Eat what your Grandmother ate

Studies now prove what we have probably suspected anyway: The rise of obesity correlates exactly with our adoption of processed foods. Starting in 1899, the amount of processed foods in the average American diet was near zero. There was a bump in the fifties with the advent of "time-saving" foods for busy housewives and the apparent adoption of the teen malt shop as the blueprint for the future average American restaurant. Obesity and processed food use really began to take off in 1980. It would really be interesting to take a close look at that decade to see what exactly happened, but one possibility is the switch to HFCS in sodas, which occurred at the beginning of the 1980s. HFCS  has been demonstrated to be more fattening that the equivalent amount of sugar.

So, the percentage of foods in the American diet that comes from junk food and fast food is within shouting range of 50% nowadays. The problem is, our bodies respond in completely different ways to junk food than it does to ordinary whole foods. This study demonstrates foods high in salt, fat and sugar screw up the pleasure center of the brain most closely tied to our instinct to survive. For ordinary foods, the body judges the nutritive  value of a new food, and makes us like it even more if it likes what nutrients it packs. It also has a limited ability to alter these messages to our brains depending on seasonal body needs. In winter, it will makes us crave more dense, fatty foods to help us conserve heat; in summer, it makes us crave light and wet foods to cope with hot weather.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when seasonality can be defeated- we spend most of our time indoors in a sort of eternal early summer. So what small amount of seasonal regulation the pleasure centers can manage is short circuited. Furthermore, our systems are not geared to like  anthocyanins and isoflavones. What it wants is what is most likely to help the organism survive until the next big kill: fast energy sources like sugar, slow-burning energy sources like fat, electrolite feeders like salt, and, in any event, high caloric content. Once our bodies have had a taste of foods that exemplify this in the extreme- by and large, high-calorie, low-nutrient creations such as soda, Death by Chocolate, Doritos and Chicken McNuggets- our bodies trick us into liking these items more and more, and craving them with increasing intensity, to the point that the pleasure center can no longer make useful decisions- it just craps out.

We are driven to crave foods for a lifestyle cycle of feast and famine. Few of us live life like that anymore (though it's become fashionable in some circles to adopt an extreme paleolithic diet consisting of just that). But excepting these extremists, the rest of us are left to fight our desires with reason. One way to out-smart a broken pleasure center is to avoid these trigger foods entirely. The circuitry of the brain returns to normal and after a while we stop relying on trigger foods to get us through the rough patch until the next elk is killed. Yes, studies seem to indicate that we are addicted to junk food- but the way out is simply to stop eating them. Heh, easy, right? Ok, not so much.

 But, actually, there is a blueprint for eating like this all around us: what people ate like before the advent of instant potatoes. Imagine what your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (depending on how old you are or where you live) might have made for their meals. My own grandparents, like many Americans of their generation and region, were agriculturalists. They always had a huge vegetable garden and eggs from their own hens. They killed chickens and had a butcher process one of their animals every once in a while for more serious meat needs. Their cattle wandered open grassy fields, so their beef provided natural omega 3s. Except in a few special cases, they grew, cooked and ate their own food. Dinner might consist of  two salads, sliced tomatoes, green beans and extremely fresh chicken. For those of you with no agricultural past, just find a cookbook from 1930s or 1940s. There will be plenty of ideas. Alternately, explore the traditional, regional cuisines of other countries. There are traces of a long agricultural past in all such recipes.

Taking this idea to the grocery store is pretty simple. If it has a list of more than a couple of ingredients, there's a good chance it's not natural. It's definitely true if there are things on the list you don't recognize. Try to eat the outer part of the grocery store- the least processed foods you can find.

I know it's not the easiest thing to do. All of us need to succumb to the call of pizza delivery and takeout Chinese now and then. But find a pattern of cooking foods for the week to come. Prep everything on Sundays. Recycle items from one meal into several subsequent meals. The Internet is full of tips about how to do it. And here is a good article about how to avoid non-natural foods that may be lurking in your diet. With these tools in hand, maybe we can spark a revolution in the American diet that brings us back from the brink of a Wall-E-style future and restore our bodies to a normal, healthy state. At least I'd like to think it's possible.