If you grew up in a Greek household you know this feeling. It’s a mixture of happiness and simultaneous uneasiness. Let me explain: Have you ever been to a family dinner where everyone is just so ecstatic to see you gulp down all the wonderful flavorful delicacies they have meticulously prepared for you? And then the following morning have those same family members empathetically instruct you that you need to lose some pounds because the weight is starting to show? I am sure this happens to a lot of families, but let me just tell you, feelings like this tend to leave you, most often that not, shellshocked. You feel as if you are the only person in the world experiencing these mixed thoughts and emotions. You start feeling as if something is wrong with you: “So are they happy when I eat or when I starve myself?” you ask yourself. Well, let us extrapolate those exact feelings unto a broader canvas. Imagine you are in the grocery store. You walk by the isle with the tasty Oreo cookies. Beside it, is the isle with the “low fat” yogurt and the “sugar free” cake designed not to spike your blood sugar(really?!!). Now let me get to my point: every day we are overloaded with stimuli from polar ends of basically the same big carrot stick: the big “bad” food industry. And guess what? Both of those ends are looking for your pockets, not just your mouths.
Do you see the problem now? We are surrounded, in fact smothered, with food choices, most of which are heavily processed, albeit neatly packed, junk foods. They are brilliantly marketed as well. Do you remember those days when fat was “the devil” and sugar was “the angel send from heaven” that would save our fragile arteries from the destructive and devastating cholesterol particles found in fat? Oh boy, were we wrong. The disease train of sugar (I mean at least it’s natural) and high fructose corn syrup (don’t even ask) came crashing down on us. It was replacing fat (good and bad) everywhere. And we went from a high rate of heart attacks to adding an even higher rate of fatty liver disease and diabetes.
So how in the world, in the year 2023 (hold your breath, it’s almost over), have we still not been able to connect the dots between truly nutritious, vitamin and mineral rich real food and well, health? Some very few have indeed connected the dots, but those voices are sparingly broadcasted to the general audience of every day consumers. In fact you turn on any radio, TV, YouTube, Spotify channel and you are getting commercials about either super tasty (unhealthy) foods or weight loss medications. Or testosterone therapy (Do not get me started on that-well, I take that back, I will at some point). I mean has anyone ever advertised an apple other than the apple picking farm you might visit once a year with your kids? Then you scroll through Instagram and Facebook and you get ads and articles about loving yourself and being yourself and then some more ads about weight loss medications! And yet there are no ads or articles that talk about being healthy, about making conscious high caloric value, nutritious food choices. These binary messages leave you with two choices: enjoy life and eat all the tasty processed food like there is no tomorrow or starve yourself and “suffer” through eating “health” foods. And now we have a third option (woohoo!): eat what you want and just start a weigh loss drug. No biggey, right?
So that is exactly why we are failing. Because we have created a society, an environment, a culture where there is only a blue pill or a red pill. Where you don’t deserve to have it all, unless you are emptying out your pockets. What if you could have it all? What if you could have a happy fulfilling life? What if we changed our horrible age old “recipes” of gluttony alternating with punishment? And also taught people how to cook and consume healthy foods for that matter.
Bottomline, we need to change the song we sing. Yes, in this day and age some people will need to take weight loss medicines to treat serious health conditions. After yearlong battles with crash diets, inactivity from sedentary jobs, sleeplessness over raising families, with the only programmed happiness being “comfort foods”, we need that bridge until we get them out of the “danger” zone. But we need to create new norms and societal habits. We need to stop telling people that they need to lose weight fast to be healthy. That in it of itself is not healthy. Nutritional deficiency is not healthy. That is just promoting eating disorders, self-hate and body dysmorphia. It is promoting crash diets. It is forcing people to spend their hard earned money on weight loss drugs that they are now being told they have to stay on forever because “nothing else will work”.
No, we need to bring back the health in healthcare (see what I did there?). We need to tell people that what they need to change is not their body but their food. We need to tell people that they need more nutrition, more fiber, more water, more vegetables, more fruits, more nuts, more grains and seeds. We need to promote real health foods-a whole foods plant based diet. We need to restore in people a balanced gut microbiome that will work with them and not against them. That will help boost their metabolism, not impair it. And we need to convince people that they need to slowly and steadily ease into these new habits so that they can own them, so that they become part of them. No more crash diets! Enough.
To conclude, I have seen a myriad of patients with the same constellation of symptoms coming to my clinic over and over again: they complain of fatigue, muscle aches, joint pains, allergies, heart burn, depression, anxiety. The symptoms will over time progress in severity: now they come with brain fog, arthritis, heart and liver disease, gout, memory loss, autoimmune disease or even cancer! There is a common denominator in all of this. It is a lack of natural foods that carry necessary fiber, antioxidants, pre- and probiotics, vitamins, minerals and essential nutrients. It is inactivity. It is ingestion of heavily processed, toxin rich, high caloric, nutritiously empty food sources. And that is what we need to start talking about. That is what we need to battle. It is not an obesity epidemic. It is a food crisis of a new kind. The weight gain is just a symptom of a much much bigger problem.
Image source: Shutterstock.com, Photo Contributor: Alina Bratosin
Excellent article. Perfectly said and written.