Why what you eat matters for your health
Here, on the glorious continent of North America, we have a tiny, little bit of an obsession with food. What we eat, how we eat, who we eat with — it all matters to us, but the unique thing in the West is that we worry about the food we eat. In other parts of the world, people either worry if they have food or not, but here we’ve created a unique dilemma because abundance isn’t enough to satisfy our hunger (pun intended).
After the agricultural “revolution” began (believed to have been approximately 12,000 years ago) humans drastically started to change the land around them to grow food and develop more stable communities.
Now just to reiterate the importance of this feat, humans were now — for the first time ever — able to control their food production, which was a pretty big change from having to forage for food within an unstable food supply.
This all seemed pretty amazing at the start but never underestimate the power of humans to mess things up. Instead of focusing on all the things that went wrong after man’s claim to land, (like patriarchy, slavery, class inequality) I’m going to focus instead on how this type of food production started to impact our health.
Because growing grains allowed for a surplus of food (more food than is needed for humans), the population of humans exploded at an exponential rate. This then required clearing of more land to grow more food to feed more humans, and the cycle continued. The population increase led to us destroying a lot of our surrounding environment and contributed massively to global warming (yay!).
But what’s so bad about a little earth warming? The increased CO2 levels, combined with a thin ozone layer above us, can lead to more harmful UV rays coming down and causing skin cancer. The warmer temperature also allows for disease-causing insects like mosquitoes to grow, leading to a rise in cases of Malaria, West Nile, and the current Zika virus epidemic.
Along with a rise in infectious diseases, we also see a rise in chronic diseases due to the excess food we have available and how we’re eating that food. A lot of the food we’re eating nowadays is processed food, which means it’s not always healthy. When we process whole foods (like fruits, vegetables, whole grains) to add fat, sugars, salt, etc, we also make these foods calorie dense, meaning a small brownie can have as many calories as two sandwiches! Eating foods with high amounts of sugar, fat, and salt can put strain our organs (which we kind of need to stay alive). This causes organs like our kidneys, liver, heart, etc to lose their function faster and we end up with life-long problems like type II diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
So this all sounds great right?! Our food systems are actually making us sicker and trying to kill us faster. Is there even a light at the end of this tunnel?! This is what happens when you learn information and focus on all the negative things to develop a “doomsday” mentality―convinced that the world is coming to an end and there’s nothing you can do to stop humans from going extinct. This is when it’s important to remember that humans are very intelligent beings who have been evolving and adapting to change for 2.8 million years.
If we can manipulate the environment around us to produce food (while slightly destroying everything in our path), we can also change our environment to save it.
What are some things you can do to save the environment around you AND benefit your body to be healthier?
- Eat Less: just because you can save money by buying a meal combo or buying two desserts instead of one doesn’t mean you should. Remember all the damage excess sugar, fat, and salt does to your organs? Keep that in mind and only eat until you’re almost feeling full. Splurging from time to time is fine, but on average, try not to eat until your stomach’s about to burst.
- Eat Less Processed Food: learn how to cook from scratch by buying whole ingredients (vegetables, whole grains, fruits, etc). This can actually turn out to be more delicious than some of the prepackaged food that’s available out there. Eating meals from scratch saves you a lot in terms of sugar, salt, and all that organ damage.
- Eat Locally Grown Food: hit up the closest farmer’s market or travel directly to a farm close to you to buy food. Locally grown food doesn’t need to travel as far, so it helps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions caused by long-distance transportation. This way of eating can help in reducing environmental damage i.e. global warming.
