(This is Part 11 of a series. Go back to Part 10.)
Throughout history, animals in nature have been able to rely on their innate pleasure systems to guide them. It a food tasted good, it was good for them too. Nature had designed it that way; evolution had ensured that those foods that were delicious were exactly the foods that the animal should be eating.
With the human animal, though, this has changed. Our pleasure systems are as reliable as any other animal's—in nature. But as civilization has made calorie-dense animal foods ever more available, and as it has devised ever more sophisticated ways to make calorie-dense processed foods, our innate pleasure systems can no longer be relied upon.
Our pleasure systems tell us that burgers, fries, ice cream, sodes, pizza, apple pie, fried chicken, hot dogs, omelettes, chocolate cake, butter rolls and so on taste great; therefore they must be good for us. But this is no longer true.
Our pleasure systems are telling us to go for the calorie-dense foods because it worked well out in nature when our natural diet was fruitarian, and later on when our diet was hunter-gatherer.
Researchers have established that animal foods were still scarce for us in our hunter-gatherer days. In other words we were mostly gatherers; we lived primarily on what we could gather—fruits, berries, nuts, seeds and greens.
Later, when fire was discovered, and then agriculture, our pleasure systems still served us quite well. Now they led us toward a starch-centered diet—a diet in which starches such as rice and wheat and potatoes were the centerpiece, supplemented by fruits and vegetables and legumes.
But as mentioned before, since the Industrial Revolution and especially since the Second World War, a flood of calorie-dense foods has become not only available but ubiquitous. And we are drawn to them. We consume a lot of calorie-dense foods these days and then wonder why we have an epidemic of overweight and obesity.
To make matters worse, we're told by various diet books that we must learn to control our food portions, that is, we must "learn to push away from the table". We must count calories or fat grams or portion sizes or whatever.
Another kind of diet book tells us to eat all the animal foods and fatty foods we like. But research has shown that most people cannot stick with such diets. And for good reason: Such diets are inherently unhealthy. And when the diet must be abandoned, the strong tendency is to gain the weight back.
There are literally tens of thousands of research studies showing that vegetarians, and especially vegans, are much healthier and live longer than their meat-fish-fowl-dairy-eating counterparts. The latest diet crazes do not and can not invalidate these studies.
Consumption of animal protein and animal fat has been conclusively linked to the heartbreaking degenerative diseases that so plague modern societies—cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, arthritis, etc.
When calorie-dense foods were limited to royalty, only royalty came down with these diseases—"the diseases of kings", as they were called. Now that calorie-dense foods are present everywhere these conditions have become equal-opportunity illnesses, available to all.
To work at these diseases at a fundamental level would involve examining our dietary lifestyle and subtracting something—the calorie-dense foods that are so linked with these diseases in epidemiological and other studies.
But the industrialized world keeps looking in another direction, looking for something to add so that we'll be healthy—a new miracle drug, a new procedure, a new supplement, a new magic food...on and on.
Since these remedies are, in general, oriented towards getting rid of or managing symptoms rather than looking at causes, they are not going to obtain causal results. Hence our gigantic and ever-increasing bill for "health".
(This is the end of Part 11. Go to Part 12.)
—jim sloman, 9.26.04 for Aug 26
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