We Live in a Dangerous Food World

Our food environment has become increasingly dangerous without a lot of people realizing it. I'm not talking about dioxin, mercury, PCBs, or microplastics, which of course, are all clearly dangerous. Most of us are aware of those concerns and although slow to act,  most governments have formulated regulations in an attempt to protect us from those types of threats.  I’m referring to a more subtle danger, namely calorie-dense, high carb, high fat, high salt foods our typical diet has drifted towards in every industrialized country on this planet. I’m talking about highly processed food products designed by flavor experts to give us “bliss point” culinary experiences and nearly instant prep times. In this regard, our food environment is more dangerous for us than it was for our parents, and in turn, much more dangerous than it was for our grandparents.

What’s the danger? Just look around. Nearly three-quarters of the citizens of industrialized nations are overweight, and nearly 50% qualify for the “obese” label. That’s true right now for the United States, and the EU is not far behind. Asian countries are seeing the same disturbing trend.  What’s wrong with being a little bit overweight? Nothing if you remain active and aren’t chronically stressing your body with high levels of carbs. But our typical western diet keeps pushing our bodies to store fat, to lose the ability to detect satiation, to increase blood pressure, to lose sensitivity to insulin, and to make it progressively harder to keep weight off when we do decide to do something about it. Current worldwide sky-high levels of type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome diseases prove the point.

Instead of starvation, an extremely common danger to our distant ancestors, we now risk the opposite, namely overeating our way to ill health and even premature death. Not bringing awareness to our current food environment is like walking unawares in tall grass in Texas without wearing boots. Nothing might happen for a while, but make it a habit and you’ll eventually step right on top of that rattler.

It’s not all about food. It includes levels of stress, lifestyles where we drive to get our groceries if the store is more than a block away, and so much time urgency that we are almost as likely to be eating in the car as at the table.

There’s no magic diet, no guaranteed supplement, no phenomenal piece of exercise equipment, no prescribed or over-the-counter medicine that has reversed this trend so far, and there is most likely not going to be a magical solution. Multiple factors are acting upon us to produce this worldwide problem of becoming overweight. With awareness, there’s a way out, however.

The answer is to recognize that if we do not actively work to change how we eat, what we eat,  and even when we eat, the odds are that we’ll be facing these new pandemics of weight-related diseases and loss of years of quality health.

See our answer to this problem. Visit our website and look at our eating app.