I am deeply angry, yet I understand. The way that the food distribution system has evolved in the US makes it incredibly difficult for much of the population to control their eating. Humans are created/designed/evolved to eat as much as possible of the most calorie-dense foods available in order to get to childbearing age so that our genes can do their work and reproduce. I can’t see that natural selection has much interest in helping us toward long life – as a matter of fact, if I were natural selection, I would want people to grow up, reproduce, and then get out of the way! This is the main reason that I think the paleo philosophy falls short.
Anyway, “food” companies (actually big corporate entities who produce not so much food as stuff for us to put in our mouths) spend soooo much money on developing products that manipulate the natural impulses of our bodies to get us to buy more product. We naturally gravitate to high calorie, easy food since two of our greatest impulses are conservation of effort and eating. It makes sense to our bodies to get the biggest calorie bang for its buck – and Doritos fits the bill. So does sugared cereal, twinkies, candy bars, French fries, etc. Corporations spend so much money in order to fine-tune the formulas of the stuff they produce just to get the right mouth feel, the right amount of salt and sugar and fat to hook us. We can look around us and see where leaving the distribution of food to the profit motive has gotten us – our obesity rates, diabetes rates, heart disease rates continue to climb.
As an American, it’s hard to imagine ways to combat this concerted effort to make us eat more and be nourished less. We have a real knee-jerk reaction against the “nanny state” even suggesting that we need to eat more fruits and vegetables and maybe cut down a little on the soda that we can’t even imagine actual legislation that would curb corporate predation.
So, I have a real free-floating anger that is coming more and more to the front of my mind as I lose this weight in a process that has felt almost effortless in a way that I couldn’t imagine before the 5:2 way of eating has cut my cravings. I can’t be angry at corporations – they’re fulfilling their responsibility to create profit for shareholders. They aren’t in business to promote health. That would be like being angry at a tomato plant because it produces tomatoes instead of apples.
Should I be angry at government which abdicates its responsibility to protect citizens against predatory food practices? We vote for the government – we don’t want officials telling us what to do. Michelle Obama gets taken to task for suggesting that people should maybe exercise a little – imagine the firestorm if there was some sort of actual, you know, legislation. Besides, I’m a vegan and I certainly wouldn’t follow government suggestions to consume meat or dairy or eggs.
Should I be angry at people (myself included) who just hand over responsibility for food choices to food scientists working in corporate labs to create stuff calibrated to get us hooked? That’s like being angry at an alcoholic who can’t just have a drink without going off the deep end.
We vote with our dollars exponentially more often than we vote with our vote. I’m trying to wean myself from the corporate giants who try to sell me “food” which only harms me. I’m trying to make things to eat from whole food plant based real foods, but it’s difficult. It’s a continuum that I want to follow, though, so I’ll do my best and try to let the anger go.