Eating an unhealthy diet is a high-risk behavior. It offers a dopamine reward-response, is addictive, and has inevitable drawbacks that literally outweigh the rewards. Unfortunately, wanting to eat healthy is not usually enough to actually achieve nutritional health. We live in an environment that makes it difficult to eat right. Whether it is us or what surrounds us that is the biggest factor in making us bigger is a matter open to debate, but a recent review of the literature provides us some insight*:
· Our perception of healthy food availability affects how we eat more than actual availability
· Healthy food is more available than is often perceived, including in areas of lower economic status
· Our perception of our environment is affected by our psychological state and sense of self (e.g. depression and how healthy we perceive ourselves to be)
· Because social education on how to eat healthy has had only limited beneficial results, it may be more effective to address how we perceive of our environment (and ourselves)
· Children have healthier habits when they perceive their parents as being more strict and involved in general (which is a perception of their environment), not when parents are strict just with health habits
· Specific child-feeding practices by parents can have negative effects, such as encouraging eating beyond satiety and using food as a reward
The authors of the review conclude that our social environment has a greater impact on how we eat than our physical environment (i.e. the availability of healthy foods), and that to succeed with improving the nutritional health of society we may need to shift from educating the public to a paradigm of health protection by the government. Such an approach has proven beneficial with the development of laws designed to protect us from infectious disease, unsafe driving, and second-hand smoke.
Clyde’s Thoughts: A health protection program would presumably include tougher food labeling and advertising laws, as well as more restrictions as to where certain types of foods can be sold (e.g. in schools and hospitals). Perhaps a higher tax on foods that increase the disease and health-care cost burden on society would make sense as well. However, laws cannot be our only defense against toxic eating patterns. As is the case in the relatively ineffective drug war, there needs to be a reduction in demand for high-risk behavior and eating. We demonstrate our demand for healthy foods very simply by purchasing them. To understand what purchases to make, we have to understand what foods and what type of diets truly are healthy (as opposed to fad diets that masquerade as being healthy). This means that public nutrition education should always be one of the cornerstones of helping the public to eat healthier.
When I travel in Europe and in North America, it is difficult to eat healthy no matter how hard I try because of both low availability of healthy food and because of social barriers. My friends and family like to eat unhealthy food, a lot of it, and late at night. It is an uphill battle to avoid the pattern of “Night-Time Eating Syndrome” when I want to spend time with them, even though I teach nutrition and am very motivated to follow my own healthy advice.
Working with and teaching many people over the years, as well as my experiences in my own life, have convinced me that knowing what is healthy is not enough. We do need a healthier environment to succeed as a society. That will require that the food industry continues to see increased demand for healthier foods, and that more protections are put in place by government. Nutrition education for the public is extremely helpful in terms of motivation, but our environment has to enable our will to act. In the meanwhile, we need tools to cope with an environment that is not always in our best interest. I am developing a set of such tools in writing my current book, but below are some simple guidelines you can put to immediate use.
Clyde’s Advice
1. Set up a healthy nutrition environment in your home. Just using your own common sense in the grocery store will go a long way (in fact most of the way) towards getting you to eat healthy.
2. When not at home, eat as healthy as you can by ordering using the same common sense you used with groceries, or bring healthy food and snacks with you. If you like unhealthy foods, pick a couple days each week when you splurge, but make healthy habits the norm so that splurging does not become a high-risk behavior.
3. Once you have done your best and have your food, enjoy it. Don’t worry if it did not end up being as healthy as you had hoped. Eat and be happy. Food is for enjoyment too, not just to provide for your body. If you want to continue to improve, go ahead and make more changes moving forward, but don’t take away from your enjoyment with guilt. Nutrition should support our lives, not dominate it.
The Bottom Line: Stop and think for a few moments every time you purchase, order, or grab some food. Those few moments will either help you make a better choice, or help you move towards such choices in the future, making a huge difference in your potential quality of life and life span.
*Reference: “Environmental determinants of healthy eating: in need of a theory and evidence.” Brug J et al., Proc Nutr Society 67 2008 307. Review paper scientific quality score: B (although based on all the scientific evidence, this evidence is at this time somewhat inconsistent and scant).
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