Why Do We Eat So Badly?

■Men  ■ Women
Prevalence of Obesity and 
Overweight in the U.S. 
(adults, estimated %)
Source:NIH

I’ve just finished watching a documentary called “Fed-Up” (now that I finally had the time to do something else other than study) and it definitely was able to stir many emotions in me, even if I already knew of most of
the issues that the documentary presented. It seems crazy how many people are overweight or obese! Yet, when you stop and think about it, it starts to make sense. What it all boils down to is processed food.

The vast majority of the foods we see in the supermarkets are highly processed. Processing itself is not necessarily bad, but unfortunately most of the processing has to do with adding a lot of sugar, salt, fat and artificial ingredients to enhance the food’s shelf life, flavor or texture. Micronutriens, such as vitamins and minerals (except for sodium), are absent, or perhaps added to make the food seem better than it is. Processed food is all around us, it is convenient and tasty – how can you not eat it?

Let’s look at these three contributors to the appeal of processed food. The first, and one of the biggest, hurdles in eating less processed food is convenience. Living in Silicon Valley, it is not hard at all to feel the pull of convenience over health – since I am using most of my time for studying, while also attempting to add some exercise into my routine, cooking is just a very time consuming activity that becomes hard to fit in. Time is difficult to come by and it probably takes some serious prioritizing and reorganizing of one’s life to change that.

Americans get most of their calories from processed food

Secondly, the documentary made a good point, which I have also contemplated and experienced in the past – if the food is there, it is hard to resist, but if it is not there, resisting is obviously a piece of cake. The solution to this might seem simple – just don’t buy any processed/unhealthy foods and fill your cabinets with nuts, fruit and vegetables instead. However, unhealthy and unfortunately very appealing food is all around us; in the grocery store, on TV, on the streets. Sometimes I think there is a McDonald’s every five blocks! It is difficult to keep processed food at a distance when it is shoved in your face all the time.

Cash register temptations

Thirdly, unless you have weaned yourself off of sugar and salt, processed food most of the time tastes pretty good. There is something in our primitive brain that tells us to eat those foods that taste sweet, fatty and satisfying. Luckily, processed food is not the only food that tastes great. And what’s better, the more of healthy stuff you eat, the more you will prefer it over processed food. I have noticed that milk chocolate just doesn’t taste as good as it used to, for example. Eating is also a very emotional activity that keeps us from letting go of some foods – just imagine someone telling you that you can never have your favorite family dish ever again.

So let’s all just stop buying processed food. We’ll simply close our eyes when we drive down the street, make time to cook and buy nothing that is bad for us. That is of course if we can afford to choose. Some people rely on processed food to provide them with enough calories for every day activities, whereas buying processed food for others may mean being able to buy more of something else, like clothing. Furthermore, healthy food is sometimes difficult to have access to – not necessarily because it is more expensive, but because supermarkets selling fresh produce are not close to everyone, not even here in the Bay Area, the mecca of technology and innovation.

So what should we do? Convincing big food companies to ditch the bad stuff and produce healthy food is probably not going to happen any time soon and the government will not be able to shift their subsidies from wheat and sugar to kale and oranges. Part of the answer is education, but no amount of education is going to help if people don’t have the means to do what they are taught. 

What we can do is to look at our own choices. Question them. Why do I buy the products I buy? Are these products good for me? Is there a better option? Could I make some more time each week to cook from scratch? Even small changes matter, as they will eventually lead to big improvements.

Love,

Anna-Kaisa

References

NIH Obesity and Overweight statistics

USDA Food Consumption Statistics