Nutrition 101: Why it’s important
The lifelong pursuit of greatness is like an endurance sport. Both endeavors favor the disciplined, challenge the minds & bodies of their participants and can look intimidating to spectators on the sidelines. But unlike with endurance sport competitions, we don’t get to choose the degree of difficulty in our pursuit of greatness in life; it’s chosen for us based on our neighborhoods, our gender, the color of our skin and our socio-economic background. For some, the pursuit of greatness is a 50-mile, indoor race walk. For most others, the pursuit of greatness is a grueling, extreme weather ultra-triathlon.
Here’s another similarity between endurance sports and the pursuit of greatness: success begins with establishing healthy nutrition routines. Whether you’re an attorney, an artist, or an accountant, you’ll never realize your potential if your nutrition isn’t optimized.
There are many ways in which good nutrition is essential:
1. Establishing healthy eating and drinking habits increases the likelihood that you will squeeze every ounce of energy out of your days, weeks, months and years in pursuit of your ultimate goal (whatever that goal might be).
2. A diet that supports general good health will do a lot to ensure healthy physical function.
3. Establishing healthy eating and drinking habits decreases the likelihood that you will get sick or die before you reach your potential.
Food is the fuel that our body uses to function and the quality of the fuel greatly effects our physical and mental chemistry, which influences our performance. According to Dr. Lisa Mosconi — an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and the Associate Director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic, Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of the forthcoming book, Neuronutrition: Nutrition for the Brain — “food is not just the source of nourishment and entertainment, but food is really chemistry.”
In my research on nutrition, I spent hours reviewing Dr. Mosconi’s presentations and, most valuably, engaging in conversations with her about the importance of good nutrition. Dr. Mosconi’s research makes clear that the quality of your body and brain’s chemical reactions — catalyzed by the food you eat & the beverages you drink — greatly influences your quality of life. Our ability to potentially delay the onset of Alzheimer’s, just by practicing healthy nutrition routines, is one such example that I discussed with Dr. Mosconi:
There’s a lot of research shown that people who eat a portion of fish twice a week, have a 40 to 70% lowered risk of Alzheimer’s as they get older, as compared to people who eat no fish.
However you prefer to frame the benefits of good nutrition, there’s no denying its importance. This undeniable importance makes the nutrition accessibility gap in America between the privileged minority and the striving majority that much more striking.
Shakirah Simley —a food justice activist and food producer who lives in San Francisco — has witnessed this injustice from multiple perspectives. Growing up in Harlem, New York in the mid-80s, Shakirah’s home was surrounded by bodegas, but there were no easily accessible grocery stores:
There just wasn’t a proper grocery store. There were bodegas, but if you needed to get anything beyond chips, sodas, and coffee, you had to go a lot further.
Shakirah would trek outside of her neighborhood on foot — four younger siblings in tow — any time that she wanted to prepare a well-balanced meal for her family. But even after traveling so far for something healthier than chips and soda, the nutritious options at her closest available grocery store were disappointing.
We’d walk pretty far to Pathmark, and it was — I didn’t know this at the time, but it wasn’t great. Not a lot of options on the fresh side. If it was “fresh,” it was brown and wilted. The meat could also be suspect sometimes. But I was trying to do the best I could with the money that my mom had gave me.
It wasn’t until Shakirah attended the University of Pennsylvania that she learned — in a Politics of Food and Opportunity class — that the neighborhood where she was raised is technically known as a ‘food desert.’ For many of the students in her class, the idea of a food desert in the middle of major American city was a surprising and sobering concept. For Shakirah, it wasn’t “a theoretical thing. It was a real thing.”
For those of us who are (unknowingly) enlisted in life’s most difficult of endurance sports, it’s critical that we prioritize good nutrition before all else. But as Shakirah grew to realize, you’ll likely need to work harder to achieve this optimization if you’re a member of the striving majority.
