Everybody eats, so when it comes to dispensing eating advice, there’s no shortage of people willing to tell you how to do it. Turn on the TV, and you’ll hear the latest warnings about what’s wrong with our food supply. Flip through a magazine and you’ll find the next miracle diet that promises to make you thin and beautiful. Search the Internet and you’ll uncover more information than you ever wanted to know about nutrition and your health.
With so many sources to choose from, where should you turn for answers to your diet and fitness questions? The experts are easy to identify and ready to help.
Learning to Eat
Human beings reign over other species due to our highly developed brains. But we start our lives as extremely helpless creatures. Everything we need to survive must be provided for us for the first several years of life.
We come into this world with no instinct to forage for our own food or feed ourselves.
The only way we know what or how to eat is by imitating what we see our caregivers doing. Most of human history has been a struggle for survival, so getting enough was the goal. All anyone had to know about nutrition could be summed up in a single precept: Eat what is available.
Then when the agricultural industry was able to produce vast surpluses and the food industry was able to package and deliver many more food choices at affordable prices, deciding what to eat became complicated. With fully stocked supermarkets and limitless fast food franchises, caregivers started to give instructions about eating to their young along with their meals, saying things like “Drink your milk, it’s good for you,” and “Finish that lamb chop, I worked hard to pay for that meat.”
Fortunately, nutrition science came of age just about the time people were grappling with the choice between white bread and whole wheat, and professionals were needed to answer the question, “What should I eat?”
Eating for the Right Reasons
Even once nutrition scientists analyzed the composition of all the foods we grow, put labels on the boxes to tell us what is in them, and provided charts and pyramids to illustrate how much we needed to eat each day, people still were not compliant with the eating advice they received. That may have been due to the fact we found many foods tasted a whole lot better when doctored up with a lot of salt, sugar, and fat, helping us to gradually drift from the “eat to live” mode, to a “live to eat” mentality.
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