The Big Fight
Which food is good for you? Now that’s a million dollar question that a multi-billion dollar industry keeps providing different answers to. Sceptics would argue that things keep changing because, well, different companies keep commissioning different reports that say different things. So instead of looking at what corporations have to say about it, let’s look at people’s collective behaviour.
Here’s the thing about people: we love to say one thing but then do another one. Put another way, we dream about the things we’d love to do for the long-term, but when reality kicks in we settle for the things that just feel good in the short-term. Research suggests it’s not really our fault, but our brains’: they tend to prefer something that feels easy over something we rationally know is right. For such a clever part of our body, our brains can be pretty lazy sometimes.
Google data offers an interesting historical lens. Looking at Ngram, Google’s search engine for keywords in books printed between 1500 and 2008, we find that books have always mentioned salads far more often than they did pizzas or burgers, which is a good sign. If books unlock new horizons in our brains, apparently they’ve also been trying to unlock healthier ways into our stomachs.
Now, this is where human nature kicks in. The books we’ve written as a species tend to focus more on salads than pizza or burgers. But what happens when we match that with what people actually search for online, especially when looking to order food? Simple: looking at Google Trends, we see that pizza delivery is far more searched for than salads and burgers combined.
Books appeal to the dreamer in us, and try to help us understand how to be our best selves, but the daily grind of work, life and food searches in-between present a far more realist picture. Literature sells the intellectual dream, but the real world ensures our heads rarely beat our stomachs. Gut 1–0 Brain.
Want to take that one step further? Of course you do. Looking again at Google data, on a given week, we know that diet searches peak at midnight. Now let’s add a bit of imagination to illustrate a point: picture an individual who reads about salads in the morning, before going through the daily grind, only to later realise what they really needed right now was pizza, but after ordering that in realised they should be on a diet… starting now. In other words, we’re witnessing the post-munchies regret.
Now, save your despair or lack of faith in humanity. Not all is lost when we prefer a juicy slice of pizza or a big fat, onion ring-enhanced burger with fries on the side to a quinoa-infused, lettuce-based falafel salad with a side of tomatoes and vinagrette. It comes down to our personal philosophies around food, and a bit of the current cultural landscape that’s been forming around the things we eat.
Diets are by far still a thing that people do, but there is a lot of merit in more balanced approaches from people like Joe Wicks, a now famous chef and personal trainer, also known as The Bodycoach. What he says is simple: between salads and pizza or a burger, why choose one over the other? With a simple workout plan in place and a balanced diet, you can actually aim to have both in your life.
Which sounds like a pretty good compromise to me: I’m all for salads and frequent doses of healthy food, but few things replace a few juicy slices of pizza with a side of Netflix and couch on a Tuesday evening. So instead of having our guts and our brains fighting over what feels right versus what feels good, we can arrange for a draw where both are winners and everyone gets a consolation prize. Who knows, maybe it’s a bit of pizza with salad on the side. (Which is actually pretty good.)
