Yeah I know, I usually blog about socio economic issues or about personal philosophies. So talking about food, on the face of it, would seem to be a bit of a stretch.
I suppose the underlying "theme" as it were with my writings has been an expressed desire to figure things out for myself. To understand the truth of things. To get underneath biases and determine whether or not the things I believe track with the reality around me. In this sense, talking about food seems as appropriate to my incessant desire to think as anything else I've said or written about.
I just finished reading through an article about healthy seeming foods, that aren't terribly healthy. With the exception of one food listed (tuna) all of the others listed were cited as unhealthy not because of what they initially were, but rather what they became as food companies and marketers altered them.
Tuna was the exception to this trend because of the link between seafood and mercury uptake in the body, for those that are curious.
Every other commonly held "healthy thing" had simply become unhealthy in context, because of the desire to market them. And it always came down to three particular things added, in an effort to make them more palatable.
Ever had muesli for breakfast? And I mean real muesli, long before you could easily find it on a supermarket shelf. Though not an unpleasant breakfast....it's rabbit food. Trust me, I've tasted rabbit food, and it's quite similar. In a palatability contest Froot Loops wins hands down, which is probably why Froot Loops sell better, even to this day.
But in this day and age you can walk into any grocery store and find "natural" and "organic" cereals to eat of all types. And the sad truth is that most of them are no more healthy in any context, than any other cereal grain breakfasty food you'd choose.
Why?
Remember the three things I mentioned above. They are the culprit. Salt, sugar, and fat. We evolved to crave sugar and fat in our diet, because they are rich sources of energy. They are also rarified sources of energy if you don't have that thing that we do have....a civilization. Salt is also important because of how it alters our pallet to either mask or enhance flavors. Soft drink manufacturers use salt in soft drinks to mask overt sweetness to modify a drinks flavor profile (and it also helps make us thirsty too).
This triumvirate of additives goes way beyond merely foods that are labeled as "healthy" in our conscience though.
In the last 40 years or so we have transformed at a fundamental level how food works in modern societies. More often than not today food is made somewhere else, by someone else, to be consumed later (often a lot later) by us. This trend led to more or less the utter removal of fiber from the modern western diet. Fiber content interferes with successful long term freezing and storage methods and reduces shelf life.
This reality ironically helped fuel the problems with modern fiber rich alternative foods. How? Because one of the easy ways to not only make these foods more palatable, but to increase their shelf life is with added sugars, salt, and fat.
The uptake of sugar in the modern diet is especially pernicious. In the late 1970's we began this (now scientifically proven to be mistaken) trend towards low fat diets. And when you reduce fat in foods that would otherwise have fat, you make it fundamentally less palatable. Sugars, HFCS, and corn syrup solids in our foods have risen dramatically as a result, to regain that palatability. And the arguments between "natural" sugars and High Fructose Corn Syrup are non starters either chemically or endocrinologically. HFCS isn't bad because it's worse than table sugar. It's bad because it's cheap, and thus ubiquitous. And ask anyone who understands hepatic (liver) metabolism, and they'll tell you a high sugar diet is a high fat diet. And as sugar intake has skyrocketed, so has obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.
It was with irony I noted that in the article I read about these so called healthy foods, the solution was strikingly simple. Make your own, and don't add sugar, salt, and fat.
Even if you don't have the time (or the inclination) for all of that, at least realize that sugar, fat, and salt intake are important to be mindful of. Not just because lowering them in your diet is good, but because relying on them (and thus your tastebuds) to inform your brain what is good, isn't a terribly great idea.
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