Can cake be part of a healthy diet?
I think it can. But perhaps not for the reason you might expect.
We seem increasingly inclined to judge foods individually: healthy or unhealthy, good or bad. Cake, pastries, biscuits and desserts inevitably end up on the wrong side of that divide.
But we don’t eat individual foods. We eat diets.
Someone whose usual diet includes plenty of vegetables and fruit, whole grains, beans and lentils, nuts and seeds, good sources of protein and healthy fats doesn’t suddenly have an unhealthy diet because they enjoy a piece of cake or a pastry.
At the same time, this isn’t quite the same as saying “everything in moderation.”
The problem with “everything in moderation”
Moderation is really difficult to define.
Cake twice a week might sound moderate. So might a few biscuits, some chocolate, a dessert, a couple of pastries and a few glasses of wine.
Considered separately, we can describe each as “moderate”. Add them together across the week and they may make up a surprisingly large part of the diet.
And, conveniently, we get to decide for ourselves what moderation means.
That’s why I prefer to zoom out.
Rather than asking whether a particular food is allowed, look at your diet over a week or two. What makes up most of it?
Are you eating a good variety of plant foods? Getting enough fibre and protein? Eating vegetables and fruit every day? Including beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts and seeds?
And where do cakes, biscuits, pastries, desserts, alcohol and other less nutritious foods fit into that bigger picture?
It’s the proportion and pattern that matter.
Not everything we eat has to be healthy
I also think we’ve become rather preoccupied with making every food nutritionally worthy.
Add protein. Increase the fibre. Replace the sugar. Swap the butter. Avoid the glucose spike.
Sometimes there are good reasons to modify a recipe. But a really good pastry doesn’t need chia seeds or protein powder to justify its existence.
Food has purposes beyond providing nutrients.
We bake for people. We celebrate with food. We meet friends in cafés. We cook recipes that remind us of people and places. And sometimes we eat something simply because it tastes wonderful.
That matters too.
Personally, I’m much more likely to choose a really good pastry than a piece of cake. And if I’m going to eat something primarily for pleasure, I want it to be worth eating — something made with good ingredients, full of flavour and genuinely delicious.
Perhaps that’s a more useful way to think about these foods. Not “Am I allowed to eat this?” but:
“Do I really enjoy this?”
The excellent pastry you’ve been looking forward to? Probably.
The mediocre biscuits you automatically eat because they’re beside the kettle? Perhaps not.
A healthy diet doesn’t require nutritional perfection, but neither does flexibility mean that quantity and frequency don’t matter.
There should be room for foods we eat simply for pleasure.
We just need to remember that making room for them isn’t the same as giving them unlimited space.