• Question: How do we know what foods were healthy and what foods are not? e.g chocolate, carrot etc

    Asked by Amelia to Anna, George, Jodi, Rob, Stefan on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Rob Appleyard

      Rob Appleyard answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Experiments! Someone in the past probably got really hungry and tried to eat a carrot. It was tasty and they didn’t die, so they decided that carrots were good to eat.

      Same with chocolate. Someone tried to eat cacao beans and decided they were OK, then someone else messed around with how they prepared them, and so on until we got the stuff that we call chocolate.

    • Photo: Stefan Lines

      Stefan Lines answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      We have the technology these days to probe exactly what is inside these foods; fats, fibre, sugars. Our body is an intricate machine which needs all of these basic food types – and many people have spent many years figuring out how much of each type we should have for our body to function correctly, based on how it responds.

    • Photo: Jodi Schneider

      Jodi Schneider answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Your body needs ALL kinds of foods.

      Each food has different vitamins & minerals. But the main thing is that they’re made of three different types of “stuff”:
      – fats
      – carbohydrates
      – protein
      Each food has a different percentage of fats, carbohydrates, proteins. And your body needs all three!
      Some examples:
      * Meats: protein + fat
      * Butter, oil, lard: mostly fat
      * Pasta, breads, sugar, juice: mostly carbohydrates
      * Beans: protein + carbohydrates

      Nutritional information will tell you what your food is made of:

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