Is it possible in the near future for tasty/snack food to be healthy?
Now im not saying “no healthy food tastes good”, but why is it that cheap, processed food can’t also be healthy? And also would it be possible for this in the future?
Is there anything stopping the possibility of having tradition tasty food (on the level of KFC, doritos, chocolate, mudcake…) that is also quite healthy for people?
I’d think with the technology we have it certainly shouldnt be impossible…
Could you define “healthy” for the purposes of this discussion?
[nitpick]And it should be “healthful”, BTW.[/nitpick]
When i say “can it be healthy?” i mean “Can people eat at McDonalds, Taco Bell and Krispy Kreme 4 nights a week and still taste the same thing, but not have health problems”
When i say “healthy” i kind of extend that to mean “supremely not un-healthy”. Possibly even meaning a single meal containing less than 10% the recommended daily intake of ANYTHING. So 3 meals a day puts you at 30% (or more…), and pills and supplements make up for the rest
Get it?
No. Food that tastes awesome has lots of sugar and fat in it. Sorry.
You can make your own food that tastes great, but even comfort food at restraunts, that is made to mimic homemade, is loaded with salt.
With considerable research and effort, you might be able to get the taste of those foods – non-calorically – through chemical means in much the same way you can get the taste of vanilla from synthetic vanillin. The trade-off is that you wouldn’t get the texture, mouth-feel, and sateity merely from eyedroppers of flavor applied to the tongue. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying, even if the flavors were spot-on.
I’ll bet this is a race that will be won by things like virtual-reality technology, artificial nervous stimulation, and nanotechnology before it is won by food science, genetics, and biotechnology.
EDIT: another thought – if nanotechnology ever gets good enough, it might be possible to have nonobots in you gut processing all the bad stuff in food so that your body doesn’t need to. So you could pig out on junk constantly; let the nanobots take care of the sugar, fat, and sodium; and just take fiber, vitamins, minerals and such in pill form. Presumably, you’d have horrendous diarrhea all the time as the 'bots expell all the junk out of your system … but maybe that’s worth it? Note, though, that that is crazy-talk science at the moment.
Holy shit, sugar and fat taste good, and they are bad for you?
Thanks for not reading my thread (or for not being smart enough to respond to what i was asking).
I like the nanobots idea! And I don’t see why sufficiently advanced nanobots couldn’t process the excess appropriately for export. [/science fiction]
I think we do OK now with having fake fats and sweeteners that taste fine to me. I’m not sure how good salt substitutes are, since that hasn’t been an issue for me. Some do exist, though. Confession - I am one of those people who prefers Diet Coke.
However, I find current artifical sources of fiber and some nutrients (B vitamins, iron, omega-3s) more onerous than trying to get them from healthy food. So that’s an issue that would need to be addressed as well.
There’s also just the issue of excess. If you get cookies down to 10 calories, there will be someone out there who decides to eat 100 of them.
What Santo Rugger said may seem like a smart-ass tautology, but think about it --individual humans aren’t immortal.
It makes sense that the most calorically-dense foods will eventually lead to things that lead to death. Human bodies, in a very nihilistic sense, are merely a shell and carrying system, for our genes. So long as great-tasting and high-calorie foods don’t kill us of en masse before reproductive age, then evolutionarily, there’s no problem.
Humans (like most animals) evolved in an environment of great scarcity. At the time, the threat of starvation was much more dire than the threat of obesity-related illness.
Wasn’t asking about how to solve people eating “to excess”, was i?
In PopSci and PopMech they talk about food technologies from time to time. I read articles recently where they are able to get the texture and flavor of meat from vat grown stuff, they just need to figure out how to do it in mass production and at a cost point people are willing to pay for.
In another field, it’s now legal and technologically possible to clone cows. So they found the perfect cow with the perfect muscle mass and fat content and who’s parents and siblings tasted the best out of any cow ever, and they are going to clone it. In 10-15 years, expect the best tasting steaks and burgers ever. They may not be nutritionally better, but they will taste so good you won’t care.
Another article mentioned how they could make stuff in a lab that has the texture of one thing but the taste of another. So you get apple texture with lasagna flavor, or meat texture with candy flavor, etc.
“Can” it be done - sure. But mass producing it in a cheap manner may be a big holdback. Sure, having cheese that is as healthy as celery, a burger as healthy as an apple, and a banana split as healthy as the banana would be awesome. In Star Trek, I’m sure the replicators can do it, hrm?
This is General Questions. We don’t do this here.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
All food is healthy. Lack of food causes death.
I’ll take that bet. Electrical stimulation of appetite might be possible by mechanical means, but it’ll also be possible by bio-chemical means. With our progress in genetics, we’ll eventually figure out how to chemically shut off all sorts of things-- appetite, digestion, processing of certain foodstuffs, etc.
Combine that with different food processing (super-olestra, anyone?), and “junk food” will get better for us over time. Or, more accurately, we’ll be better able to resist/process junk food in the future.
This is the growth area for biochemistry, BTW. Obesity ain’t going away on its own, and in a free society, you can’t simply tell people not to eat more when its so cheap to eat. Medicine is going to have to figure out how to counteract a couple of million years worth of evolutionary tendency to pig out-- and for many people to stay fat once pigged out.
Having tried various vegetarian/vegan meat and dairy substitutes, texture is what I find to be the tough one. We’ve tried a soy-based ice cream that has the right flavor, but it doesn’t have the velvetty texture that real butter fats have, and it really affects the enjoyment of itto a surprising degree. However, I don’t know if that’s a learned response or not. Do I associate the velvetty texture to ooey-gooey goodness because in all my experiences the yumminess and texture have come together?
We tried a “meatless hamburger” patty that was probably the closest in taste and texture to real meat that I have yet tried, but - holy penguins! - the sodium levels are astronomical! If the sodium was drastically reduced that mostly soy burger would be much more healthful, but would probably have not flavor.
Aye, there’s the rub. The close-to-real faux burgers and chicken breasts we’ve tried cost a bloomin’ fortune! And (currently) are only slightly better for you than real meat. I don’t doubt that better quality (as far as being high in the good nutiritional components and low in the bad-for-you components) is possible, presently the price point would be out of reach for most people.
I think eventually, when we get to the more Star Trek era foods, that we will be able to do the things our favorite sci-fi authors have suggested, like turn yeast into accurate copies of steak, but I would be surprised to see it in my lifetime.
We already have fat substitutes that are as tasty as ordinary fat yet don’t contribute to calories because they aren’t absorbed. Olestra is the best known one (also available under the trade name Olean). Don’t start with “anal leakage” either. Olestra was reformulated years ago to eliminate that as a problem. Lays makes “light” potato chips with olestra and they taste just fine.
The past few years have also seen a number of new sugar substitutes introduced, which are touted as being much closer in taste to sugar than the bitter aftertasty substitutes of yore. Splenda is already in hundreds of foods, and I expect to see an explosion of them in the future.
No, I don’t got it. This is meaningless as far as I can tell. There are two solutions: use substitutes that aren’t absorbed by the body or modify body tissue so that the foods aren’t absorbed. In neither case will you get 10% of the recommended daily intake because that presupposes that the food is being absorbed. I don’t think you understand the implications of your own question.
Sunflower seeds. Beef Jerky. Dried Fruit. Cheese Sticks. Veggies and dip. Dark Chocolate.
All of those are 'snack food" yet contain valuable nutrients and when eaten in moderation are fine.
:dubious:
If it was possible to make awesome tasting foods that were healthy, somebody would be doing it. There’s too much money in it not to.
How is that not what you’re asking? Spleda and Olestra were mentioned upthread, but if they were as good as the products they are intending to replace, they would have already replaced the products they replace. Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact, but if that’s the kind of answer you’re looking for, perhaps you’re posting in the wrong forum?