Without doubt, those looking for a better, healthier life will find it much easier if they live in an environment where processed foods are less prevalent, especially ultra-high processed foods.
All animals thrive best on their indigenous diet. Millions of years of evolution have specialised their organs to the foods they could readily find in their natural habitat and humans are no different. Our bodies and minds thrive best when our diet is closest to that of a hunter-gatherer.
“Left with little time or the skills to cook from basic ingredients, people seek their comforts from convenience foods.”
It was only a few thousand years ago with the advent of farming, that humans started moving away from their indigenous diet, a blink of an eye in terms of our adaptive history. It started by replacing green leafy vegetables with grains.
All mammals get their base nutrition from green leafy vegetables, either directly if they are herbivores or indirectly if they are carnivores (they eat the animals that ate the green leafy vegetables). Grains carry useful nutrients, but nowhere near the range and balance offered by green leaves. This substitution started a trend towards nutrient deficiency, one that has been getting steadily worse in modern times.
Grains are also high in sugars and form acids that force our bodies to create bases to neutralise them, further using up scarce resources .
Subsequent ‘advances’ in farming then brought higher consumption of domesticated meats and dairy products that further acidified our diets and left us deficient in essential fatty acids. The increasingly intense farming methods then also introduced chemicals to our foods and depleted our soils, further decreasing the balance of nutrients foods typically contained.
Fast-forward to even more modern times and we now also find a large decrease in the variety of foods that most people eat and manufacturers increasingly finding ever-more novel ways to process them, making food more convenient, but at the same time, further depleting its nutritional value and loading us with unnecessary calories and novel, sometimes toxic elements that our bodies have to use up further resources to detoxify.
But that's not the end of the food adulteration story. As manufacturers have become more sophisticated they have chanced upon ways to fool our senses and hit our pleasure points. By loading processed foods with just the right amount of sugars and fats and adding salt and other additives, they can fool our body’s gateway senses into thinking that what we are eating must be loaded nutrients.
Our depleted bodies consume these 'pleasure foods' expecting the nutrients that a natural food that tasted so good would inevitably contain, but once broken down finds them empty and spends yet more resources rebalancing itself while also loading unnecessary sugars into fat cells to get rid of them. Being still nutrient poor and craving sugars and stimulants to feed their overworked brains, people are then drawn to yet more empty food and either put on weight or burn the extra calories in a flood of nervous hyperactivity.
Add to this picture our increasingly stressed lives, where our brains work overtime and demand more sugars and our stresses lead us to crave the comfort foods we've been brought up with and you arrive at a food environment that promotes dependency and creates ill health.
And the proof of this ill health is now all around us. As hunter-gatherers our diseases were mainly acute, such as infectious diseases, unwanted organisms on our food, food scarcity, the ravages of nature and brutality. Today, our protected environments and hygiene largely protect us from these former acute diseases, but instead our diseases have become chronic, caused in large part by our modern food.
Heart disease, diabetes, cancers, chronic liver and kidney diseases, digestive issues, dementia, endless numbers of research papers increasingly conclude that most of our modern ‘killer’ diseases are of our own making and they get worse by the day.
Every generation over the past few decades has seen their levels of chronic diseases get worse and start earlier in life. Generation X has worse levels of disease than baby boomers, Millenials are worse than Generation X and Generation Z are worse than Millenials. It shows no sign of stopping.
People eating like this might survive, but they do not thrive. They wake up feeling groggy, they put on weight, they accumulate chronic diseases, their minds become foggy. Their accelerated chronicity is slow and insidious, accumulating as the stresses build until they overwhelm a person’s tolerance thresholds and emerge as chronic diseases.
Faced with chronic issues, people turn to modern medicine to try to help them, but it has no answers. The pharmaceuticals and medical interventions don’t deal with the root causes, they just treat the symptoms, ostensibly helping people to cope with and live with their problems, but doing nothing to turn them around and often causing other side-effect problems as they do so.
In the modern, stressed and bewildering world, where people know no other way than to train for and then work for the 'system' and live in an environment designed to keep them at their computers until they can no longer cope and then discards them thereafter, they crave their comfort foods as one of their only salvations. And, left with little time or the skills to cook from basic ingredients, they inevitably seek comfort in convenience foods.
And because most people start the day in a rush with a long list of things to do and a plethora of worries, their over-worked brains demand stimulants in the form of sugars and caffeine to get them going. Where pre-industrial humans would have rested in the middle of the day, to replenish their resources, modern humans instead put in even more stimulants to keep them going and typically end the day so over-stimulated that they need relaxants such as alcohol to bring them down again.
This chaotic daytime routine and confused biochemistry then leaves a person unable to sleep properly, with all its detrimental effects on their health, and so the cycle continues.
It requires an iron will to stay embedded in a modern way of life and also eat healthily. Thousands of books, diets and research papers all point to the same answers, but despite having the knowledge, very few people have the strength to make positive choices last longer than a few weeks. Even faced with life threatening illnesses and instructions on how to eat to improve their situation, few people are able to comply.
But despite it being glaringly obvious that our modern food environment is creating an increasingly unhealthy population, dependent on modern medicine to blunt its edges, our governments do nothing significant to change it. Why?, quite obviously because all modern governments of all types put their economies and the interests of big business above the health and wellbeing of their people. And businesses tend to put their profits and shareholder returns above social value.
Faced with overwhelming evidence of the harm of processed foods, plus calls from the World Health Organisation to deal with the growing food problem, the UK government recently received a recommendation from its own ‘Food Tsar’ to tax processed foods so that their cost more accurately reflected its cost to society, whilst at the same time making healthier foods more financially appealing. The government chose to reject the suggestions for fear of rocking the economic boat.
Such a rejection by government in favour of continuing the domination of the processed food industry is not new, but what makes this most recent rejection more extraordinary is the overwhelming evidence that those most susceptible to the current Covid virus are those who’s bodies and immune systems have become ‘weakened’ by the modern food environment.
Furthermore, people scared and stressed by the ‘fear’ tactics used by governments to try to ‘fight’ the pandemic have been turning to yet more junk food to feel better, making them even more susceptible to the disease itself and less likely to be able to quickly recover from it.
Until people vote for a different kind of political party, one that puts people’s health and wellbeing first and builds an economy around those values, nothing will change (see our manifesto for a better world). No current party has policies that will address our food crisis. Only a newly formed party with different values that put the people’s and the planet’s health and wellbeing first, appears capable of turning it around.
As we wait for political change, for those who crave a healthier life where their mind is clear, their body and immune system functions properly and they thrive into old age, the only answer is to work on themselves and try to escape from the worst ‘trappings’ of the modern system. Only then are they likely to be able to depend less on manufactured and processed foods.
And, after all, ‘you are what you eat’.
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