History Main / IfItTastesBadItMustBeGoodForYou

** Yup, because legitimately healthy granola bars do exist and -as you might expect- they taste like spiders and hate.

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** As of spinach - I love it provided it is fresh. If it is frozen... green something... on plate on the other hand...
*** Frozen spinach doesn't measure up to fresh (though quite good as an ingredient in a recipe), but it's still way better than...canned. Ugh.

** My current bottle of Advil was apparently part of a new campaign intended to cull the [[TooDumbToLive worthlessly stupid]] because that rust-red coating is now unpleasantly sweet.
** Another real life example I'm pretty sure I remember reading: there was apparently some medieval "doctor" who took the trope's name seriously and thought he'd found a healthful spring that turned out to be connected to sewage.
** This troper would have been most grateful if the makers of Dimetapp had ascribed to this theory. He might then have avoided the stomach pump when he was four years old.

** As of spinach - I love it provided it is fresh. If it is frozen... green something... on plate on the other hand...

** In point of actual fact, she ''could'' cook quite well, and probably with highly nutritious results, provided she stuck to actual, edible food. It was when she decided that she needed to take things UpToEleven and started experimenting with tofu and freakish hell-vegetables like beets and lima beans that her cooking gained the capacity to kill at twenty paces.

* Averted in a {{Cracked}} article which explained that lots of "healthy" granola bars are about as good for you as a candy bar. Also on how Bran Muffins are ''not'' nutritional, muffins being mostly cake, and cake being mostly fat.

* Buckley's Cough Syrup uses this trope as a marketing campaign. "It tastes awful, but it works"

** Buckley's cough medicine's entire advertising campaign is based on the idea that it tastes awful [[EarWorm But it works]].

*** It also helps that fruits are naturally ''sweet'', too.

Well, if it tastes bad, it ''must'' be good for you! There is some TruthInTelevision here, as many people portray health food as being healthy, but tasting extremely terrible. In fact, there is some health food that ''is'' considered tasty, but many of the health foods that have the irony of health food are heavily fortified with vitamins to make them even healthier. This also makes them taste rather...unpalatable; as some of those nutrients can taste extremely bad because they are in higher amounts than normal and there is ''no'' covering up the flavour. (Such as B vitamins.) Ironically, it's the highly-processed, vitamin-fortified "health foods" that tend to cost the most, taste the worst, and have the most potential to actually injure you. Plain plant- or animal-based food is mouthwatering in comparison.

* Beat Your Greens from ''PowerpuffGirls'', where not eating vegetables turns out to be a ''good'' thing, as they've been contaminated by mind-control spores as an affront to an alien invasion of sentient broccoli. In the end, the children of Townsville fend them off by eating the broccoli soldiers, and after the aliens retreat, wind up craving more.

* One episode of TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete throws this one completely out the window. Pete the Younger overdoses on creamed corn (apparently based on the notion that it's weapons-grade nasty, so logically it must be tremendously bad for him) to get out of going to a school dance his parents are pressuring him to participate in. He has to have his stomach pumped to prevent a fatal case of creamed corn poisoning ("Creamed corn isn't the answer, son!" declares the doctor). He ends up going to the dance anyway, as the resulting "gut-kludge" emits a radioactive green glow, and he sets up a table near the restrooms charging dancegoers a fee to see it.

A further irony of health food is that you can actually get sick ''from'' it if you eat too much. Yes, it is possible. It's called an overdose. Some overdoses are more fatal than others, thankfully. (You won't die from overdosing on a Vitamin C superdrink, but if you take too much Vitamin A, then you ''CAN'' die.)

*** That's because parents don't force fruits on their kids the way they do vegetables. It probably has something to do with the fact that fruits don't taste like they've been marinated in pure hatred, and thus are seen as cheating.

** Calvin's parents sometimes trick him into eating by telling him that it's actually [[NightmareFetishist monkey brains or toxic waste]].

Think back to when you were a kid. Remember some of the foods you really did not wanna eat for dinner, but had to choke down anyway? You obviously wondered why of course you had to eat such things, but it was healthy. If it was healthy, then ''why on earth did it taste so freaking bad?''