“You are what you eat”, must be one of the most popular phrases of the last decade. Ever since medical research has proven that one of the (many) reasons of why in the past years the incidence rates of many deadly diseases, namely cancer and diabetes, have raised is the disorganized, hurried, and unbalanced food intake, food industries have turned their heads to a new market niche dedicated to convince everybody that healthy people eat healthy food, and that whatever they sell is not only innocuous, but improves many bodily functions, and therefore, if you want to be one of those healthy people, you must run and buy those things.
Whenever I hear “you are what you eat” I cannot think of anything else but a tall skinny woman dressed in a white baby doll eating with one hand a 0 calorie yogurt while admiring a zen landscape, and rubbing her flat abs with the other. This image, brought partly by the actual mistaken concept of beauty, and partly by the need of a new market, is the one that has distorted the whole idea of healthy eating, selling the idea that eating more and more highly processed food, that has no calories, is the key to loosing weight, or looking healthy.
It is no news that the point of marketing campaigns is selling no matter what, and companies will do everything in their power, and this includes lying to their customers, in order to boost their sales up, and this is no different within the food industries.
Among the many curious marketing manipulations in the food industries, I like to quote the one that appears in certain cereal that holds a big feline as an image: “No Cholesterol” it says in a yellow box on the upper right side of the container, making you think that the company, because is so concerned about your health, has invested in a process that takes the cholesterol away from the cereal, the trick however, lies in the fact that the cereal never had any cholesterol on it simply because vegetal cells do not carry any significant amount of cholesterol molecules on them.
Healthy eating does not involve stopping eating any kind of food, but eating everything at the right time and the right amount along with physical activity. The right time varies according to what you are eating: it’s not the same thing to eat the same steak in the morning, at noon, or at night, mainly because if you eat it late at night, apart of having an upset stomach, the digestion process will not occur with the same efficiency as during the day, and certainly eating it first thing in the morning may cause you some acidity. The right amount is not the same for every person: some people reportedly need more complex carbohydrates than others due to their high physical activity during the day; some others need more vegetal fibre given the size of their stomach.
On personal experience I can tell that, strict diets turn out unsuccessful because they cannot be followed for long periods of time, and when broken, the body stores everything whatever it receives, making it harder every time. The modern theories state that healthy eating includes the combination of every food group, and that the persistent lack of any of them might lead to a number of disorders. Preference also becomes a problem when it comes to combining food groups: not liking one thing does not always mean you can pass on it, for instance, many people, hate fish and seafood due to the strong taste given by the presence of nitrogen, but since fish has many substances that cannot be found anywhere else, it should be eaten at least twice a month by every person.
Being what you eat holds a much deeper meaning to itself than not eating fats or carbs, it goes more on the way of knowing what to eat, and when to eat it. Eating eight pieces of bread, a slice of pizza, with a diet coke is as unhealthy as eating a cucumber, with a glass of water, not eating any meat is as unhealthy as eating red meat everyday, or drinking no water is as bad as drinking ten litres of it.
It is the obsessive seek of wealth that has taken man to look for head blowing ways of obtaining money to the point where it has reached an industry where health is at stake, furthermore, the huge amount of information that travels so rapidly around the world and reaches the wrong ears, creates a worried vulnerable population that will do whatever it takes not to fall in a negative category. When it comes to eating, just sit back and enjoy what you are given, it is just a matter of being organized and controlling the amounts and times.
