Human body needs three basic ingredients to survive: oxygen, water and food. We can survive only about three minutes without air, three days without water and three weeks without food. Clearly food is essential for our existence and it is crucial to understand how food can make or break our body. This blog is inspired from my learning through a recent course on "Food and Health" from Stanford University.
In the past
century, there have been numerous researches to comprehend, decode and
re-create the food we eat. This primarily started in western society during the
times of World War when shortage of food became a global issue. There was a
socio-cultural shift where women, who were usually the caretaker of food needs
of family, started working to run the family as men were out for war. This gave
birth to an industry of processed food where mothers need not to invest time
and energy in cooking the food at home.
Overtime the convenience
food meant fewer meals to be cooked at home and more leisure time for people to
relax. Thus, people get to eat tasty food instantly without having the need to
prepare it. This was contrary to the traditional approach, which required a lot
of physical activities to grow, procure, process, serve and then consume food.
This led to emergence of obesity as chronic disease with well-defined health
consequences and medical recommendations. In second half of twentieth century,
attention was focused on reducing saturated fat and total fat in diet. And
processed food industry responded promptly to these demands. One of ways to
reduce fat was by adding significantly more sugar like corn syrup to almost
everything we eat. This not only made food taste better but also increased
their shelf-life. And the sudden increase in our intake of simple sugar fueled
modern epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes.
Over the years,
scientific studies break down the food we eat into various nutrients which they
say are essential for different body functions; and medical advancements
started diagnosing our bloodstreams for innumerable “check-ups” to point out which
vitamin and mineral was in excess or deficit. Soon people started showing
symptoms of new-age diseases which never existed before. This further created a
demand to manufacture food supplements which would serve specific nutritional
requirements and the way was paved for packaged food industry.
And here we are
today looking at the ingredient list of each pack from the shelf of grocery
store, ensuring to consume the right nutrition for our health. Whether it’s a
pack of potato chips, carbonated cold drink, lip-smacking cheese or your
favorite dessert, we feel it has been carefully prepared (formulated) for our
consumption using the best of technology. One of the biggest drawback in the
approach of modern science I always feel is that it tries to breakdown to the
lowest single entity or component out of the whole, based on current scientific
records. What it ignores is the fact that nothing in this universe works in
isolation. Similarly, any food we intake as whole acts as a system in itself
and if we break it down trying to extract one or two components, we are
breaking down the system. Thus, the iron our body extract from eating an apple
would not be the same when we pop-up an iron supplement pill.
To delight the
taste buds of ever growing population, the food processing industry is
launching new products each day neglecting the side effects of synthetic ingredients
on the health of its consumers. These food products are usually high in
sodium(salt), fat and sugar to maintain appealing taste. Regular excessive
consumption of such products damages the homeostasis of our body leading to
diseases categorized under lifestyle disorders like obesity, type II diabetes,
blood pressure, etc. At the same time, ignorant consumers don’t seem to
question what they are feeding their own body each day and fall prey to such
diseases.
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