Let's kick off with a little music shall we?
I've been thinking a lot lately about what we put into our bodies, and why, and to what effect. I guess I've always had a bit of an interest in food and nutrition. My mother was a stay-at-home parent when I was growing up and that along with the way she was brought up meant that everything we ate was made from scratch, often using vegetables and fruit from our own garden. Having veg and fruit growing in the garden also meant we ate a lot of it. There was also a wholesale produce shop pretty much across the road from where we lived, so we'd buy boxes of oranges in the winter and so on. In short, we ate a lot of whole foods, freshly prepared and home cooked. We would have a Sunday roast without fail every Sunday, often followed by an apple, rhurbarb, blackcurrant or gooseberry crumble. (If you aren't jealous by now you don't know what you're missing!). We did used to eat out occasionally, if we were in town for shopping or something, and I used to enjoy the donuts at our local fast food restaurant (Wimpy). We'd have icecream, chocolates and sweets in moderation. For example, we'd often go for a walk on the weekend, and we would stop at the sweet shop on the way home and could buy one kind of sweet. Or after a swim we were allowed something out of the vending machine. I don't recall ever being told I couldn't have something, and I don't ever recall over-indulging in anything either.
My mother also grew up making everything from scratch from whole foods, in a culture that uses a lot of herbs, vegetables, fruit and legumes. She is also reasonably nutritionally aware and would tell us about the various vitamins and minerals in various things we were eating. I always found this very interesting. I think watching her eat fruits and vegetables with relish is also an early memory of mine that encouraged my own love of these things. Perhaps at the time I didn't fully realize it, but I think our tastes were being shaped through all these things. We grew up with a healthy appreciation for good, largely unprocessed food, which has carried on through my life. As for less healthy processed foods, being allowed to have them but in moderation meant that I did not develop any kind of excessive desire for them (which I might have done had they been forbidden), and neither was I overly exposed to their effects.
It seems clear to me that our childhood experiences with food have such a profound shaping effect on our tastes and ultimate food habits. I feel lucky that I happened to have had the experiences I did with food growing up, but recognize that in today's world where in many cases both parents work and time (as well as space) are of a premium, that perhaps most people do not get the kind of benefits I had the luxury of in terms of home-grown and home-cooked foods. In fact, there are many pressures to eat in a much different way to this.
The other night we were talking about the way that the state tries to influence people's eating and activity habits through various types of marketing. A recent book titled 'Nudge' talks about how the placement of foods in different places in cafeterias for example has the effect of promoting either healthy or unhealthy eating. Many people find this controversial, as though the state were trying to control people and that has to be bad. Personally, I find it heartening. The thing is that whether we like it or not, we are being subjected to nudges all the time, but most of them come from the marketers of products. Junk food especially, with bright colours and loads of artificial colours, flavours, massive amounts of sugar and very little nutritional value is often marketed almost exclusively at children. See this assessment of common breakfast cereals for instance. The effects of these pushes towards such eating patterns are manifold. They have the effect of shaping the tastes of people for one thing, tastes that may continue for the rest of their lives. On top of that, in such cases, what is being promoted is something like a drug. The massive amounts of refined sugar, and the lack of fibre or anything else that may take longer to digest causes a sudden high, a temporary elevation of mood... followed by a crash which is often only remedied by another dose of sugar.
And that is besides all the artificial flavourings, colourings, preservatives, sweeteners, etc. All of which I have to admit I find a bit suspect. Several colourings have been linked for instance to various disorders in children as well as increased cancer risk. At one point, in an effort to slim down I was using artificial sweeteners (Sweet n Low and Equal) in my tea and coffee. I found I started getting headaches with a frequency and severity that didn't seem to correspond to anything else. This stopped when I stopped using them. The evidence on the potential dangerous effects of sweeteners is currently lacking, and in the UK at least, almost all drinks contain such sweeteners, regardless of whether they are diet drinks or not. I think it's only a matter of time before studies start to emerge showing the long-term effects of consuming such things.
My point of this post is that sometimes identifying the goods and the bads in terms of food options is really hard work. And while various governmental bodies do exist to try and keep obviously harmful things out of reach, it's still possible to do a lot of harm to ourselves through what we eat and drink, particularly if we do so in excess. What's the solution? I guess that people like Jamie Oliver, and other celebrity chefs focusing on school food and the connection between the raw ingredients and what we end up eating are trying to take the place of the parent in encouraging healthy food consumption. This is probably one good way forwards, but better still it will start inside the families, with parents making healthy choices for themselves as well as their children.
No comments:
Post a Comment