Over the last 2 centuries, humans have studied nutrition, but has all that science made us healthier as a species?
Animation by After Skool and What I've Learned
Key Takeaways
It is a common assumption that the human species grows more intelligent as time progresses. We are certainly learning more about how the world works—from space exploration to the smallest atoms, our knowledge is expanding—but is all the scientific knowledge making us healthier?
When it comes to food, scientific research has done little to make us healthier as a species, but rather it has done far more to ensure the profits of massive food corporations.
For centuries now, humans have studied food. The field of food science began in the early 1800s when English chemist William Prout proclaimed that he had identified the three pillars that make up all food—fat, protein, and carbohydrates.
Shortly after this discovery German scientist Justuce Von Liebig added a few new minerals to the big three and declared that he had uncovered the mystery of animal nutrition.
This was the dawn of nutritionism, an ideology of viewing food for its nutritional value, rather than its taste or tradition. This would be the biggest shift in the way humans ate food since the invention of Agriculture.
Liebig would go on to concoct the first ever baby formula—consisting of cow’s milk, wheat flour, malted flour and potassium bicarbonate. This invention would reveal itself as a massive failure of Liebig’s understanding of nutrition. For babies fed, exclusively on his formula would suffer serious health effects.
Regardless of this failure, scientists were determined to break down food to its smallest elements and unlock its nutritional secrets.
Enter the 20th century and the rise of the Kellogg Empire. John Harvey Kellogg, considered a diet guru at the time, went on an unfounded campaign to smear animal protein in an attempt to promote his much healthier snacks and cereals.
Kellogg convinced the public that protein proliferated toxic bacteria that destroyed organs and even spread the idea that protein caused obsessive masturbation.
In the mid 1900s, the focus would become fat. As Americans gain weight throughout the century, a logical target was fat. Short-sighted consensus would lead us to believe that eating fat makes you fat. Science and the media would support that logic by demonizing fat and soon every aisle in the grocery store was nonfat this or low-fat that.
As you do a little more investigating you uncover that many of the studies that demonized fat in the 1960s and 70s were funded by sugar companies.
The same thing happened in the tobacco industry with physicians approved cigarettes that could miraculously heal a sore throat, clean your teeth, and lead to a longer life. Of course these studies and claims were all funded by the tobacco industry.
Today, it’s the same story, but different culprit. Packaged foods are now covered with health labels of no carbs and sugar free. The science is now telling us that some fats are a necessary part of a healthy diet.
Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats—which are found in foods like fish, seeds, nuts, olive oils and avocados—are a major source of energy, help you absorb vitamins and minerals, are needed to build cell membranes, essential for blood clotting, muscle movement, and hormonal balance.
For the last 40 years, marketing on food labels has convinced the public that fat makes us fat, which could not be farther from the truth. Yet many of us go on trusting food labels that claim to be backed up by science.
What happens when we zoom out at the last two centuries and review all the nutrition science?
You’d think that with all these studies and health revelations that the population as a whole would be much healthier. If the goal of foods was to produce the most optimal, most nutritious food, wouldn’t there be ultra healthy superhumans walking around everywhere?
The fact is the exact opposite is true. After all the studies and research, the Western world is more unhealthy than ever. More than 100 million people in the United States have diabetes or pre diabetes. About 70% of the population is overweight and 40% is obese. Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans.
Nutrition science may have its intentions rooted in the right place, but ultimately it has been manipulated to serve the capitalist profit machine, not our health. Nutrition fads, health claims, and diet plans have fueled the food industry into a nine trillion dollar glutton.
The bottom line is the Western diet is not good for health. If this wasn’t already obvious enough, we have startling proof of just how unhealthy the Western diet is when it gets introduced to an isolated population like the aboriginals, who for thousands of years lived on animals, they hunted and plants they could gather.
Once the Western diet was introduced to them, the rates of obesity, heart disease, addiction and diabetes skyrocketed. When aboriginals get off the Western diet and go back to their traditional ways of eating, they lose weight, lower their blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and dramatically improve their health in all areas.
We should ask ourselves. How different are we from aboriginals?
What’s even more concerning is the conflicting alliance between the health care system and the corporations that produce our food. The unhealthy addictive food that is force-fed to the masses ensures that there is a steady flow of paying customers for hospitals and drug companies.
In 2016, Bayer Pharma acquired Monsanto, the world’s largest food agriculture company, for $63 billion dollars. This merger put Bayer in control of 1/4 of the world’s food supply. Why would a pharmaceutical company want to control the food supply?
This is just one example of how the large corporations don’t have your best interests at heart. They only care about profit and they use Scientific research to manipulate the population at the expense of our health.
So what can you do to escape the complicated misleading maze of information surrounding food?
The answer could be an entire three-hour video on its own, but here are a few simple rules to follow:
- Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A. Unfamiliar B. unpronounceable C. more than 5 and number.
- Avoid food products that make health claims.
- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket. The middle aisles are where all the processed foods are.
- Get out of the Supermarket whenever possible and go to farmers markets.
In closing, we need to move away from deconstructing food into nothing more than calories and nutrients. It’s time we reevaluate our relationship with food and it is a relationship. Everything in nature has a deep relationship with what it eats. This is what keeps nature’s balance.
In Ancient times a human’s entire day would revolve around food—growing it, catching it, preparing it and sharing it. Now the average person spends only an hour per day interacting with food. We want instant gratification with food and with everything today. We want our nutrition now. We want our meals instant, the faster the better, but it’s time we reconsider that relationship.
Get as close to the source of where your food comes from. If you have space, plant a garden. It is time to reconnect with the source that nourishes us. You will find that this connection will lead to re connections in every aspect of your life.