Mindful Eating: Obesity
Happy Weekend to All! I usually try to get in at least one “mindfull” post each week, this past week was my thoughts on Nutrition Anthropology and Agriculture, partly from Food and Society class. This post blends with another class nicely, as I have a paper due this week in Medical Nutrition Therapy class on an article by Cutler, Glaesar, and Shapiro: Why Have Americans Become More Obese?
Obesity is one of the areas in nutrition that fascinates me. I am hugely passionate about prevention, in everything, preventing things from happening. 90% of chronic diseases are related to nutrition, which means 90% are modifiable! If you just knew how or found out what to do, you could modify your outcome!
A few months ago I did a post about F as in Fat: Childhood Obesity. Thank you to all of your excellent comments on me possibly starting a weight management camp. After some soul searching, I really am starting to feel like that could be my niche in life. It would be a great combination of all my interests: exercise in plenty of ways, activities, teaching children, nutrition, wellness, and the outdoors!
Back to the post at hand, the article by Cutler et al. states that 14% of the population was classified as obese in the 1970′s. 39 years later, those rates are close to three times as high according to the CDC.
Evidence may suggest that calorie expenditure rates have not changed since 1980, rather, calories consumed have increased. Advancing technology and agriculture, Nutrition Anthropology and Agriculture, could be one culprit. Mass production of food goods have resulted in tasks taking less time and food costing less but increases in quantity. Quality of such food items is questionable with microwaves, preservatives, vacuum packaging and artificial flavors. Ready-to-eat meals have more “value” but the nutrient content has decreased.
Survival of the fittest has become survival of the fat-est. Biggie-sizing, bigger seating, bigger cars, bigger buildings, bigger everything. We never needed childhood obesity research because we never thought we needed it. Gastric by-pass surgery. Diet- anything. Paleolithic times required the fittest to hunt more, hunt better, and survive so that evolution of hominids occurred. Now those people that can take advantage of these ready to eat, made for you, edge of technology foods aren’t just the fittest that survive, everyone can have these foods at any time of day, in nearly any U.S state.
The $100 billion dollar diet industry proves that we have an issue with self-control. We are willing to eat manufactured, pre-portioned, frozen turkey, nutri-systems, but we can’t seem to go to a farm, pick out a turkey, and wait for it to be properly sacrificed to feed our whole family in a month. Food now has to be immediate and agriculture adapted so that it could be. Society adapted so that we could keep food sources on hand, but is that really necessary? Should ores, french fries, pretzels, and gummy bears really even be classified as “food”?
I think not. Somewhere in all this industrialization, processing, and manufacturing caused the general population to believe that we can all just eat whatever is advertised as food, whenever we feel like it and that would actually be beneficial. These rising rates of obesity and chronic diseases say otherwise.
As always, I love comments and this is part of my paper that is due this week so thanks for reading my homework!
