Or, you could just adopt a paleo-diet and dispose of these mind-tricks.
The problem this solves, in my mind, is less "unhealthy food" and more "tiny, unhealthy food", and that's interesting to me. Food that packs a lot of calories into a small space can be hugely detrimental to a good diet plan, because you don't realize how much you're eating. Embiggening the food to make you think you're eating larger quantities is a completely silly but still interesting idea.
Incidentally, anybody who finds this visualization cool and is also worrying about their own diet: you might find Picture Perfect Weight Loss worth a look. By comparing the calorie counts of similar foods, it does a great job highlighting which foods are shockingly worse for you than still-tasty, slightly-healthier counterparts. I own a copy and occasionally briefly skim through it, and simply having those visuals has helped train me into avoiding certain nasty cravings. Book preview at: http://www.amazon.com/Shapiros-Picture-Perfect-Weight-Loss/d...
I also learned I can process wheat and lactose just fine, it's not the poison a lot of paleo people make it seem.
> If you harvest seeds of wheat which we cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable", which is the more extreme diet?
Is that more extreme than relying on specific animal species to eat and process foodstuffs we wouldn't find "palatable" on our own, then letting biological process transform that into material which we're capable of harvesting off their bones, cooking using an artificial heating process, and then putting into our bodies?
I'm not saying that raising animals to kill them is particularly "extreme", I'm saying that if you want to, you can make any food process sound like it's much more "unnatural" than it is. I wouldn't eat chicken feed, but I'll sure as heck eat the eggs that chickens poop out. Or the things we squeeze out of a cow's udder – who saw udders and thought that was a normal thing to do?
The thing really gets to me about it is that in addition to being based on fallacious thinking, the approximation is so selective. How can we equate a paleolithic human spending a day catching fish to a modern human buying a fish at the supermarket?
And don't even get me started on coconut. Getting to the meat of a coconut in the paleolithic era was a time intensive (and calorie burning) process that bears little resemblance to opening the jar of hexane-extracted coconut oil you bought at the health food store.