The US and probably most industrialized countries have a fundamentally flawed food paradigm that’s propagated everywhere, primarily by the companies profiting from it, which also influence the healthcare and medical industry.
When you step back to consider what food is, and how we’ve gotten so far removed from “natural” or “whole” or “raw”, it’s really alarming.
I’m convinced it’s a result of profit motives.
Economics.
But also, I think blatant disinformation.
Nutrition is a weirdly complicated topic, and it really really really shouldn’t be. It’s almost too pseudoscience-y.
I think it’s the result of special interests groups and the profit motive agenda.
We buy processed foods because: •lower cost
•more convenient (quicker to make, longer shelf life)
•tastes better (artificial flavoring and sugars)
But there’s a serious absence of actual nutritional value. Processed foods are “non-living”.
I think of eating processed foods like eating cardboard shaped into an appealing food form factor. It’s got a bunch of starch/carbs, it resembles something edible or appealing.
I think the main thing is that whatever we eat, it should have some biological activity.
It should decompose shortly after it was killed or plucked from the earth.
It should be biologically active. It should be alive or really recently alive. Or have the potential to be alive again.
Eating dead shit seems intuitively stupid. As stupid as eating paper. Or pure sugar, which is essentially what paper is, given a little more processing.
Eat shit that is biologically alive, and you’ll be healthy.
I think that’s a good rule of thumb.
Eating foods that are alive or recently killed/harvested from the earth may mean more preparation to cook. It may mean we shop for these foods more often. It may mean they aren’t addictive.
I’m convinced that intermittent fasting combined with this diet is the ultimate healthy lifestyle for 99% of the world.
Eat 8 hours a day. Don’t eat 16 hours. When you eat those 8 hours, feed yourself the highest quality meat and vegetables and fruits. Dense nutrients. Don’t get full, get satiated. Let your fasted body fully absorb all that high quality living nutrients.
Food tastes better when fasting. Smells better. Digests better.
Most of our health and medical problems are entirely related to the industrialization of food processing.
We’ve traded cheap food for expensive healthcare.
Diabetes. Heart disease. Cancer. Alzheimer’s (type 3 diabetes). All these can be helped with a natural diet. With some whole living foods. Cut out over eating. Cut out all processed packaged foods.
We can eat cheap. But we pay exorbitant amounts toward later life health care as a consequence.
Processed food won’t kill you right away.
It’ll kill you slowly,
by starving your body, by disrupting your hormones, by disrupting your microbiome and digestion.
The biggest thing with all these carbs is insulin insensitivity that occurs.
When we eat carbs all the time, we become insulin resistant. When we become insulin resistant, we cannot absorb nutrients. In addition, persistently high insulin levels mean higher body fat.
Fasting and working out ensure insulin sensitivity, but the other side is we absolutely need that healthy unprocessed living food when we do eat. We’re animals, damnit. Eat like an animal.
Michael Pollan wrote a great book that overviews this transition a bit titled The Omnivores Dilemma
Advertising propagates this misinformation. Food processing companies basically became middlemen and took money away from farmers into food processing corporations.
We should be buying from farmers directly. Farmers markets.
These corporations came in and contracted with farmers and bought all their food, processed it. Took $10 and made $50 out of it. With zero nutrients and more convenience. I mean it solved the problems of cost and convenience. Healthy Food goes bad. What to do?
Can that shit.
Except then it doesn’t have any nutrients.
It’s just a corpse of the healthy food it once was.
There’s really nothing tastier than fresh food.
So you can it and package it. Process the hell out of it. Then it loses its flavor. So you add chemical flavorings, and shit just spirals from there into this grotesque industry we have today, which is represented in the center aisles of every grocery store.
Fresh. Fresh is 🔑
I bet it really started during the war feeding soldiers.
I have to believe that was a massive impetus towards the industrialization of food we have today.
In addition, urbanization. Getting fresh food to the urban centers. I don’t think that’s much of an issue, actually. But maybe. Then there’s a whole demographic who is so poor they’d prefer to spend less on food and more on other conveniences, mostly cause they’re uneducated and don’t understand the consequences: “If I can take a $500 monthly bill of fresh food, and cut it to $200 in processed shit, but afford a better house/apartment, and better clothes…. why not?” And then this demographic has $5000 medical bills that drive up everyone else’s healthcare premiums.
We just need to go back to buying from the sources, and eliminate food processing and packaging company middle men, like those who make all the packaged foods we know today. A cultural shift towards whole fresh foods: Produce, Meat.
Also, the supplement industry is a complete sham. The whole industry is bullshit. No supplement can replace or substitute eating fresh healthy Whole Foods. They’re totally unnecessary, and recently long term studies have shown even dangerous.
The Supplemental food industry is snake oil. Pills and powders and shit. Diet and digestion are 100% correlated. What you eat determines how you absorb nutrients. It’s a vehicle. Changing the form by processing doesn’t mean it delivers the same. On the contrary. Everything is some damn variation of corn or soy or palm/canola/vegetable oil. Stay away from all soy protein, Sugars, Vegetable oils.
The biggest thing I’ve been trying to learn recently is to eat less. I’ve always ate healthy, but I’ve been so obsessed with building muscle the past decade that I’ve overlooked the benefits of eating less. That’s the journey I’m on now.
What you eat is critical, but when you eat is just as critical. I think I overate even though I was eating “healthy”.
It definitely is how you build muscle and add body weight, but long term it’s not ideal for wellness
William Dare 