In the past 100 years, food, or perhaps more specifically, what had been manufactured, marketed, and consumed as food, had evolved and changed dramatically. If the average food shopper had fallen asleep 100 years ago, and then woke up hungry and went to the grocery store to buy food, they would be totally lost, overwhelmed, and bewildered.
The infinite number of boxed, packaged, canned, cooked, processed, and raw food items available, can no longer be comprehended by humans of normal intelligence.
This must surely be a sign of our unprecedented prosperity, scientific genius, and productive achievements.
By government regulations, these food items are labeled with content and nutrition information. I dare anyone who does not have advanced degrees in food chemistry and the legalese of marketing and labeling to make sense of most of this stuff.
Yet we blithely trot off to the food depots and fill our shopping carts with all kinds of things that promise, through their advertising and displays, to taste better than the next, make us healthy and more successful, and brim our souls with happiness.
In fact, however, the only real obligation food producers and manufacturers is not to kill you on the spot, and make their products so appealing, and tasty that you will want to consume as much of it as they can manufacture and sell. The main, and often the only, goal of food manufacturers is to make as much money as possible selling you legally ingestible products. They do not, nor indeed can they, take personal or legal responsibility for what you eat, how much you eat, or for long-term effects of their products on your body and health. That responsibility is 100 percent yours!
But what is a poor modern urban dweller to do? Most of us live in areas with no means of food production. Even if we had means, our jobs and lifestyles do not afford us time for food production. Some us barely even cook meals anymore. We are almost totally at the mercy of the food production and preparation industries.
Perhaps not so strangely, our cases of food-related diseases such as diabetes, allergies, colitis, obesity, hypertension, heart ailments, and cancers, seem to be trending in the same direction as our reliance on manufactured food consumption. This may be just coincidence. Who knows?
However, I suspect that it might take a bit longer than 100 years for the human digestive and other key biological systems to adapt effectively to such drastic changes in food intake. Just the adjustment to be able to safely handle the vast amount of food preservatives we regularly consume in our diets seems like a great feat. Not to mention the more obvious ones like massive amounts of sugar, salts, fats, and alcohol, we cannot seem to live without.
I don’t want to seem too fanatical or apocalyptic here. I do enjoy the occasional pizza, though for me it now has to be gluten-free, if I value my intestines. (Not everyone needs to be gluten-free.) I still must shop at the Costco’s and the corner stores of this world. I can only eat what they sell there. But I must admit that over the past few years, the list of food options that I can safely consume and stay somewhat healthy, has dwindled to just a few.
Ok! Ok! I know that I’m an old fart, and when you get older you just can’t handle foods the way you used to. But I still think it’s important for younger folks to pay attention to their diets and not accept whatever is sold in the market places, in blind faith.
Whether we are old or young, the vehicles of our bodies are all that we have to take us through life. When they’re done, we are done. Our bodies are literally made up of whatever we put in them. What we eat is what we are.
I cannot overlook the fact that, especially in western societies, food consumption has become more of a pleasure activity than one just for nutritional intake. Most people eat what they like to eat and what makes them feel good. Food manufacturers and marketers know this and constantly campaign to make us eat more going-tasting, feel-good stuff.
Many people also eat more in response to stress, and we know that modern, competitive, urban, living has brought a lot for us to stress about. Eating for psychological reasons rather than mainly for physiological ones compounds our problems.
So, what can be done? We can’t turn back the clock to 100 years ago. We can’t all move to the rural areas. If we did, they would become just like the cities. And we can’t tell food manufacturers what to produce in our market-driven, free-enterprise, capitalist, profit-making system. They will continue to follow their corporate charters and make and sell whatever makes them a bigger profit.
We can only control our choices, food selection, and consumption. Thankfully, if we are well enough informed, we will see that there are still relatively healthy choices for diets and food consumption. Since I am not nutritional expert, and cannot know what is good for you as a unique individual, I can only suggest that you invest some time thinking about your own dietary needs and options, and seek sound information from qualified experts and sources about how to select, prepare, and consume foods to maximize your individual health.
No serious personal development discussion can exclude diet, nutrition, and individual health needs. Like it or not, our physical needs still take the highest priority in any intelligent hierarchy. We cannot move toward empowerment and self actualization if our bodies are not well enough. Because we are what we eat, food maters! So let’s talk a bit more about food.
There are three basic functions or purposes for eating food:
~ To alleviate hunger
~ For the pleasure of taste
~ For nutrition
Of the three purposes, only the first two are done instinctively. In fact, humans were not even aware of how nutrition affected health until fairly recently in our history.
Consequently, most of us still eat to alleviate hunger and to experience the pleasure of taste. We can experience both of these things at a sensory level. However, we cannot experience nutrition at a sensory level. We cannot taste or feel nutrition. If we are not educated to understand the links between food and nutrition, we will not even be aware that they real and connected.
These five factors determine our diets:
~ Availability
~ Affordability
~ Familiarity
~Taste preference
~Perceived Nutritional value
For this reason, humans eat whatever is available to relieve hunger and what tasted good to them, not necessarily what is nutritious.
Nutritious eating requires intellect, not just instinct. If we are not informed enough or disciplined enough to guide our eating by nutritional requirements, we will not. We will simply eat instinctively and any nutrition we get, will be incidental.
Fortunately for us, our ancestors evolved enough knowledge over the years, to eat foods that provide some kind of nutrition, otherwise, we would not survive. The idea of optimal nutrition, however, is still one that is relatively new and still out of reach for many humans. We typically eat what our environments provide and our cultures habituate. None of us sat and studied nutrition and then designed our diets based on individual needs the day we were born. We simply ate what was fed to us, got accustomed to those tastes, and continue to eat foods that are available and familiar throughout or lives.
Fortunately, humans don’t need optimal nutrition to survive and even procreate. Humans have managed to survive on this planet in spite of a roller coaster history of food insecurity, poor nutrition, and unhealthy eating. We don’t really need to eat that well to survive to puberty and become fertile enough to produce the next generation of humans. Minimal nutrition will get us there, at least for a while. No matter how unhealthily we seem to eat, some of us survive and procreate. So, I don’t want so sound idealistic, puritanical, or religious, about nutrition. However, we now know very well, that nutrition plays a huge role in physical and metal health and wellness, affects physical and psychological functioning massively, and facilitates optimal brain and intellectual development and learning.
Even though we know this, it is still very difficult for us to modify our eating habits to optimize nutrition. We are creatures of instinct and habit. We still typically eat whatever is available, relieves hunger, and tastes good to us. In places where there is high food availability and wide food choices, we tend to eat too much in general, and certainly too much of foods that taste good, but don’t necessarily promote good health. In fact, huge segments of the economies in the western developed countries are dedicated to producing foods that sell because they taste good, rather than because they are healthy.
Whole generations of people have now grown up with this type of commercial food choice, boosted by psychologically powerful advertising, and cheap, quick, and convenient, availability. If we grow up in a typical western urban environment, we have no real idea of food production or preparation. We simply buy food products from stores or restaurants. Most urbanites don’t even know how to prepare most of the foods they like and eat regularly. Fewer have any clue where their food comes from.
The fact that major food production is now driven by highly mechanized agriculture, and produced in highly mechanized factories far from the places it is consumed, and mostly for the purpose of maximizing corporate profits, created food environments where taste, price, convenience, and marketing matter more than nutrition. The fact that urban residents can only access, purchase, and eat, what is sold in this neighborhood, means they become habituated, of necessity, or perhaps by design, to modern processed foods.
Our basic lack of nutritional knowledge, and our instincts to eat to relieve hunger and satisfy tastes, combined with limited healthy food choices, and our fast-paced life styles, make time spent in basic food preparation seem tedious and inconvenient, if not impossible. This makes our reliance on commercially available food our best or only option. Those who cannot grow, select, or prepare their foods, are therefore at a significant disadvantage in designing and developing nutritional diets and eating habits.
To complicate matters, our newly acquired intellectual awareness of nutrition has spawned whole new industries around fad diets, supplements, supposedly healthy extracts, super-foods, and pseudo-nutrition.
Many acknowledge that our food supply is not the best. We know that though we may not be dying on the spot from eating junk food, we are likely to develop major diet-related health problems, like diabetes, heart disease, cancers, compromised immune systems, and obesity, in the future. This fear has driven many to look to experts to provide guidance for dieting and nutrition. Where there is a demand for experts, they will arise, whether qualified or not.
Now we have many “experts”, most of whom are part of the food or pharmaceutical industry, whose aim is to create and sell more products to increase profits, advising us about how to deal with the nutrition problems produced by the same industries’ foods. We even depend on these industries to tell us the nutritional value of the foods they sell us. They are required by some laws to print this information on their packaging. The thing is, even nutritional experts disagree widely on many recommendations for healthy diets. They end up promoting whatever they think people will buy so they can make more money and remain relevant.
In the confusion, consumers are left with a deluge of printed nutritional information, a flood of crazy or exotic diets, conflicting promotions and representations by “experts”, yet without any clear understanding of how any particular food will contribute to balanced health for the individual. Most consumers, even the most diligent, often give up in frustration after reading labels, and just buy whatever they like or trust.
To be fair, nutrition is not any exact science that can provide unequivocal back-and-white guidance on what each person needs to be healthy. The most that can be done at this point is to give general guidance. But since not everyone is average, the general guidance may not be helpful to those with physical profiles may be outside the “normal” range. Therefore, each person needs to know their own body and try to figure out what foods work best for them as individuals.
Additionally, no matter how healthy our diets are, nutrition is only one of many factors in healthy and wellness. Genetics probably plays the biggest role. Accidents and injuries can also undercut health and wellness even in those eating healthy diets. Infectious diseases cannot be avoided through diet alone. Neither can aging and age-related conditions. These are just the real challenges to human survival and well being we all face. However, our ability to deal with those unavoidable challenges can be improved, if we have a healthy diet that provides us with maximum protection and chances of healing and recovery, if we do get struck by illness or injury.
Therefore, those who have the option of growing or getting, and preparing healthier foods, do stand to benefit. Granted, many of the benefits of eating healthy are invisible and long-term. This makes it very difficult to forego the immediate pleasures and convenience of eating commercially prepared foods, in pursuit of some future benefits that appeal to us mainly at the intellectual level. For those who have healthier food options, or the ability to prepare foods more healthily, it seems worth the extra effort. Personally, I would rather take my chances with eating clean, naturally produced, unpreserved, and healthily prepared foods, than exercising blind faith in food and diet industries who must be mandated by governments to meet basic health and nutrition standards, whose main purpose for existence is to make as much profit as possible, and who are more concerned about packaging, promotion, and sales, than product quality or nutrition.
Human experience has shown that in every culture in every part of the world where humans live, they have been able to develop adequate diets using the large variety of food sources naturally available to us omnivorous humans. This is how we have been able to survive and thrive on this planet for this long, in spite of periods of food scarcity. I’d rather trust practices that brought us through millennia of human experience than those we have recently developed primarily to drive economic enrichment of those with capital. I doubt that our current industrialized way of food production and diet are sustainable for thousands of years, though it seems to be flourishing right now.
Food is our source of energy and nutrients our bodies need to function, grow, and repair itself. Food drives our physical existence. Without food, we die, and nothing else about us matters. Understanding ourselves and the role that our physical bodies play in our entire human experience, is critical. Understanding the role that good nutrition plays in maintaining our physical bodies, is just as vital. EgoPilot is an approach to learning and living that focuses on self understanding and personal development. It recognized our physical bodies as the capsule of our individual human existence. It encourages us to get to better know and understand how we work at our physical level, and what we need to do as individuals to maximize physical health and functioning.
EgoPilot helps us to understand that our emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual selves, which are all the aspects of our complete conscious selves, are all built on the foundation of our physical bodies. It helps us to understand how our physical selves are driven by primal instincts meant to ensure our short-term survival, but that our intellectual capacities can be developed to better manage our physical bodies and impulses, to bring about better health and life experiences in all aspects of our human activities, including diet. This approach does not provide expert advise about diets and nutrition, rather it encourages each person to learn more about what his or her individual nutrition needs are, and how they can be better met in the food environments we find ourselves. When we understand how our physical instinctive selves can get in the way of healthy eating, we can then begin to plan and implement ways to counter and control unhealthy eating habits.
This approach takes work and discipline. For most people, it is just much easier to eat what’s available, convenient, alleviates hunger, and tastes good right now, and then worry about the consequences later. For others, who prefer a more empowered, managed, strategic approach to life and eating, perhaps the EgoPilot approach can help. If changing our eating habits seems like a bridge too far, just remember, that none of us was born with any eating habits, except to breast feed. All of our other habits were learned at some time since birth. They can therefore be replaced by new learning and habits. That is our only choice if we are to give ourselves the best chance at healthy living.
