blog, lifestyle, nutrition, WOD
Why our environment is stacking the odds against health
Have you ever seen obese wildlife? If you have, I would bet it was city ‘wildlife’: squirrels and raccoons who have grown accustomed to scavenging through garbage bins in search of human food leftovers as a replacement for their own evolved food. But in their natural habitats, I would wager you haven’t seen any morbidly overweight deer or birds around lately.
Next question: have you ever seen an animal with a calorie counting app? A blood glucose monitor? For that matter, consider this: humans, before the advent of our modern technology, didn’t have access to these constant information delivery that we do now via our phones, watches, heart rate monitor straps etc. How were people pre- MyFitnessPal and Apple Watches’ movement tracker not sick and obese?!
Technology: helping or hurting?
These devices that allow dieters in 2019 to track their carefully measured out food intake and log exact calories burned to ensure that they have exactly the right caloric balance on any given day rob us of our natural instincts and intuition regarding movement and food.
Our bodies are smart. They have built in regulatory mechanisms to tell us when we’re hungry, when we’re full, if we need more of a certain mineral or vitamin or macronutrient. Furthermore, our bodies are also designed to not have the exact same calories in and calories out on any given day.
Our hunter gatherer ancestors didn’t think about calories in food. They ate when there was food available and didn’t when there wasn’t.
Furthermore, there were periods of fasting naturally built in - and in addition to limitations in food availability, the lack of artificial light dictated stricter circadian rhythm patterns. Research emerging is showing the power that this time restricted feeding and periodic fasting has on our cells - and how disruption to these previously ubiquitous practices influences our vulnerability to heart disease, metabolic syndrome, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.
The food industry doesn’t make money if you’re healthy (nor does pharma)
The modern environment - of hyper palatable foods, of engineers in labs whose job it is to design ‘franken-foods’ that make us unable to stop eating, of constant food availability - is not what our genes are wired for.
The very drive that kept us alive as a species, to seek out high energy food, in combination with industries built to take advantage of our hormonal systems so that they can sell more product (at the expense of our health) has consequently made us sick and obese, plagued with chronic lifestyle diseases that hunter gatherers were free from in old age.
It makes sense that as humans, we evolved to take advantage of abundance when it was present; the next meal was not a given. An affinity for high sugar (in the form of naturally occurring glucose and fructose - fruit, starchy vegetables, honey) and fat (most definitely not coming from highly processed industrial oils) made sense. So now we live in an environment where our genetics are still programmed to seek out these highly prized, energy dense molecules - but most people are not faced with scarcity of volume or availability of these foods. There’s a mismatch, and this is a major problem.
Is your food really food?
If it's got an ingredients list and/or that list contains anything you can't identify, the answer is likely 'no'
Try reading a ingredients label any common packaged, processed food. A protein bar, a frozen, pre made meal, a box of sugared cereal. Even some of the items in the bio markets - the ‘healthy’, ‘gluten free’, ‘keto’, ‘vegan’ labelled snack foods: aim to identify what all of the ingredients are. Below are ingredients lists for two ‘healthy’ protein bars.
Sugar’s role in mental and physical health
Is it really just 'harmless' and 'the same as other calories' as the food industry has told us? There's a much darker side than the energy highs and crashes of this addictive substance
The other thing to note about these two protein bar examples above is most of the ingredients list is comprised of sugar or sweeteners in one form or another. Most protein bars on the market are sugar bars with some poor quality protein thrown in there. If it’s possible, a couple eggs or a piece of fish would provide a much better option for protein (without triggering a sugar craving cascade) than a typical protein bar on the market.
Sugar stimulates the same neurochemical pathways in the brain as addictive drugs: no wonder everyone loves sugar. It gives a dopamine response, a high that makes us want more and more and more. And if you work in the food industry, this is exactly the goal: to keep you eating and buying their products!
Not only does sugar simply drive us to consume more in terms of calories, these calories are poorer quality than other real sources - causing an inflammatory cascade of signalling in your body. You’ll experience an energy high and then a quick crash - the glucose will be quickly absorbed and spike in your blood, which when done excessively, leads your body down the path towards obesity and type 2 diabetes. Not only is inflammation an underpinning mechanism in most modern, chronic diseases, it is also emerging to be a causal factor in mental health and mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. Not only this, but the conventional wisdom that saturated fat and cholesterol are behind heart disease is showing to be incorrect; it is, in fact, sugar that’s driving cardiovascular disease.
A confluence of factors not in your favour
It’s impossible to pin down an exact, singular cause for the global obesity and health epidemic. No doubt is the combination of 24/7 access to food, most of which is engineered to tap into hardwired addictive pathways in the brain via careful combination of sugar, fat and salt a major player, but the rest of 21st century compounds these effects.
The stress of modern life and often demanding work and family expectations have deleterious effects on sleep and stress management (and therefore drive excess inflammation, especially in the brain, and contribute massively to hormonal imbalances causing weight gain).
Work and social structures that are primarily indoors and sedentary; we sit most of the day at work and then drive to and from work, and sit in front of a screen at home. Our bodies were designed to move and we’re ignoring this. The data are supporting the immense benefits of being in nature and exposure to sunlight for overall health - especially for hormone and circadian rhythm health, which influences everything from sleep quality to appetite regulation
Constant obsessive technology usage, from smartphones to social media to data collection apps. Again, this fuels stress, inflammation and mental health issues.
Everyday environments such as the supermarkets that are designed to press your willpower to give in to the chocolate bar or ice cream.
Chronic exposure to toxins and pollutants - exemplified by the air pollution issues in cities and the preponderance of endocrine disruptors in the plastics present in everything from shampoo to tupperware.
You can gain some control back!
You can gain some control back! There are some ways to work around our environment that is setting us up to fail; it just requires more work. Here’s a list of general tips:
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