IWU Environmental Wellness: Safer Path: Despearately Seeking the Perfect Diet

I remember when I began to suspect my culture had a distorted relationship with food. I was flying back to America after a year abroad. Olestra was headline news. This fake fat had been just approved for (limited) consumption and would enable us to eat chips or other tasty snacks and not absorb the calories. My fellow Americans thought this was a good thing. Stuff themselves and not absorb the nutrients. They were chubby and wanted to be skinny. They thought this fake fat would help.

I was secretly horrified. Something seemed terribly amiss.

I had just spent a year in a primitive Bangladesh village helping dirt poor families try to maximize every nutrient in every morsel of precious food so that they, especially the children, could be better nourished. These people were skinny and wanted to be chubby. They spent their days immersed in the labor of growing, harvesting, processing, and cooking food. Indeed, food was life, in many complex ways.

Disturbingly, my generation’s attempts to block absorption -- the vehicle for releasing food’s life force into our body -- is at odds with the survival instincts of 100,000 years of human existence on Earth. We may be clever, but not wise… for we’ve inherited a biology fine-tuned to our ancestors’ learned survival skills.

Admittedly, my culture is at a crossroads, confronting many norms. We must adjust to the sudden bounty of food after thousands of years needing to pack on fat for the next famine. We must accommodate the dietary efficiency rendered by this century’s public health gains that sanitized our intestines of nutrient-flushing, energy-zapping parasites. We must adapt to a life of sitting all day, fueling gadgets to do our work (with gasoline, electricity, batteries) instead of boosting the fuel our bodies need (with food) to do physical work. And we must learn to forage in a supermarket jungle of fabricated foods never before consumed by humans.

Certainly we need novel strategies for eating in our new “improved” environment. Our profound chubbiness, while historically protective, may now hinder health. There’s no shortage of diet “experts” peddling the latest advice on how to maneuver this weighty cultural shift. But the advice is often shallow. Quick-fixes for our complex “obesity epidemic,” like absorption-blocking Olestra, abound. Given the miracle cures nutrition offered for diseases afflicting us earlier this century -- vitamin C to cure scurvy, vitamin A for night blindness, iodine for goiter -- perhaps it’s not surprising we’re seeking magic food bullets to cure us of today’s afflictions – cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and more. In the 1980s and 90s, diet experts convinced us that food fat was making us fat, giving us heart disease, and probably cancer, too. Therefore, a lowfat diet was the solution. So we counted fat grams and food manufacturers rushed to save the day with lowfat foods of every kind. By the late 90s, “experts” were telling us carbs were really the villain. Diets like Atkins, South Beach, Dr. Phil’s Plan became household words and food manufacturers are still scrambling to flip-flop the fat and carbs of their products to meet consumer cries, all the while pocketing hefty profits.

By keeping up with the latest trends, we appear to be nourishing ourselves scientifically, but we’re really not caring for ourselves. We treat the body like it’s a robot… a shell that runs on nutrients (B-vitamins to soothe nerves, calcium for bones, fiber to cleanse intestines). We’re desperately seeking the perfect diet. You’d think after 100,00 years of feeding ourselves we would know what and how to eat. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that, historically, we’ve thrived on diverse diets from many terrains… Forgotten that our food needs change often, as we age, reproduce, shift seasons, get sick, get well… Forgotten that we are more than just a body, a tongue and an assortment of nutritional requirements… Forgotten that eating can be festive and fulfilling… And maybe we’ve forgotten that we are mortal -- that we will die someday regardless of how “perfectly” we eat, drink, exercise, or think.

So, we must cease our desperate search for some perfect one-size-fits-all diet, and instead seek inner nourishment needed for the ever-changing seasons in our lives. We must put our bodies back together, remembering the dynamic, sensual organism we truly are. We must put food back together, embracing the synergy and sensuality offered by 3.8 billion years of nature’s testing. We must tap into our own inner wisdom which often knows what we need… and the collective wisdom of thousands of years of nourishing ourselves. Then, I believe, we can each begin to assemble some truly life-honoring strategies to maneuver this unprecedented cultural shift. My hope is that we will stop complaining about food. And we will, again, bless the sacred gift of life offered by the incredible bounty gracing our plate.

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