On National Food Day, Let’s Choose to “Eat Real”

National Food Day is coming on October 24. According to the organizers, their goal is to help people “Eat Real,” which they define as “cutting back on sugar drinks, overly salted packaged foods and fatty, factory-farmed meats in favor of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and sustainably raised protein.”

I can get behind this idea and I’m sure that many people can, at least in theory. The problem is that while many of us want to eat healthy, sustainable food, a lot of us don’t have a healthy relationship with food.

For many people, eating is a highly charged subject that goes way beyond nutrition or ecology. There’s an undeniable psychological aspect to eating. Some of us eat to be healthy and to live longer but many of us eat for emotional reasons.

Some people eat to soothe or nurture themselves, using food as a substitute for love and reassurance. They eat “comfort foods” to try and feel better, but studies have shown that eating unhealthy food can make us unhappy as well as physically ill.

James E. Gangwisch and his team from Columbia University published an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition discussing how foods with a high glycemic index (foods that significantly raise your blood sugar) actually contribute to depression.

On the other hand, there are healthy foods we can eat that will improve our mood. The Happiness Diet: Good Mood Food, by Rachel Kelly, is one book that discusses this idea.

Some people are lonely and eat to fill themselves up with a substitute for love; some people are bored and eat to entertain themselves. Some eat to distract themselves from unpleasant emotions or to stuff down anger or shame. Nutrition or sustainability are the last things on their minds.

Most people in North America are surrounded by an abundance of healthy food choices and yet they turn to junk food, fast food, unhealthy food. It’s like they’re unaware of the true nature and purpose of food, to be high-quality fuel for our bodies.

I always ask people who eat poor quality food, if you wouldn’t put crappy gas into your luxury vehicle, why would you put crappy fuel into the one body you get to inhabit for life?

Of course, we’re made to enjoy flavorful food. If we didn’t enjoy it, we wouldn’t want to eat at all and we’d quickly die off. Taking pleasure in food is good because it encourages us to eat regularly, but there’s much more to food than the pleasurable aspect of it. There’s the nutritional component and the environmental aspect of it.

Today we have the option to eat the most healthy, sustainable and delicious food possible, and yet too many of us automatically turn to food that’s bad for our body and worse for the planet. We think that as long as we get an instant rush of pleasure from what we’re eating, that’s all that matters.

I’m convinced, though, that people who indulge in junk food don’t actually enjoy what they’re eating. Maybe they started off liking it but now they’ve just become addicted to all the sugar, fat or salt in it.

Studies have shown that lab rats respond to sugar in the same way as they do to crack cocaine. Sugar, salt and fat are so over-stimulating that our brains respond to them as though they were hard drugs. When we eat any of these foods, we activate the “reward pathway” in our brain that triggers intense pleasure but also powerful, insatiable cravings.

The New York Times reporter Michael Moss talks about how we’ve become addicted to these foods in his book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. And in his book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, former FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler talks about how the food industry has combined these three ingredients to keep us constantly craving them.

The major North American food producers have hit on a great idea to maximize their profits. They churn out a multitude of non-nutritious but highly addictive products that our susceptible brains just can’t resist. Instead of eating for health and nutrition, and with a consideration for the planet, we’ve become food junkies, looking for our next sugar, salt or fat “fix” with no regard for the personal or environmental consequences.

The good news is that we can break our cravings for these addictive foods. Just like with hard drugs, we’ll have to go “cold turkey” and completely stop eating them for several weeks until we reset our brains and the cravings for sugar, salt or fat go away.

Eating is also a global issue. I could write a whole series of articles on the inequities of food distribution, the way that we waste tons of food every year and how our current system of farming is so unsustainable. We’re in a position, here in North America, to purchase sustainably raised foods and in so doing make it known to our food producers that this is what we’re going to spend our money on.

We can put our purchasing power to work, in the same way as we’ve done with organic food, and show food producers that sustainable, ethical farming is the new normal. We can only do this, however, if we raise our consciousness about the connection between how food is grown and the health of our planet. Here’s a list from Audubon Magazine of the 10 best sustainable food books.

Today, too many of us eat for emotional/psychological reasons or because we’ve become addicted to sugar, salt, or fat. So how can we focus less on self-soothing, distraction, suppressing our emotions or satisfying insatiable cravings and how can we put our attention on eating for our own well-being and for that of the planet?

Here are four things we can do to change the way we eat and the way we think about food:

Deal directly with our needs and feelings so that we don’t have to use food to deal with them.
Wean ourselves off the foods we’re addicted to and break free of our cravings.
Recognize the powerful effect of good nutrition on our physical and emotional well-being.
Recognize the important relationship between the food that we eat and the health (and survival) of our planet.

According to the organizers, “National Food Day involves some of the country’s most prominent food activists, united by a vision of food that can be healthy, affordable and produced with care for the environment, farm animals and the people who grow, harvest and serve it. “ When we follow the four above recommendations, we can eat in a way that’s good for us and good for the planet.

Check out my new online course, How to Stop Overeating, Once and For All and learn how to lose the weight permanently, without ever having to diet again.