Why do we eat?
For fuel? For nutrition? Because we're bored? Or is it for pleasure?
Human motivation is a strange thing, by turns regular and habitual or capricious and whimsical. Our mood or something we see, feel, hear or smell can change our attitude to food in a flash. This can have a powerful influence on what we eat. And caprice and greed can ruin our health.
Some people don't care much about food. They can take it or leave it; it's just fuel, not interesting. These are usually the ones who stop eating when they feel full enough -- way before the rest of us would say we're full -- and are always slim with small muscles and little fat. If the fuel they eat is a healthy balance they will enjoy better far health than most of us. If they eat a poorly-balanced diet, they will suffer the same deficiency problems as everyone else, but maybe less badly. But, on the whole, the food-is-fuel people do seem to me to listen to their bodies and chose good nutrition as they understand it.
Similar are the disciplined eaters, who know what too much concentrated, refined food will do to them and can suppress the greedy craving to eat more of those addictive foods. They, too, are usually very healthy if they eat a balanced diet. Among them are the consciously careful who put nutrition before craving. These include most vegans and vegetarians, athletes, the image-conscious who want to look good and many people who have had a physical problem and are using diet to avoid or correct a condition like diabetes, ulcers or liver disease.
The Driving Force in Food
But what about the rest of us? Why do we eat as we do? Most people would admit, if they're honest, that pleasure is a major factor, and why not? Eating is one of the activities that most people enjoy most. And there is the hazard. As with every pleasurable activity, we can overindulge or misuse it, and we have a huge pressure from powerful advertising to do just that with our food. I see three key dangers:
Eating only the tastiest foods -- the gourmet
Eating more food than our bodies can use -- the glutton
Eating continually -- the snacker
All these dangers have been with us whenever food is plentiful, of course. There are scores of accounts from past civilizations of excessive banqueting, from the ancient Roman Empire of Nero to the British Empire of Queen Victoria. Though it's notable that although she threw lavish parties for dignitaries, Victoria herself ate sparingly, just as her descendant Queen Elizabeth does today. In fact, the records we have show that the rich of one to two centuries ago in the West generally ate simply between the socially required banquets and dinner parties.
Gourmet Delights
In the past, those who sought out the finest delicacies were called gourmets. Gourmets were generally careful of their health, using their discerning palate to enjoy small amounts of the finest food and wine. It was an expensive pursuit for those rich enough to pay for such delicacies, and this is still true today. But then, as with other rich folk, they ate plainly most of the time, so as to savour the delicacies better by comparison. The 'gourmets' of today, it is said, eat the finest treats all of the time.
Such a diet is very unbalanced and will inevitably lead to ill health from nutritional deficiency. Though it is possible to be a nutritionally balanced gourmet, by being aware of your nutritional needs and meeting them. Many fussy eaters today, however are 'bargain-basement gourmets' -- some might just call them greedy, though they may not get fat. They choose to eat their favourites from the huge range of modern 'treats', foods designed by their manufacturers to overwhelm the palate and become addictions.
What foods? Chocolates and candies, sweet drinks, salt- and fat-laden fast foods, snacks in little bags -- you know the kinds of things I mean. All that stuff doctors have been warning us for years about eating to excess. Well, if you eat little else, you don't have to eat to excess to get ill, and diabetes is only the start of it. Cartoonists caricature the worst of them: the delicate wife who can eat very little, but who puts away a pound of chocolates a day in compensation; the youth who lives on colas, burgers and pizzas alone. But plenty of others are in the modern 'bargain basement gourmet' group, and they're all heading for a miserable older life.
Fat Freddy and Billy Bunter
Years ago, the overeating companion of the gourmet was the gourmand, in English a glutton. Today we call this pigging out, and it's getting press coverage in the US because of low-cost restaurant 'upsizing' policies which encourage overeating. The overeater has been with us forever, though.
In pre-civilization cultures, it made sense to put on fat in fall and use it as stored energy when food got scarce at the end of winter and in early spring. Some people seem have inherited genes to do this to excess, and can't stop eating if they get the chance to gorge. Or maybe they have a habit of doing what feels good at the time, and ignore any consequences.
But it's a major health hazard to eat far more than you can burn up. The damage comes in three ways:
First, obviously, carrying around the equivalent of an army combat pack 24/7 puts a big strain on your physical system, which is going to break down and wear out early.
Second, most overweight people have atherosclerosis -- hardened and less flexible arteries coated inside with fatty deposits. The extra strain of pumping blood around usually weakens your heart and arteries early -- cardio-vascular disease -- and heart attacks, aneurisms and stroke are much more likely.
Third, your lymph system, liver, kidneys and glands are overstressed by the poor diet and (usually) lack of exercise, leading to nutritional problems and slow poisoning because you can't absorb key nutrients or get rid of bodily wastes properly.
None of these difficulties is so serious alone, but put together they are a major health hazard and contribute to a shorter life span with progressive bodily breakdown during the last couple of decades -- not nice.
Sweeten up? How To Encourage Diabetes
Type II, or 'late onset', diabetes mellitus is almost always the result of a number of factors coming together, and it's hitting more and more, younger and younger people as our new century progresses -- including many teens. A hundred years ago, it was a rare condition, so what's different today? In a word: sugar -- and that one factor outweighs all the others combined.
Without going into the complexities of sugar control in our blood, the chief cause of type II diabetes can be put simply and bluntly: if you give your body frequent 'sugar hits' during the day, it screws up your blood sugar stabilization and you begin to yo-yo between too much and too little blood sugar. Both are dangerous, and the continual overstressing sooner or later causes multiple organ breakdown.
How can you encourage diabetes to begin? Simple. Be a snacker. Eat sugar-rich and refined starch foods frequently during the day. This is easiest in the US, where most manufactured foods, even staples like bread, are highly refined and have added sugar. Your body wasn't designed to cope with more than a little refined and sugar food; in nature, it's rare (honey is the commonest source, historically an occasional treat.)
Most natural carbohydrate foods are 'complex', with starch in fibre-rich enclosed cells (grains like wheat and rice) and sugars in similar natural packaging like fruit. All these whole foods include the other elements needed for good digestion, and as you chew, each food signals your body how to deal with it. Even traditional processing like flour and grits milling by hand leaves the grain in a coarser, less quickly digested form.
Today, all that's changed. We in the West refine most of our starches: fine white flour, polished rice, skinned potatoes. Processed sugars are ubiquitous as an addictive flavouring, with glucose sources like corn syrup being the worst for triggering diabetes. So, we get our carbohydrates neat. The natural signal compounds that tell our bodies how to digest them are refined away with the fibre that keeps our guts working properly. Is it any wonder that our sugar balancing system goes wild?
If you eat three sugar-rich meals a day, with half a dozen sugar snacks in between, you're at risk. If most of your food is refined, you're in double jeopardy. How much risk? If the incipient diabetes is controlled, not a lot in the long term. But it will mean a radical dietary change to keep you alive once you're diabetic; it's rarely reversed. If you ignore your diabetes and suffer frequent 'hypos' and 'hypers', each one is a major system stress and your body will begin to break down. Most uncontrolled diabetics -- unable or unwilling to keep their blood sugar stable -- will die young from some kind of organ failure. And it's reckoned that a third of America's youth of today could show Type II diabetes before they get to forty -- purely because of what they eat. That's bad news!
And Your Attitude?
So, where do you lie in this spectrum of trouble? Do you strictly control your eating, or at least, binge only occasionally in celebrations? And, with this, keep a steady eye on your nutrition to avoid deficiencies? Or are you a delicacy-eating bargain-basement gourmet, a greedy pig or an incipient diabetic snacker? Maybe it's something middling? Remember, though, that middling is still trouble for you in later life. There's only so much punishment your body can take before the symptoms begin to show: high blood pressure, cholesterol problems and arthritis are the start of something big. Yet all of them can usually be corrected by diet.
Notice that I've called this an 'attitude', not a 'condition'. YOU choose what you eat, not your family or friends. Ill health via nutrition IS a choice, and most of the West has chosen it.
David
This article has been expanded from a July, 2008 blog post. You can find more stuff about health in my Bad Health Blog, at http://www.davidsblog.typepad.com Do get back to me with your opinion on this article or any other stuff you'd like me to know. I love debate!
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