Sometimes, people believe they are eating healthy while being unaware of the ecological damage their health fad causes.
Two examples come to mind:
Coconut sugar spoils the health of a coconut tree with repeated sap harvest and sends the farmers/ecology down the drain in long term. I see an entire coconut-based industry/society dying down & suffering. Should I just shut up when I notice people promoting such wrong things? And why did they start believing that it is THE healthiest sugar, there are other natural sweeteners to try out, right? Coconut sugar is high in fructose & is no better than cane sugar (sucrose).
I think good health goes hand in hand with sustainable harvest. Something that wrecks havoc with the ecology/health of a tree, can never be good for us to consume.
Quinoa: the very cheap seeds grown by Bolivians, the poor man's food, is now exported all over the world, is the fashionable healthy thing to eat... Domestic prices of quinoa skyrocketed and the middle class stays hungry.
The poor grow poorer. This is not right, I am sure there are healthy ways of eating which we can adopt from within our local ecology, amaranth seed flour comes to mind, local rural Kenyans eat it. It is even funnier when the people who import & consume quinoa, do it without knowing about its saponin content!
It is okay to import & eat some exotic good-for-health thing once in a while, or if it is sustainable.
But this kind of consumption, feels unfair to me.
I don't know what the solution is, it is a free world so we can't place restrictions... But I do feel people need to be better educated. Sometimes a very healthy plant grows right in your backyard, but we ignore it and import some exotic healthy item to eat...
There are many such examples that come to my mind... Poor malnourished Kenyans who can't afford to eat Nile Perch from Lake Victoria in Kisumu, because it is now exported & very expensive.. The list goes on..