"Cut the Calorie Rich And Processed Foods"
The traditional medical view on obesity, as summed up nearly a century ago:
"All obese persons are alike
in one fundamental respect: they literally overeat."
While this may be true in a technical sense,
this is in reference to overeating calories, not food.
Our primitive urge to overindulge is selective.
People don't tend to lust for lettuce.
We have a natural inborn preference for sweet, starchy, fatty foods,
because that's where the calories are concentrated.
Think about hunting and gathering efficiency.
We used to have to work hard for our food.
Prehistorically, it doesn't make sense to spend all day collecting types of food
that on average don't provide at least a day's worth of calories.
You would have been better off staying back at the cave.
So we evolved to crave foods with the biggest caloric bang for their buck.
If you were able to steadily forage a pound of food an hour
and it had 250 calories per pound,
it might take you 10 hours just to break even on your calories for the day.
But if you were gathering something with 500 calories a pound, you could
be done in 5 hours and spend the next 5 practicing your wall paintings.
So the greater the energy density— the more calories per pound—the more
efficient the foraging. So we developed an acute ability to discriminate foods
based on calorie density and to instinctively desire the densest.
If you study the fruit and vegetable consumption of four-year-old children,
their liking correlates with calorie density.
They prefer bananas over berries, carrots over cucumbers.
Well, duh, isn't that just a preference for sweetness?
No, they also prefer potatoes over peaches, and green beans over melon,
just like monkeys prefer avocados over bananas.
We appear to have this inborn drive to maximize calories per mouthful.
All the foods that researchers tested were naturally less than
500 calories per pound. Bananas topped the chart at about 400.
Something funny happens when you start going over that.
We lose our ability to differentiate.
Over the natural range of calorie densities,
we have this uncanny aptitude to pick out the subtle distinctions.
However, once you start heading towards bacon, cheese, and chocolate territory,
which can reach thousands of calories per pound,
our perceptions become relatively numb to the differences.
No wonder, since these foods were unknown to our prehistoric brains.
It's like the dodo bird failing to evolve a fear response
because they had no natural predators, and we all know how that turned out,
or sea turtle hatchlings crawling in the wrong direction
towards artificial light rather than the moon.
Aberrant behavior explained by an evolutionary mismatch.
The food industry exploits our innate biological vulnerabilities
by stripping crops down into almost pure calories: straight sugar,
oil, which is pretty much pure fat,
and white flour, which is mostly refined starch.
First, they have to remove the fiber, because it effectively has zero calories.
Run brown rice through a mill to make white, and you lose
about two-thirds of the fiber. Turn whole wheat flour into white and lose 75%.
Or you can run crops through animals— to make meat, eggs, and dairy—
and remove 100% of the fiber.
And what you're left with is CRAP— an acronym used by one
of my favorite dieticians, Jeff Novick— Calorie Rich And Processed foods.
Calories are condensed in the same way plants
are turned into addictive drugs like opiates and cocaine:
concentration, crystallization, distillation, and extraction.
They even appear to activate the same reward pathways in the brain.
Put people with food addiction in an MRI scanner and show them a picture
of a chocolate milkshake and the areas that light up in their brains
are the same as when cocaine addicts are shown a video on crack smoking.
Food addiction is a misnomer.
People don't suffer out-of-control eating behaviors to food in general.
We don't tend to compulsively crave carrots. Milkshakes are packed
with sugar and fat, two of the signals to our brains of calorie density.
When people are asked to rate different foods in terms of cravings
and loss of control, most incriminated was a load of CRAP:
highly processed foods like doughnuts along with cheese and meat.
Those least related to problematic eating behaviors? Fruits and vegetables.
Calorie density may be the reason people don't get up in the middle of the night
and binge on broccoli.
Animals don't tend to get fat when they're eating the foods
they were designed to eat.
Now there is a confirmed report of free-living primates becoming obese,
but that was a troop of baboons who evidently stumbled across
some dumpsters at a tourist lodge. The garbage-feeding animals
weighed 50% more than their wild-feeding counterparts.
Sadly, we can suffer the same mismatched fate
and become obese eating garbage, too.
For millions of years before we learned how to hunt,
our biology evolved largely on leaves, roots, fruits, and nuts.
Maybe it would help if we went back to our roots and cut out the CRAP.