Am I really advocating junk food?

‘Sofie, why are you advocating for junk food?’ is a question I often get. Let me be crystal clear: I’m not advocating for junk food out of some deep love for it. I don’t eat these so-called bad, unhealthy foods that much. But I do want my kids to have a healthy relationship with junk food – which ironically means I stop calling it junk and just food.

Balance, to me, means something deeper than just making up for the ‘bad’ with the ‘good’. Balance isn’t about flipping between two extremes. That’s basically un-balance. Balance is about food neutrality, filtering out that moral layer that sticks to food like mental pesticides. It’s about not demonizing foods, even the ultra-processed ones (or UPF’s). From a nutritional perspective, balance means we eat from all the main food groups. But I like to think of balance differently; balance is that quiet pause – the breath you take before judgment – when you realize there are no good or bad foods, only good or bad experiences with them. Maybe you’ve had bad experiences with food. For example, your body started to change around 12 years, and you ate a lot of carbs then. Note that these facts are not correlated – they just co-exist. Another example? You were restricted from candy when you were young and feel like you can’t control yourself around candy. Here, there’s a correlation, and it’s even causal.

Just like detachment grows from attachment, balance grows from permission. What if the attraction of junk food is not only the glitzy packaging and yummy flavors, but also that feeling of doing something tempting, against the rules? What if the attraction of junk food isn’t only about the glitzy packaging, challenges in our food system, and the flavor rush, but also about the forbidden fruit effect? For example, an eye tracking study in Vienna found that the presentations of unhealthy foods do not automatically lead to higher visual attention or emotional arousal. Yet parents’ restrictions on candy at home influence children’s emotional arousal toward unhealthy products. Okay, it was a small study, but combined with the research on the impact of parental restrictions on eating in the absence of hunger, preferences for salty and sweet foods (so-called palatable foods), and fruits and veggies, knowing this can be a game changer.

Honestly? It wasn’t the research that led me to truly embrace the concept of food neutrality. I mean, I embraced the idea, both as a mother and a dietitian, but I did not fully embody it. After all, my nutrition journey is rooted in functional nutrition, and our menu had a lot of no-go foods from my side. When my son was about 1 year old, I felt that my fight against processed foods was unhelpful, unsustainable, and exhausting. The more I focused on the ‘bad’, the narrower my vision became, and the harder it was to actually nourish balance. That’s when mealtimes became a battleground, filled with tension, negotiations, and endless discussions. It was a constant push and pull between good and bad foods, losing balance in every way.

I felt like a defeated wellness warrior – frustrated, angry, and everything in between. That’s how things started to shift. I started to feel different about food. Not because I was in a luxury position to make an academic exercise, but because of my own survival modus. Together with my growth as a dietitian and a mother, it became clear: the only way out was in. Inwards, direction my beliefs. Inwards, direction my own education as a child. Inwards, to that place where my devils still reign over my actions. Inwards, clearly seeing that UPF’s are not the devil’s foods. After all, when we critically deep dive in science, we can start to notice that UPF is an artificially, morally created category for everything we find ‘unbalanced’.

‘It’s not on the menu today, but we’ll put it on our menu later’ is a cool thing to say when you decide not to give your child any (really, any!) food for any reason. This is the difference between felt restrictions and just taking the feeding role back in your hands. Thanks to this one-liner, you stay in charge of when and how those foods fit into your family’s meals, in a way that feels right, without making any food seem extra special or off-limits. But honestly? One-liners like this don’t work when our kids still feel our food fears. When our kids still pick up on how bad we feel about those foods.

What if, for you too, the only way out is in?