Bureaucratic nutritional proposals

Our society is not just spiritually sick, but physically sick, and it seems obvious that this is largely driven by the foods we eat. Heart disease, obesity, and diabetes are the most obvious nutrition-related diseases; but also Crohn’s and the various gut problems, celiac, and perhaps allergies.

The favoured solution of government bureaucrats and food companies like appears to be “education.” That is, teach people what nutrients they need, what they should avoid too much of (e.g. sugar, sodium), how many calories they need in a day, how to read food labels, etc. The pitch is that if people know about nutrition and have nutritional information presented to them on food labels, they will be able to choose healthy foods and therefore eat a healthy diet.

Fine and dandy, but there is one little problem with the mathematical equation: this is nothing like how people naturally behave with food. People are not built to spend minutes or hours sorting and picking and choosing among possible foods, adding up and weighing various factors, and so on. People eat what they like and what they are used to, and they eat when they are hungry. Since the nutrient-checking behaviour is not natural to us, either we don’t do it—and continue getting sick from our food—or we do it and it becomes a compulsive neurosis. It seems today that many people are afflicted with scruples and legalism about food, to the point even of superstition.

Even if people do adopt the latter course, it is doubtful that the nickel-and-diming approach is going to make much difference.

If we want better nutrition what we need is to adopt a practice that fits easily into natural human habits with food, not an artificial one created by a bureaucracy. I propose that the simplest answer is to simply stop eating packaged foods and instead eat whole foods that you cook yourself. The key is that it is a very simple and quick to apply practice, which requires no label-reading or internal calculations, and that it fits into the normal habit of most human beings everywhere before the last century. It allows you to treat food the way humans naturally do: not with scruples and legalism about nutrients, but simply, “this is what we eat, and this is what I like, so we shall eat this.”