His contemporaries knew William Feathers as a magazine writer and publisher as well as the owner of a successful printing business. Today if you know him at all, it’s probably because he’s the guy who said, “Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”

Those words are comforting, encouraging, and — if you’ve failed at something and reached a crossroad — motivational. But what is it exactly that allows you to hang on while others let go?

The proper mindset.

My mindset when I write these articles is one of assistance. But such assistance will only happen if you develop the right mindset toward food.

With that said, I have to admit that today’s title, “Eating is never neutral,” may be a lie — or at least an overstatement.

Since each person processes foods a bit differently, there may be dozens of them that neither help or hurt your health. But if your goal is to better your health, the mindset you want is that every bit of food you eat either positively or negatively affects your health.

Adopt that mindset and you naturally become far more aware and selective about what goes in your mouth.

While that should lead to a loss of some unneeded body fat (and who wouldn’t want to lose a little of that?), studies abound that suggest embracing a foods-are-never-neutral mindset will do even more good for your health.

One published in the journal Clinical Nutrition in June reaffirms something you assumed long ago: while fried foods taste good, they are no good for your health, especially your heart. Using information compiled on more than 150,000 military veterans, researchers led by Jacqueline Honerlaw at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center discovered you double your risk of heart disease by increasing your fried foods consumption from one to three times a week to daily.

Statements WebMD shared about the study by Dana Angelo White, an associate professor at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut and not a part of the research team, suggest she doesn’t embrace the foods-are-never-neutral mindset but understands the ubiquity of fried foods. While she believes “eating small amounts of something fried isn’t the end of the world,” she also recognizes that many people fail to realize that many foods, such as doughnuts and chicken wings, are indeed fried.

Do you realize, for instance, that a breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and a doughnut would begin your day with four separate bad-for-your-heart foods?

If fried foods increase the incidence of heart disease, what type does the opposite? Plant-based foods.

Since a past study found that eating more of them reduces the risk of heart failure by 40 percent, Casey M. Rebholz, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, recently led a similar one to determine if consuming plant-based foods also reduced the chance of dying from heart disease. The results published in August in Journal of the American Heart Association produced a resounding “yes,” finding that not only did the subjects who consumed a high amount of plant-based food reduce their risk of dying from a heart-related ailment by 32 percent, but they also reduced their risk of dying from any cause at all by 25 percent.

Another eating change that naturally occurs by adopting a foods-are-never-neutral mindset is a significant reduction in the amount of processed foods you eat. Since processed foods tend to be calorie dense, the increased consumption of them has been linked to the increases in obesity and diabetes.

New research, however, suggests that even if you eat moderate amounts of processed foods, you may be more likely to develop both obesity and diabetes. Besides being calorie dense, many processed foods also contain propionate, a short-chain fatty acid often used as a food preservative to keep processed foods from turning brown and getting moldy.

Research published online by Science Translational Medicine in April determined that eating foods that contain propionate made both mice and humans secrete higher-than-healthy amounts of insulin. This led lead author of the study, Amir Tirosh, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, to declare that consistently consuming processed foods “might in turn lead to an increase in food intake, weight gain, and insulin resistance.”

An article in the September issue of Environmental Nutrition contains a lengthy list of foods “most likely” to contain propionate that includes breads, tortillas, pizza dough, breakfast cereals, pasta and noodles, flavored milks, dairy-based spreads, cheese, some processed meats, certain processed fruits and vegetable products, puddings, frostings, sports drinks, condiments, diet foods and beverages, soups, and sauces.

The article notes that on food labels, you may find propionate listed as calcium propionate, sodium propionate, propionic acid, calcium salt, calcium propionate, and calcium propanoate.