The Swedish curriculum emphasizes sustainable development, including health, in subjects like Home Economics (HE) and Physical Education and Health (PEH). Teaching these subjects therefore involves navigating potentially sensitive personal issues and contested interpretations of health and sustainability. Our aim was to explore challenges related to teaching such topics, but also didactic strategies for handling them. We distributed a qualitative online questionnaire to HE and PEH teachers and analysed the 37 responses using reflexive thematic analysis. This yielded four themes that showed how teachers struggled with limited resources and knowledge, low student performance, student resistance, and sensitive issues and ethical dilemmas. The lack of resources in the subjects can lead to fruitful discussions about inequalities in health and the ability to make sustainable choices, but such discussions can also trigger sensitive issues among students. In HE and PEH, teachers are required to balance student engagement and their right to a private life, fostering a supportive environment for discussing sensitive topics while also respecting personal boundaries. At the same time, they must navigate student resistance and lay beliefs about health and sustainable development that is conflated with scientific knowledge. Because this is such a complex area, we posit that HE and PEH teachers need ethical competence to handle these sensitive topics and balance societal change with individual integrity.