This is the second post in a series addressing the fundamental Minimal Wellness dietary principles. We are using the framework of Michael Pollan’s iconic dietary advice “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” to help guide the discussion. Make sure you check out Part 1 of this series for proper context.
The second sentence in Pollan’s guidance, “not too much” is a loaded one in modern times. Our obesogenic environment encourages us to eat, drink, and imbibe, around the clock, and the products that are endlessly pushed in our faces are almost categorically not nutritious. In fact, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that in 2012, the food and beverage industry spent 4.6 billion advertising fast food while only spending 116 million advertising fruits and vegetables. Although adults can be fooled into thinking they aren’t influenced by food marketing (spoiler alert: we all are), children and teens are especially vulnerable. And if you consider 4.6 billion on advertising to be a lot of money, consider that in 2009 and 2010, those same companies spent exponentially more — 58 and 40 billion, respectively — lobbying against changes to food and nutrition policies and laws in the US.
It would be irresponsible to not mention the influence of food politics in a discussion about diet, but, food politics is an exceptionally vast topic with brilliant minds already writing and researching about the issues. Needless to say, as evidenced by the vast sums of money spent lobbying in 2009 and 2010 by the food and beverage industry, the laws, policies, and guidelines related to nutrition on the national level are heavily influenced by corporations that only have one, monetary, bottom-line — they don’t give a damn about your health. In fact, they make more money by producing highly addictive sugar, sodium, and fat-laden products and by marketing binging and overconsumption as socially acceptable norms.
If you can escape from or tune out the ever-presence of foods in our obesogenic environment, and manage to eat on your own terms, you still have to eat an appropriate amount. As a society, we overwhelmingly struggle with eating too much, as reflected by our current rates of obesity. Unfortunately, the standard recommendations of balancing energy in with energy out, and calorie counting have proven ineffective. In fact, a calorie is not a calorie as calories from carbohydrates, protein, and fat all affect our bodies in vastly different ways. What has been proven effective for weight management (keep in mind that weight gain, maintenance, and loss are all covered by the term “weight management”) is a combination of listening to or re-learning your internal hunger and satiety cues, environmental tweaks, and altering the composition of your meals by drastically reducing sugar, reducing carbohydrates, and increasing healthy sources of fat. Reducing added sugar and carbohydrate intake while increasing fat consumption will help improve hunger and satiety signaling from the body and your ability to respond to those signals appropriately. When your blood glucose levels fluctuate wildly as happens when sugar and carbohydrate intake are too high, you feel a false sense of hunger and very real cravings for more carbohydrates. Bringing sugar consumption into line with American Heart Association recommendations and reducing processed carbohydrate in the diet, will allow your body to recalibrate and appropriately assess the food you are consuming, eventually leading to appropriate hormonal signaling. When hunger and satiety hormone signaling is reset, it is much easier to gage how much food you should be eating and be able to respond accordingly. If we have spent years or decades overeating though, we will need to go through a period of retraining our senses to what an appropriate amount of food is, and what that actually feels like in our bodies.