I was doing some thinking this morning about the root of our problem, the problem being obesity. Nations are calling it an epidemic, and it is. More and more people are crossing over thresholds of unhealthiness never seen before in the modern world, and even scarier is that many of those people are children. So why? Why after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution is our lifestyle becoming so detrimental to our physical health?
Our food industry should be centred around a few core principles; ethics, quality, and nutrition. Makes sense right? We want to eat food that is of a high standard, that was obtained fairly and ethically, and is high in nutritive properties. The unfortunate reality is that the food industry only has two core principles that are in direct opposition of the ideal; profit and convenience.
Think about the average run of the mill grocery store. Think about the products on the shelves and the percentage of those products that contain the same or similar ingredients. Almost every single product on the centre aisles contain a wheat, soy, or corn product. Now why is that a problem? Well consider what we would encounter in a wild or hunter-gatherer environment before the dawn of agriculture. We would consume very little, and in some regions of the world, absolutely no grains whatsoever. Furthermore, the grain we consume today is not the grain of yesteryear. Almost all of them have been bred, hybridized, or genetically modified in some way, shape, or form. Why are grains so widely used and manufactured? Is it because they're good for us or mandatory in our diet in some way as the industry would have us believe? Nope. They're cheap to make and highly profitable. Corn production in the USA is subsidized to the point that growers have little to no production costs; still wonder why high fructose corn syrup is now the go-to sweetener for many companies?
The other problem is sugar. In a natural environment we would encounter very little that we would consider to have a 'sweet' flavour. Berries and other occasional fruit maybe, depending on where you lived. Now sugar is a very bio-available easily digestible carbohydrate. What that means is that your body receives fuel from it's consumption very quickly, and because our bodies are designed for survival it makes sense that we would be programmed to obtain the most convenient source of fuel. If you happened upon a field of blueberries it would make sense that your brain would tell you to eat them, and then eat some more, and then some more. Enter the modern grocery store. The minute you walk in the door you are bombarded with sugar. It is in a huge variety of products from potato chips, to tomato sauce, candy, chocolate, and processed meat products. Your natural brain is telling you to eat sweet, couple that with the high levels of insulin coursing through our veins due to unnaturally high carbohydrate diets and you have an almost impossibility that people can resist the temptation.
So we have a food industry directly opposed to what should be important principles, and abundance of grains and manufactured products that our bodies aren't used to consuming, and an overwhelming amount of sugar in our food products and you have our current recipe for disaster. Would people still be overweight if you resolved the above issues? Sure, but I think that the vast majority of obese and overweight people are struggling the most with what I've referred to in this post.
When you go to the store, try to think about your natural hunter-gathering self. What percentages would your diet be comprised of if you were primal man? How many grains? How much protein? And if it isn't natural, don't eat it. If you're looking for a way to clean up your diet without over complicating things or calorie counting, start there. Whole, natural foods are quite possibly the solution to the ever mounting problem; why are we all so fat and unhealthy?
