Why is Obesity Such an Overwhelming Problem in Our Society?
Why are cancers, diabetes, allergies, and other illnesses rising?
Why is such a high percentage of the North American population hypoglycemic? The answer is simple: our food does not meet our needs. Much of what we eat is more harmful than befitting us.
So why aren’t we eating well? Over the last 200 years, food has changed dramatically. Humans have changed, too. But they don’t have changed together.
In the last 50 years, human lives have changed dramatically. The human genome has been mapped, the atom has been split, AI is snowballing, our use of technology has exploded, and our understanding of the world has grown exponentially. We have gained a new capacity for multitasking to deal with stress and crisis. We’re using more of our brains for resolving and calculating than ever before. Our life expectancy has almost doubled. We have changed nearly everything about the way we live and work. The quality of food we eat has changed, too. But not in an effective way. The evolution of food is not keeping up with the development of the people who eat it.
Five thousand years ago, humans first cultivated seeds. Two thousand years ago, the Egyptians invented fermented bread. People made their bread from whole grain, locally milled wheat for thousands of years. Then, 200 years ago, the Industrial Revolution happened, and milling stopped being a small-batch, local pursuit and became a manufacturing process. Factory mills were faster and could produce more flour. Since then, bread – and food in general – has taken a massive leap towards mass production. Because foods started being made in such vast quantities, they could not be consumed as soon as they were made. They required storage and needed to have a longer shelf life. So, in came the additives and preservatives. And out went nutrition and freshness.
Since the Industrial Revolution, everything has become about making more stuff faster. In the food industry, quantity trumps quality. Seeds are genetically modified to grow faster and produce heartier crops that can be stored and shipped without damage. Nitrogen is used as a fertilizer, resulting in huge yields; herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers add to the toxic, carcinogenic cocktail. Vast tracts of land are used for single crops, depleting the soil of critical nutrients and minerals. For example, silica, a nutrient that keeps skin resilient, no longer exists in the land. Now, taking a pill is our only option.
Food isn’t about nutrition anymore. Now, it’s big business.
Since the industrial revolution, everything has become about making more stuff faster. In the food industry, quantity trumps quality. Seeds are genetically modified to grow faster and produce heartier crops that can be stored and shipped without damage. Nitrogen is used a fertilizer, resulting in huge yields; herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers add to the toxic, carcinogenic cocktail. Vast tracts of land are used for single crops, depleting the soil of key nutrients and minerals. For example, silica, a nutrient that keeps skin resilient, no longer exists in the land. Now taking a pill is our only option.
Food isn’t about nutrition anymore. Now it’s big business.
Let’s take bread as an example. Once milling was industrialized, a bleaching agent was introduced into the process to create white flour, which was perceived to be cleaner and more “upscale” than its rougher-looking (yet infinitely healthier) unbleached counterpart. Bleaching flour involves removing the bran and the germ – which contain almost all the nutrients – leaving behind only starch.
Today, we have realized that bleached white flour isn’t good for us. So, instead of encouraging traditional milling, the government has mandated that white flour be enriched. That means all the bran and germ are stripped out of the wheat, and then pharmaceutically made nutrients (which are, as you may imagine, harder for bodies to absorb since they’re artificial) are added back in. Why don’t they leave the nutrients in the first place and find a better way to distribute the whole grain flour?
This departure from food as sustenance to food as a product is more comprehensive than bread. It’s everywhere, in everything we eat. Remember when tomatoes tasted good? Your tastes have stayed the same. The tomatoes are not tomatoes any longer. If you ever ate a tomato in Italy or one grown in your backyard from an heirloom plant, you would never touch the flavourless ones in the produce department again.
Food has evolved from local, small-batch, homemade sustenance to a manufactured, mass-produced product. That adds up to a fundamental lack of nutrients – and toxins our bodies don’t know what to do with. Manufactured foods cheat our bodies. So, we get fat. We get sick. We are killing ourselves with unhealthy food and forgetting sound, and rational minds are in a healthy body.
It is alarming that our fruits and vegetables no longer smell or taste like they should. Producers have robbed their products of flavour, aroma, and nutrients to bring us beautiful fruit that can be transported at great distances. Everything is about shelf life and durability. Items have to be picked unrepented, so they’ll last longer. But ripe fruits and vegetables are the ones that have the highest enzyme activity and the highest level of nutrients. Most of the things we buy are picked at 50% or less of that potential. And so many foods we eat are genetically modified for durability, shelf life, and resistance to pests. You know those Granny Smith apples that have extra-thick skin? They’re like that because they have been combined with fish genes.
That’s what we’re eating. It’s what we’re feeding our children. And we wonder why, even when we “eat right,” it isn’t making us as healthy as it should. Cancers and allergies are a by-product of the things we are doing to our food sources and our environment. People have started waking up to this fact. It’s a movement that began in the sixties but took off in the nineties when people sat up and said, “What the hell are we doing to ourselves?”
We’re realizing that being able to eat strawberries in January means leaving a huge carbon footprint. Eating things sprayed with chemicals designed to kill weeds and insects isn’t good for our bodies. Stripping the natural nutrients out of food and adding artificial ones back in doesn’t make sense. So many of us are eating more healthfully and making better choices. But when the options we have are poor, what should we do?
We should make food the way it was done 200 years ago. However, eating organically and locally can’t work globally; it’s too expensive and time-consuming. You can’t feed seven billion people with organically grown products. Without genetic modifications, etc., we could not provide the world. So, in all fairness, I can’t condemn the entire system out of hand. It’s necessary. But it could be better. We need something bigger and better that can feed everyone – and feed them properly.
So what do we do? Food has to go backward to match the forward movement of human evolution. We must find a new way of growing, storing, processing, manufacturing, and consuming food. We may not be 100% sure of what that should be, but here are a few things we do know:
- Growing food should not be damaging the soil. Farmers should be rotating crops, and the government should encourage responsible farming.
We shouldn’t be shipping food across continents. Growing and storage should be done locally as much as possible, with minimal logistics and movement. We should eat locally and seasonally. - We should be phasing out herbicides, pesticides, additives, and preservatives and finding natural ways of protecting crops and keeping products fresh. It is not about how it looks.
- We should be rethinking the genetic modification of our foods. The best way to do that is to be educated – and stop buying questionable foods designed in a lab. In Europe, where genetically modified foods are not permitted, the incidence of people with wheat allergies is significantly lower than in North America.
- We need to change the way we think about food. We shouldn’t be eating three large meals a day and getting hungry in between. When we get hungry, we run out of energy. We get moody, tired, and irritable. So, we reach for a fast energy source – our bodies crave sugar. But as we know, sugar enters the bloodstream quickly, giving us a boost, but after it spikes, we crash. So, we reach for more sugar. This is the nasty cycle that causes obesity. Instead, we need a continued source of energy that provides constant nutrients. If we had a start that kept us satiated, we would make fewer unhealthy food choices – and have healthier lives.
There’s no single answer to this issue. But it helps to spread awareness. At Shasha Co., we educate people. We’re also doing our part by creating a range of tasty, functional, raw, low-GI foods grown naturally, contain nutrients, undergo minimal processing, can be consumed throughout the day, and don’t leave a big carbon footprint. They are multi-use foods that can be used as a snack, cereal, or porridge, cooked with other ingredients, or just eaten as a snack. Our bodies need these foods, and our environments need us to produce them responsibly.
To make a real difference in our health and planet, we need to change how we look at food and eating – as a society. And that will take time and effort. But I hope this article is a step in that direction, making you think about what you eat. I hope it inspires you to pick up a book about eating locally, buy a loaf of bread that hasn’t had all the nutrients processed, and think twice before putting that genetically modified tomato in your cart.
By Shasha Shaun Navazesh
