Challenges

So you want to try and make your diet healthier? Good luck with that. There are several substantial challenges that will make it more difficult:

• Diet trends are usually based on vast over-simplifications of nutritional needs, and not maintainable over the long term, and certainly not beyond when they are inevitably debunked.
  
• Government food regulation will always be several years behind the latest science, and heavily influenced by industry interest groups. Food labeling is only of minimal help, with several key data points missing.
• Food producers' and retailers' health claims cannot be considered credible. These companies are trying to sell products. The health claims on them are merely marketing messages, and how true they are is somewhat beside the point. "Healthy" food is also generally more expensive, as retailers see it as a value-add for which they can charge extra.
  
• The science of nutrition is a vast field with new discoveries being made daily (and old discoveries being invalidated almost as often). There is no way the average person can be expected to maintain a strong understanding of how different foods affect our overall health.

So to summarize: the diet people are against you, the government is against you, companies are against you, and science is against you. Those are some pretty intimidating opponents to say the least. It kind of makes all this pressure to eat healthy seem like a bit of a kick in the head, when the institutions that are supposed to help us are conspiring to make us less healthy.

I plan to write more about each of these challenges in the near future. But the plain truth is that eating well is hard and it requires real work.