Will We Ever Get Diets Right?
According to a scientific survey I conducted where I just sat around and thought about numbers until one sounded right, we humans have created 900,900 diets. Not one of them is perfect. And when you run to the store and riffle through the magazine rack, you’ll find another 75 new diets every single day. The article titles are foaming with phrases like “healthy weight loss tips”, “healthy weight loss plan”, and “healthy weight loss programs”. Not one of them is perfect, either. We’ll try again next week.
Meanwhile, the evening news is droning on week after week about what a rotten state we are in regarding nutrition. We’re all getting fat, giving ourselves heart disease and cancer, and stunting our energy. There must be something wrong with humans. I’ve never seen a hermit crab stuff itself with empty-calorie junk food until it’s too heavy to walk, nor have I seen a pigeon agonize over which scrap of junk on the ground will have the best nutrition per calorie unit. Every other living creature on the planet eats whatever it finds that it can catch, and thrives on for a long healthy life. To hear the experts tell it, man alone is incapable of coming up with a healthy weight loss diet plan.
Why is a healthy lifestyle so far beyond our grasp, and why are there so many conflicting stories about what constitutes healthy solutions for weight loss? Specifically, everybody’s looking for a fast healthy weight loss system. Could it be that we’re thinking about it the wrong way?
What are the animals doing right?
Let’s get back to those pigeons. In fact, with any animal, the diet is limited to what there is available. I’ve seen pigeons out in front of a cafe; kids will throw potato fries and sandwich crusts to them and they’ll eat it all. But pigeons didn’t evolve cultivating potatoes out of the ground, slicing them, and frying them in vegetable oil. Yet somehow, they’ve adapted to the diet provided to them by the offal of the inner cities all over the world. Give them this much; they’re successful.
Koala bears, on the other hand, are as picky as you can get. Got eucalyptus trees? If not, they’re not coming to dinner. Unlike humans, they have sense enough to stick to what’s good for them.
I blame technology
The patterns of eating that we humans have carried with us for the history of our development wouldn’t really be a problem if it weren’t for all of our technology advances which make us able to do everything we shouldn’t do:
* telecommunications: Just think how many advertisements you see every day. You almost don’t have a chance to get hungry without a TV commercial or a magazine ad showing you some new food you haven’t tried yet. Media is jammed with advertisements begging us to consume, and consume we do.
* transportation: It almost doesn’t matter where in the world you live; wherever the food grows, they’ll ship it. Exports and imports ensure that every kind of food is available to everyone in the world.
* manufacturing: Barring the occasional outbreak of mad cow disease, we have the problem of mass-producing food pretty much licked. Everything these days is packaged and preserved. The focus is on shelf life and less on nutrition and taste.
The thing is, these advances in technology are very empowering. Our natural development just hasn’t caught up with our ability to instantly obtain any kind of food that’s cultivated anywhere in the world at any time of year, in any quantity. Unlike the animals, who do fine without coming up with any healthy weight loss plans, we humans are not limited by the natural constraints of time and resources.
Time to “Think Local” again?
Which brings me back to a favorite topic of mine: the Mediterranean diet. It seems to be a continuing favorite among healthy weight loss programs. Which brings to mind a startling theory: Could it be that humans are designed to only benefit from what is readily available in the immediate area?
After all, the Mediterranean is regarded as the cradle of civilization. From writing on clay tablets to the wheel, if it was invented, it was invented there first. But because the technology boom started there, we have an accurate record of the history of that area. We also see that the chief aspect of the diet is not that it produces so many good healthy weight loss diet recipes, but that all of the food is local to that region.
For dessert, here’s a YouTube video on the subject:
Could there be other diets lurking in the history of other world cultures that are just as good? It is possible. After all, indigenous people of every continent have their cultural heritage with their own traditional foods and recipes. Perhaps a healthy weight loss menu can come from taking any area on the globe, and limiting yourself to just what can be grown or caught within a fifty mile radius.
Well, it’s another theory, and this is one more article on the subject of healthy food for weight loss… But along with the 900,900 diets we have created before this article and the billion more we’ll create afterwards, I suppose that this theory has as much weight as any other.
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