Food Blog: Choose Healthy Eating

Share

Tweet

Email This Page

Sign up here for
our Newsletter: *

Your choices will make a difference in the long run

“Every day, several times a day, each of us makes food choices that influence our body’s health for better or worse.  Each day’s choices may benefit or harm our health only a little, but when these choices are repeated over years and decades, the rewards or consequences become major.^1”

This slightly edited quotation appears on the first page of the first book in the first course of my nutrition training.  It launched in me a fascination with the determinants of choice and my exploration into how we can facilitate healthy eating.  For a nutritionist, understanding what constitutes a healthy diet is fairly straightforward.  Understanding how to help a client make the choice to adopt a healthy diet is more difficult.  Understanding how to facilitate an entire community to choose a healthy diet is one of the more important and pressing challenges of our time.

It can be overwhelming when we consider how many factors influence our food choices, most of which conspire against healthy eating.  For example:

• Our food environment  – We live in a food environment in which most of our food choices are processed, manufactured, nutritionally depleted or adulterated foods. In fact, added fats, sugar and refined grains, all of which are nutritionally depleted, account for more than half of the calories in the American food supply.  Making a healthy eating choice is often inconvenient, unattractive or even impossible.
• Our media environment – Advertising and promotional spending for unhealthy foods (fast food, manufactured snack foods, candy, and sweetened drinks) exceeds spending for healthy food advertising by a factor of one thousand to one.  Advertising works.  And it is working against a healthy American population.
• Our genetic heritage – We are genetically wired to seek out calories, particularly sweet and fatty tastes. This worked well for most of human existence when food was hard to get, when we needed stimulus to seek out calories and when all food was whole food.  However, food manufacturers and sellers now exploit this human desire for sweet and fat to sell nutritionally depleted food.
• Our feedback systems – Eating the standard American diet of high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt and low-nutrient food delivers immediate positive feedback:  good taste, low cost, convenience. The long-term consequences of that diet, for any individual, are unsure (a risk of poor health; it may not happen to us) and are delayed, often by decades.  As humans, immediate, positive feedback trumps negative consequences that are delayed, especially when the negative consequences are murky, which we tend to deny anyway.

And the list goes on.  For those concerned about the health of our communities, it is easy to see the problem as intractable.

But it isn’t.  There are solutions.  And that is what will be explored in future messages.

NEXT BLOG: Food Blog: Why Do We Have Unhealthy Diets?

References:

¹ Rolfes et al, Understanding Normal and Clinical Nutrition, sixth edition, 2009 p. 3