My parents (in their 60s) still think this way - they mostly use that ‘egg substitute’ that comes in a carton (I think it’s some sort of processed egg white) as the bulk of their eggs, e.g. scrambled eggs using a 4:1 ratio of substitute to real eggs. They used to almost exclusively use margarine instead of butter too.
I like eggs a lot better now that I’ve learned to make them myself.
That stuff is pretty much just egg white and food coloring. Nowadays they sell undyed egg white in cartons alongside it because the trend has shifted to high protein diets.
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.
The street wisdom was that eggs gave you high cholesterol due to the yolk having loads of cholesterol (which doesn't get absorbed, we need to produce our own cholesterol).
There were a bunch of studies saying high cholesterol was bad and would give you a heart attack. Then also ones saying low cholesterol would make you crazy [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4215473/].
And also ones saying food high in cholesterol was bad. Then ones saying food high in ‘bad’ cholesterol were bad, and one’s high in ‘good’ cholesterol were good.
Then eventually we figured out that dietary cholesterol has almost no impact on blood cholesterol levels except in a tiny portion of the population.
It was about health. You know, trying not to grow old and get sick and eventually die. Between the seventies and about 15 years ago, educated people in the US, the sort of people who got their toehold in the middle class by doing what their betters told them to do, would look at you like you were deliberately trying to kill yourself if you had eggs and bacon and white bread toast with real butter on it for breakfast. It probably peaked around the turn of the century.
The margarine section of the dairy case was bigger than the butter section. Imitation cheese slices were sold right alongside regular processed cheese - they're now completely dairy free and banished to the vegan food section.
There's a famous scene in "Sleeper" (1973) by Woody Allen where the character wakes up in the future to find out that everything that was considered bad for you is considered good for you again. Woody Allen was born in 1935 so had been around long enough to know these things go in cycles.
