernised. Ghee is healthy in small amounts, just like real olive oil. But way better than hydrogenated oils. It won't make yoj unhealthy if you have like 1-2 tbsps/ day.

crystalclearbuffon

Fats Are Energy

Well fat in general gets a bad rap... but it's pretty universally agreed upon these days that there are a lot of healthy fats that are important for brain function and do not "make you fat". Also, foods that have these fats may be seen as "unhealthy" to someone on a restrictive diet because they are high in calories, but in fact are super healthy! I.e. avacados, walnuts, flax seeds...

Escape_Motor

Eating fats alongside vitamin-rich foods (in particular fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K) can improve absorption of those vitamins. To get the most of your multivitamin supplements, they should be taken with a meal, and they will be most effective if that meal has sufficient oil in it to promote absorption of the fat-soluble vitamins. The water-soluble ones will be absorbed pretty easily since we're mostly water anyways.

JimmyAirbourne

Who Doesn't Love A Good Potato?

Potatoes get a bad rep because they're "full of carbs" and, of course, how most people tend to eat them. But they're actually a very good way of helping to lose weight, and have most of the nutrients you need.

Potatoes have an incredibly high "satiety index": that is, how full you feel after eating them.

If you plot the satiety index, you'll see a pretty straightforward linear relationship (those high in sugar tend to have a very low index, which is why you can scoff a tub of ice cream and still feel hungry afterwards). There's one massive outlier: the humble boiled potato:

https://nutritiondata.self.com/images/help/fullness-factor.png

Importantly, this is only true for boiled or baked potatoes. Chips score much lower on the satiety index (less than a ¼ of the boiled potato).

If you are trying to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, replacing pasta or rice with a boiled or baked potato is a very good to go about doing it. Its much cheaper than all those diet drinks etc.

Silly-Power

When The Best Stuff Is Also A Benefit

Isn't it a treat when the stuff you really want to chow down on all day turns out to not be as bad as you thought?

Well, still, eat an appropriate amount and you should be fine. No one's saying have 15 bananas a day.

It's Food On A Stick. You Can't Beat That.

Chicken doner kebab with herb dressing. It's just chicken meat grilled on vertical rotisserie, so all the fat just drips down and it's served as a tortilla wrap with a big pile of salad veggies and some yoghurt dressing.

Yoink_Tactics

"When I was a lad I ate 4 dozen eggs, every morning to help me get large."

food science has more or less squarely determined that eggs are amazing little nutrition bombs and that the idea that eating a serving of eggs is like pouring concrete into your veins was utter f-cking rubbish and kind of terrible science.

People still think they're horrible for you thanks to a decades-long history of them being demonized by fad diets.

vagabond_

Maybe Don't Add So Much Flavored Creamer Too, Huh?

Coffee. It often gets a bad rep ...but, along with increasing metabolism for weight control and can increase adrenaline for athletics and/or for clearer thinking...& much more...Did you know that many of the nutrients in coffee beans make their way into the finished brewed coffee. A single cup of coffee contains:

Riboflavin (vitamin B2): 11% of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI).

Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5): 6% of the RDI.

Manganese and potassium: 3% of the RDI.

Magnesium and niacin (vitamin B3): 2% of the RDI.

That doesn't sound like a big nutritional supplement, but...since most people drink several cups per day — these amounts quickly add up.

New_Awakening4me

An Apple A Day And All That

Bananas. Sure it's 100+ calories, but the fiber helps with sugar release. Same with other sweet fruits. Saying the fruit as a whole is bad due to "sugar" makes the fallacy of saying all sugar is the same. It's not. The sugars in whole fruit get released slowly and steadily in the bloodstream than simple sugars, even though they are both sugars.

MasterAqua2

Dark Chocolate For Everyone!

Dark chocolate. The darker the healthier

Professional-Tax-936

Diabetic here. Sugar free chocolate is trash and literally has laxative in it--but 90+ dark chocolate works great for me. It's a pretty easy choice :)

Zebirdsandzebats

In Moderation, People. Moderation.

Peanut butter! Criticized for being high in fat- but is also super high in protein and an important part in a lot of people's diets.

loerclohs

Peanut butter is healthy, but is super caloric. The serving size for peanut butter is deceptively small and that's where it can become unhealthy if you have too much

MaizeNBlueWaffle

Remember: Everything in moderation. Nothing is truly "unhealthy" for you, so long as you keep in mind that overdoing it on anything can lead to weight gain. Be mindful of what you're eating and, above all, enjoy it.

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Women Explain Which Mistakes Dads Make Raising Daughters

Reddit user Bluemonday82 asked: 'Daughters of reddit: what's the biggest mistake dads make with their daughters?'

man with girl on his shoulders

Brittani Burns on Unsplash

"Daddy's Girl, Daddy's Girl, I'm the center of Daddy's world..." ~ "Daddy's Girl" by Red Sovine

A lot has been written about the bond between fathers and daughters.

But there's always room for improvement, right?

And who better to offer constructive criticism than daughters?

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woman making the shushing gesture

Bjorn Pierre on Unsplash

Full disclosure at all times with your significant other, right?

Yeah, good luck with that.

Let's get real—there are things we don't tell our partners for a lot of reasons.

Sometimes you just don't feel like having to explain something that doesn't really affect them.

Sometimes you're protecting them from something that will have a devastating effect on them.

These are probably going to be more that second one...

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We all have that moment where someone we know says something so completely absurd, the only response we think of is 'WTF is wrong with you?'

Sometimes, it's something woefully inaccurate that you can't wrap your head around the fact that someone believes that.

Othertimes, it's something completely offensive and you regret your association with that person.

My college roommate was a girl I knew from my high school. I didn't know her too well, but we had some big things in common, so I figured it'd be fun to live with her.

This girl was half-Korean and talked a lot about racist people. At first, I let her rant, figuring maybe she or someone in her family faced some racism. I faced some myself, and I agreed with most of the things she said about racists. Eventually, however, I realized she was equating the word 'racist' with the word 'white.'

I spoke to her once, telling her she can't use 'racist' and 'white' interchangeably. She agreed to stop doing that, but within a few days, she started doing it again. She was a very bright girl, so I was a little concerned about this, especially since her own dad was white and was possibly the nicest man in the world. Not to mention, this made her and her siblings half-white too. Did that mean they were all half-racist?

I stuck by her for a while, but when she started saying things about what she wanted to do to racist people (once again using the word 'white' instead of 'racist'), I realized I couldn't be around her anymore. She couldn't talk about anything else after a while, and every time she spoke, I wanted to say, 'WTF is wrong with you?'

We did not room together the next year.

Redditors have stories similar to mine (and some even crazier), and they are eager to share.

It all started when a Redditorasked:

"What did the person do/say that made you go "what the f**k is wrong with you?"

How To End A Friendship

"In college I used to kill time between classes hanging out with a guy who was from the same redneck county as myself. We didn’t really have much else in common, but he was nice enough and seemed eager to socialize so I figured why not. I wasn’t overly social myself and didn’t know a whole lot of people."

"One day we decided to go somewhere off-campus, and he drove us. While driving, on an interstate mind you, he proceeds to show me his handgun that he kept in his truck - not in a menacing way, but in a “Ain’t that cool?” way."

"I was not immediately frightened, but I respect firearms enough to recognize we are going like 60-70mph on an interstate in daylight, and nothing good can happen in this scenario. I calmly asked him to put it away because I was not comfortable in this situation at all. He then tells me “Oh it’s not loaded” and presses the gun to his head before pulling the trigger."

"Thank f**k he was right, but still it was a wild and frightening display of reckless disregard for his own life and mine for that matter in the event that he’d accidentally killed himself while driving us. I didn’t hang out with him much after that, certainly didn’t get in a car with him."

– omjf23

"“It’s not loaded” famous last words of many an idiot."

– GloInTheDarkUnicorn

The Worst Kind Of People

"When my dad was in the nursing home, they weren't running certain expenses, like ambulance rides, through his insurance. When I took over his financials, he was tens of thousands in medical debt that shouldn't have ever been charged to him in the first place. He was in numerous collections, and his credit score was tanked."

"When I complained to the nursing home director, he said, "Well, it's not like he's going to be buying a house or a car!" Then he laughed."

"My dad was paralyzed from the waist down and needed lifelong care, so he was never going to leave the nursing home. Even though he was technically correct, I gave him the "WTF is wrong with you look." Then I complained to HIS boss and he got canned a couple a weeks later. My dad's insurance was fixed pretty quick, too."

– MNWNM

"“Sorry, what was funny about that? Could you please explain.”"

– v3n0mat3

...Seriously?

"MIL told my wife she should divorce me bc I googled whether a lasagna should be covered with foil while cooking."

– Struggle-Silent

"This is my first laugh of the thread lmao wtf."

– koreantrvp

"It actually ruined this entire trip. It was at my BIL’s wedding, which was only close family (siblings + parents) and they had the caterer make a lasagna for an evening dinner."

"Father of the bride was gonna pop it in the oven and asked if it should be covered. I googled lasagna cooking instructions and said yes it should be covered and cooked at this temp. MIL said absolutely not!"

"Me and the father of the bride kinda gave each other a look and he covered it. MIL was furious and texted my wife that I was an a hole and she should divorce me before we had kids."

– Struggle-Silent

Hostile Work Environment

"Boss at old job told the team we needed to ‘get used to a healthy level of conflict, fear and anxiety in the workplace.’ I dipped so fast after that."

– Prestigious-Energy69

"Similarly, a boss told me that I owed him my loyalty because he was paying me."

– Kylearean

How To End A Relationship

"A girl I was with while we were still together just looked at me while I was driving to her house and said.” You know I would get over you faster than you’d get over me” I was like …… Tf did you just say?"

– omega91301

"Huh. And just like that I'm over you."

– Pineapple_Spenstar

"Honestly, that would absolutely do it for me. When I was younger, I would be stupid and hurt and argue. I'm past 50 and I got no time for that nonsense."

– Terpsichorean_Wombat

There Are Other Ways To Stave Off Boredom

"I was DD for some buddies who wanted to go to a particular dance club in Baltimore. They're all hammered, it's too loud and we've been there for several hours. Casually an older woman next to me chats me up and notices my eyes are nearly crossing from boredom. I explained what I was doing there and casually (stupidly) mentioned I'm a bit bored. This psycho BITES ME on the chest! Afterward says "Well ya ain't bored now, are ya??""

– Mike7676

"Well, were you bored after that?"

– DontWannaSayMyName

"I must say, I was not!"

– Mike7676

That Goes Both Ways!

"I'm a man who works with kids, and when I started this job, I was talking to one of my old coworkers about how every once in a while I'll get weird looks for being a man working with kids and my coworker said I deserved it because some men can't be trusted with kids. I was shocked and she went on to say that I did it to myself and deserve to be questioned about it. I immediately stopped talking to her."

– Dolhedew

"What? What in the actual f**k? Doesn’t she know there are women who can’t be trusted with kids?"

– Anonymoosehead123

That Escalated Quickly

"The lady that accused my kids of cutting the line. (They hadn't, I was watching). When I went to ask her what was wrong, she told me to go back to my own country with that sh*t. (I was born in Massachusetts.)"

"The line was to pet dogs at a Renaissance Fair."

– pasafa

Everything All At Once

"While alone with a coworker, he told me that "women in the work place will lead to the decay of the fabric of society" to me. A woman. He also asked me out, got an attitude when I didn't say yes and continues to walk around with huge incel energy. He always complains that he has no one to go home to yet refuses to look at himself as a possible reason."

– Nopeferatu31

"Sounds like they should learn something from the phrase, "if you meet one a**hole, they're the a**hole. If everyone you meet is an a**hole, you're the a**hole.""

– tmpope123

Ouch!

"I told a coworker my wife had died."

"Her response: "You're one of those bald middle aged guys with a dead wife.""

"Me: "Yeah.""

– WalrusCello

"I want to think this was a wholesome thought that came out wrong. An awkward attempt at dark humor."

– ThisUsernameIsTook

*Cringing*

"Had an otherwise normal co-worker who was completely convinced windmills will cause the earth to stop spinning."

– Shadowmant

"WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!"

– Torvaun

These are all crazy 'WTF is wrong with you' stories, but that last one blew my mind in 'how is it possible people think that could be true' sort of way!

black and red tool box

Tekton on Unsplash

One of the possible wonders of adulthood is home ownership. But homes come with so many things that can break.

And the last thing you want is a nonfunctioning furnace when temperatures dip below zero or no water when you're covered in dirt and grime.

That's what routine maintenance is for—to make sure things work when you need them.

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