The Best foods, the foods that you really like, are they the childhood foods that you grew up on? Do the best tasting foods have an association with a positive experience? And the most awful food, is that the food that you ate that made you sick all night? Where did you learn how to cook? How do you know what food is good for you and what is not? Does the knowledge that you have about food come from your parents, your culture and the teachers you have had?
In 2005 there were
48695 malls across North America (that is large shopping centers that have large food stores in them). The American population in 2006 is 300 000 406, equating to 6160 people per shopping mall, not including all the stand alone stores. And each of these malls is filled with food that is enhanced and wrapped in cellophane wrap. Of the money spent on food by Americans
90% is used to buy processed food.Yet are American’s happy with their food choices? Every day 1207 people search on line at google alone for “healthy eating”. It seems that many Americans are struggling to understand how to eat a healthy balanced diet. Statistically 3.8 million Americans are over 300 pounds and 400 000 people are heavier then 400 pounds.
The average weight of women is 163 pounds. Figures suggest that most of this obesity is lifestyle related, rather than due to medical causes. This bares out the fact that people in America no longer know how to eat healthily anymore. Obesity is not the only indicator that our food choices are not healthy. Given that 90% of US household food budget is used on processed food, it should perhaps be a subject of concern that the FDA keeps a list of 3000 chemicals that are added to processed food and not all of these chemicals have been properly tested.
For those not happy with the standard diet and diseases of North America, other cultures can offer some interesting alternatives, both as regards to food and health care. Although “traditional” cultures, such as American Indians in the past and Africans in the present do face their own nutritional problems (limited variety, famine) adopting their reliance on fresh food into our situation of plenty could have decided advantages. Foods from the garden and the hunt - are better for the body than those which are processed. It is with devastating results that the American Indians are finding this out again as diabetes and other traditionally white American nutritional and life style diseases become the norm and not the exception.
The body can let us know when it is craving certain nutrients. Most pregnant women experience cravings or at least aversions to certain foods. Is it necessary to wait for an unborn embryo to remind us that the body can be a well balanced machine capable of self diagnosis.
Those Americans committed to healthy eating will still have to face the ever present push of advertising that aims to sell processed food to us. This has a particularly profound impact upon our children who are known to be more susceptible to advertising messages. In a study by
National Bureau of Economic Research it was found that a ban on fast food restaurant advertising would decrease childhood obesity in 3-11 year olds by 10% and in 12-18 year olds by 12%. The effectiveness of advertising was seen when the U S Department of State ran
ads about integrating Muslims in to the community and being more tolerant. There was a marked trend toward acceptance of Muslims between 2002 and 2003 while these ads were being displayed. There is nothing to suggest that food advertising is any less powerful.
As well as laying out large amounts of money on advertising, some global food corporations are involved in “bio-prospecting”. This involves the “discovery”, patenting and introduction of certain foods or food traditions from other countries into America. India has recently fought a $30 million court battle to have patents reversed which saw Global corporations steal traditional Indian health and cuisine knowledge and patent it. This bio prospecting has led India along with nine other countries including China and Brazil to start compiling the
“Traditional Knowledge Digital Library” which will include 20 million pages of traditional knowledge to stop bio- prospecting, by proving that the knowledge was in prior existence and there fore cannot be patented.
A recent set of articles in the Public Library of Science Medicine raise further questions about multinational companies and their attitude to public health as opposed to private profits. The articles talk about pharmaceutical companies which are creating “diseases” out of the normal conditions of ageing, such as menopause, as well as pushing certain diseases to be much more prevalent than they are, for example male and female sexual disfunctionality. The net result is that more medications are sold than in the past, but with sometimes ambiguous results for the end user, as in the case of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for menopausal women
With these things in mind, it may benefit the American consumer to evaluate carefully their sources of knowledge when it comes to health and nutrition, and to endeavor to make the most reasonable unprocessed choices we can.
Labels: American consumer, health food, ill health, obesity, Processed food, traditional food
