Human beings have prejudices and misconceptions about most things around them - and even about themselves. Our general tendency is to label things - people, foods, cosmetics - put them all in neat drawers in our minds and just think of them as "good for us" or, alternatively, "bad for us". However, when it comes to food and the kind of products that are beneficial for our health, few things can be labeled decisively good or bad - the rest of them are either beneficial or detrimental to our health depending on how we choose to consume them.

Red meat is the perfect example. It's true, it does contain saturated fats that contribute to clogging up our arteries, but lean red meat has less fat than chicken meat, and provided we consume it periodically and in moderation, it can actually be a welcome addition to our daily diets. For comparison, 100 grams of lean beef sirloin steak counts 135 calories but only 4.5g of fat, while the same amount of corn-fed chicken has marginally fewer calories (129) and 4.8g of fat. The red meat also has the definite advantage of being rich in iron - three times as rich as chicken meat, in fact - and four times the amount of zinc we all need for a healthy immune system.

Ice cream is another unlikely friend - of course, we're not talking about consuming a whole tub every evening while lying pointlessly on the couch, but eating a moderate amount for dessert. Few of us know that ice cream is digested slowly and gradually releases sugar into our blood after eating it, thus making us feel full for longer. A 75g ice cream scoop has 114 calories and 6g of fat - as opposed to a slice of cheesecake, which comes with 511 calories and a whopping 43g of fat. The conclusion is that abusing one type of food is bound to have negative consequences on our health,-whereas moderation is the key to a balanced - and diverse - diet that's bound to be much more satisfactory.