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Basic Trope: Healthy food tastes absolutely terrible.

  • Straight: Alice eats a vegetable and nearly retches.
  • Exaggerated: Alice smells a whiff of vegetables - cue Vomit Indiscretion Shot.
  • Downplayed:
    • Alice eats a vegetable and doesn't like it much, but can tolerate it for the most part.
    • Alice tends to dislike healthy food, but there's some kinds of healthy food that she can tolerate.
    • The taste of the said healthy food isn't that horrible, but it's bland and lacks of taste compare to the unhealthier food.
  • Justified:
    • The body likes the taste of what it's accustomed to. Alice eats fast food on a daily basis, and health food only at gunpoint. When she tries to lose weight by eating nothing but health food, after the first few weeks it doesn't taste as bad to her anymore because she's gotten used to it. After several months, she discovers that she now loves the taste of health food and hates the taste of all the fast food she used to enjoy.
    • Alice's mother used to have two specialties - dry chicken with vegetables boiled grey and bitter, and banoffee pie. Alice learned that healthy stuff tastes awful, and swore off it for life.
    • The companies that release the vegetables do not pick it up properly.
  • Inverted:
    • Junk food tastes like "cardboard and shame".
    • If it tastes good, it's bad for you; the tastiest dish Alice ever had was banana pudding her ex-boyfriend had secretly laced with arsenic.
    • See Nutritional Nightmare.
    • A plant's extremely bitter taste is a sign that it is poisonous.
    • A deadly poisonous substance is also an Impossibly Delicious Food.
  • Subverted:
    • Alice tastes broccoli - and likes it.
    • Alice decides to start eating healthy and eats the mice from the nearby coal power plant, Alice understandably gets sick.
    • Alice hates broccoli, but she likes most other vegetables.
    • Alice is offered some supposedly healthy food and she hates it. Later she gets sick. It turns out it wasn't very healthy at all.
  • Double Subverted: Alice can't handle the aftertaste.
  • Parodied:
  • Zig Zagged:
    • Alice has a love-hate relationship with vegetables and tofu.
    • Alice can take broccoli. As long as it's smothered in cheese sauce. But she admits she loves other vegetables... not mentioning that she specifically meant potatoes, in Chips and French Fries form.
    • It's all in the preparation; Alice will hate vegetables that are cooked but will eat them raw for example.
    • Alice hates the classic vegetables and some healthy things; but will regularly eat other stuff that is healthy.
  • Averted: Alice doesn't have a problem with eating healthy food.
  • Enforced: "Everyone knows health food tastes like crap. Let's make that into a Running Gag."
  • Lampshaded: "If it's good for me, why does it taste so unspeakably vile?"
  • Invoked: A pharmaceutical company puts a bitter taste in a medicine so kids won't mistake it for candy.
  • Exploited:
    • Bob, wanting to kill Alice, convinces her that a deadly poison is actually healthy because of the bitterness.
    • Bob is the Lethal Chef, and he uses this belief as an excuse for his terrible cooking skill.
  • Defied: Alice determines to find some healthy stuff that actually tastes good.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: "I wonder why all the best-tasting foods are bad for you, while all the worst-tasting foods are good for you." "Not necessarily all of it. Maybe you just need to find something you'll like."
  • Deconstructed:
    • Alice's boyfriend is eternally frustrated at how picky an eater she is, and nags her that she's harming her body. She develops a heart condition from never eating healthy food, and eventually has a minor heart attack.
    • Alice develops an eating disorder, and gets the idea that the worst something tastes, the healthier it is. She eats nothing but onions, her most hated vegetable, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not only is she completely miserable, she becomes dangerously malnourished.
    • Due to this belief, the Supreme Chefs receive bad reputation and become unemployed, and the Lethal Chefs can get away with it, so they can even cook with unhygienic preparedness and sell their food as "healthy food", which spark lots of controversies about health concerns, and this make several restaurants and food brands go bankrupt.
  • Reconstructed:
    • Alice determines to cut down to eating the really unhealthy stuff only in moderation. Her boyfriend takes her on a cordon bleu cookery course, and they learn how to make food that tastes good without being unhealthy. Her favorite dish is still banoffee pie with ice cream.
    • Alice learns that she doesn't have to torture herself to lose weight, and that eating a balanced diet instead of going to extremes is healthier for her. She learns how to cook better for herself, and make meals that are both good for her, and that she can enjoy. Yes, even with onions.
    • The government and the FDA introduce stricter rule for food qualification, while the Supreme Chefs launch healthy restaurant chains with approval certification from FDA to prove that healthy food can also tastes good too, and later their restaurants become the best-selling restaurant chains with plenty of locations.
  • Played For Laughs:
  • Played For Drama:
    • Alice is perceived as unwise and unhealthy due to her poor diet and is treated as such. She may even flat out refuse to eat it and be anorexic.
    • Alice is physically healthy and well-being person, but her taste buds are so numb as she desperately eats a lot of food without any enjoyment, since she only ever eats horrible-tasted healthy food for her whole life.
  • Played for Horror: Alice inadvertedly consumes some bitter poison but thinks she has to eat it because its bitter and is therefore good for you.

Back to If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You. And despite the taste it won't kill ya to eat a salad once in a while.

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