You are what you eat ….

Posted on February 19, 2013 | 4 Comments

…. but do we realize what we eat ? And why overconsumption ?

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4 Responses to You are what you eat ….

livinginabox | February 19, 2013 at 7:33 am | Reply

Some foods can prove a rider with more horsepower
joop | February 19, 2013 at 8:22 am | Reply

schokkend.
Dan denk je; biologisch eten dan maar, maar na het paardenvleesschandaal weet je ook niet meer wat waar is en wat niet.
Op een etiket kan je niet meer vertrouwen.
livinginabox | February 19, 2013 at 9:18 am | Reply

We consume far too much and the recent scandal concerning mislabelled foods has only served to highlight this. I live in the UK and we are one of the most obese nations in the EU, obviously obesity is a complex subject, but partly it’s physical inactivity, partly food advertising, partly eating behaviour, partly our car-sick transport system, partly work patterns and partly leisure ‘activities’ – which rarely include significant physical activity.

Humans evolved in conditions where food was often hard to obtain, and availability was variable, storage wasn’t reliable with seasonal gluts and enforced fasts. We had to eat where and when we could. Food with high levels of fat, salt and high levels of sugar were very beneficial (in small quantities), but also very hard to obtain and evolution led us to find them irresistible.

In under fifty years the food industry has discovered what foods humans cannot resist and how to make such irresistible food cheap and widely available and in mountainous quantities too.

At the same time, the world of work was transformed. Hard physical work is now rare in the industrialised world. Almost all our work is performed by energy-slaves. In the UK in 2005 each Briton had an average of 110 energy slaves. The magnitude of the problem is revealed by the fact that in mid-2007 the resident population of the UK was 60975000 [National Statistics]. With energy slave numbers at 110 per capita, that’s 6.7 billion, very nearly equivalent to the world’s population in 2008!

The combined effect of energy slaves and unlimited irresistible food creates an obesogenic environment. In the UK, where the over-reliance on motor-vehicles creates a hostile road environment and without a genuine segregated cycling network, this hostile road environment acts to deter many from cycling, further contributing to inactivity and obesity.

There is evidence to suggest that ‘exercise can definitely suppress hunger’. I could only find a tiny abstract, so no link.
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