Where is the line between appreciation and poor health?

[Dlavjr]

There are a lot of communities out there based around hobbies that involve food and alcohol. Many people who are heavily passionate about food and experimenting with it will likely use ingredients that are generally considered by nutritionist's standards to be bad such as wheats, alcohols, sugars, etc. Even deeper than this, there are similar things with wine and whiskey, where people are genuinely passionate about the craft of these things rather than the "binge and get drunk" factor. Is there any balance to be had here? Is there legitimacy to these passions? I know there are chefs who will have a higher goal of cooking only with fine ingredients that are pure and healthy, but what about bakers? How does one maintain balance between partaking in what they genuinely feel passion for doing, and living a healthy lifestyle? 

This topic can be stretched even further outside of nutrition with people who are passionate about video games and film, even. At what point does passion become addiction, and how can one maintain it as a passion without ever falling into a harmful addiction? Or is there no difference?

[Mada_]

I think this is a good topic, I think about this all the time. 

If Walter White was passionate about making meth, would this justify selling it?

Probably not I'd say. The value of such products are based on temporary pleasure, but with the downside of physical harm. The same goes for the "tasty" food and drink industry. 

There is a book called 'The Pleasure Trap' that explains this concept really well. 

 

[Flowerfaeiry]

11 hours ago, Dlavjr said:

Is there any balance to be had here? Is there legitimacy to these passions? I know there are chefs who will have a higher goal of cooking only with fine ingredients that are pure and healthy, but what about bakers? How does one maintain balance between partaking in what they genuinely feel passion for doing, and living a healthy lifestyle? 

I think that the way a passion is expressed can change as the individual changes. Maybe a chef who fried doughnuts at a farmers market becomes healthy and now slings epic salads. 

[Nahm]

Passion is an emotion, and not a property or description of a person or people, in any identity manor. Infinite mind appears as the thoughts; ‘finite bodymind’, similarly, “line”. This is why there is an exception to every generalization and or statistic, and why ‘bad’ is judgement, and not a property of anything which seems to be judged. 

[UDT]

Constantly eating junk is not a passion - it is an addiction to blood sugar spikes and food high.

No nutritionist eats their diet without exception.
They eat their diet 90% of the time. And then its no problem.

One example -  If Im getting offered a crazy deep fried choco donut, I will look at what I ate today, the time of the day, what I am doing in the next hours and will adapt this so that I can comfortably munch the donut. 

Will the fried fat cause oxidative damage ? Ofc. 
Will the simple glucose spike my blood sugar levels sending me to space? Ofc.

But If this is my problem, then I need to stop breathing as well because oxygen is literally deadly poison we learned to utilize

And if I dont breathe Im gonna die - If I dont eat the donut Im also gonna die.
It is all about balance. 


 

[Village]

I thought about this quite a bit because I'm a barista and I quit coffee over a year ago. I'd always loved coffee, I loved the smell of it even as a child before my parents allowed me to drink it. At work I drank a lot because of the addiction but also because tasting makes you better at your craft. Eventually I decided to make health my #1 priority and I quit caffeine altogether. I'm happy with the choice.

All in all, I think it comes to what you value more in life. I'm passionate about health and natural living, and even though I like my job and I'm good at it, it doesn't align with my values. Imo values should come before your cravings and addictions, and even appreciations.

Another path one could take - continuing with the coffee example - is to ensure you only deal with the highest quality beans, and to find your balance in terms of consumption. For me, I've done so much tasting in the past that I don't need to anymore. I can tell quality of the coffee by the look, smell, consistency, temperature, latte art, the sound the steamer makes when I turn it off, the customer's feedback, and so on.