It's all about clean eating these days. Even piling on with extra vegetables doesn't count as healthy anymore because there's carbs, and sugar, and even dairy products to completely unfriend if you want to follow the footsteps of the many clean-eating gurus that social media is abound with.
But this festive season calls for some extra cheer – all in the form of the news that most of these 'facts' about your favourite guilty pleasures when it comes to food, are just myths that have been busted.
Also read: Lose weight OVERNIGHT: Try these 4 EASY food tips to lose inches while you sleep!
Dr Aaron Carroll, a nutritionist and physician at Indiana University, comes with the Bad Food Bibles – a book that urges people to eat everything and whatever they want.
"The first time I wrote about artificial sweeteners [in his New York Times column], one reader asked why my children hadn't been taken away from me because I let my kids drink diet soda once in a while,' Dr Carroll shared in an interview with the Daily Mail Online.
"People feel very passionately that food is either magic or poison, and these days everyone seems very concerned about what we eat. The problem is cherry-picking of research. The World Health Organization says everything causes cancer.
"If someone says something is bad for us, we go overboard. And fear sells - people will take those messages seriously. But if you cherry-pick you will find research to support almost anything," he claims.
People just adore the idea of eating gluten-free. While half the world's population is still clueless about what gluten actually is, the habit of dropping it from one's diet is the easiest go-to trend.
But Dr Carroll claims otherwise. "There just isn't the evidence to support the idea that going gluten-free does any good for people who do not have celiac disease," Dr Carroll explains.
"It really is just a 'nocebo' effect, the opposite of the placebo effect, where they believe that if they eliminate something the harm goes away. That's about it."
But if you were to adopt Dr Carroll's top tips, the first mantra of eating, in his words, happens to be moderation. "Food is something to enjoy, not to worry about," he insists.
Sugar being poison is actually a myth. Dr Carroll believes a drizzle of honey or a spoonful of sugar – as long as within the limit of 25g a day, should be fine. Even exceeding the limit is nothing to worry about unless one is spiralling to a binge.
Also, milk is not the divine entity when it comes to being good for the body, It is, in fact, a dessert, according to Dr Carroll. "We have been led to believe that milk is good for your bones. And if we hear something is good for us, sometimes we go overboard and have too much of it.
"If you actually look at it, while milk has a high calcium content, it has many down sides similar to a dessert, so you should treat it like that and certainly shouldn't push yourself to drink it every day."
And everybody's beloved – coffee – is in fact, NOT cancerous! "We need to really have a look at how we categorize what is dangerous and what is not," Dr Carroll claims.
"The World Health Organization says coffee causes cancer. That has to be one of the stupidest they've said. Obviously coffee is not as dangerous as smoking. The sun causes cancer, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't go outside. In fact, evidence suggests coffee is good for you."
"Ultimately, we need to just try to eat fresh food in a balanced way. That involves cutting out processes that humans created to make it easier to consume foods," Dr Carroll says. Apple juice is a processed food. We were meant to eat the apple - not drink its pressed juice.
"Bread is a processed food, and junk food obviously. As I said, everything is fine in moderation, but if you aim to cut out anything, make it processed foods, not an ingredient that you don't have an allergy to."
