What are "quality calories"?

What are "quality calories"?

Susan Silberstein & Marilyn Joyce (Health and Nutrition Educator & Heath Counselor) gives expert video advice on: How can a poor diet impact my mood?; How is a poor diet related to infertility?; What foods should I avoid if I want to eat a healthy diet? and more...

I love the question about quality calories, because so many people are eating calories that are absolutely non-quality. They're drinking sodas, which have no nutritional value to speak of, just a lot of sugar, or fake sugar; things that are substitutes for sugar. Basically, a high-quality calorie would be something that you find in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and seeds; foods that we don't eat enough of, but should be eating because of the high density of nutritional value. It's like nutrient-dense foods versus foods that have very little or no nutritional value. For example, if you go in and have a hamburger and French fries, you are not necessarily getting anything of quality there at all. You're getting a lot of calories, but they're empty calories, not nutrient-dense calories. An example is that a friend of mine has, and this is without a word of a lie, a hamburger and fries (I won't mention the company) that she's had for eight years. She shows them at events. They've never gone bad; they've never turned green. If there were any nutrients in that, they would go bad. They would turn green, they would not be healthy, and they wouldn't look the same as they did eight years ago. No self-respecting bacteria will live on those foods. That's what we mean by nutrient-dense versus lacking in quality.