Food Glorious Food
“Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.”
— Ghanaian Proverb
“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
This is how Michael Pollan begins and accentuates the title of his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. This statement seems like such a simple concept but can also be considered questionable in terms of its meaning. We are eating food…aren’t we? This is where we have to be careful and pay close attention to how we nourish our bodies and the use of the word “food”. We live in a society where genetically modified “food”, bio engineered substances being marketed as food, highly processed food items enhanced with chemicals or scientists in a lab determine what we are putting in our bodies for supposed nutritional purposes.
Oliver Twist had a point…food is glorious and as long as we actually eat that, it benefits us in ways supplements won’t be able to. Although it has become challenging to obtain highly nutritious food which is not loaded with chemicals, harmful and health debilitating pesticides and fertilizers, or some which might be highly processed, we must make it our goal. A simple example of how we recognize the reality of this concept, let’s visit the fueling of many long distance races. What 90% of the runners trust in is the goop contained in highly processed endurance gels made by various companies. It’s accepted and understood that the sugars and other additives will give our bodies the necessary energy for our bodies to make it through the grueling demands of a long race or run. But are we paying attention to what it contains? Are we blindly accepting these products because everyone uses them? In most cases we are and we should take a closer look at this. Sometimes we fail to realize that every food supplement is trying to mimic what nature has already gives us. Gatorade and Powerade wants to be coconut water but it can’t, electrolyte and Ph waters like Vitamin Water and Essentia only wish they were water with squeezed lemon or lime juice but they’re not. The infamous running gels we spoke of earlier are attempts at doing what dates have done for centuries. Dates are a natural and valuable form of sugar which provides pure glucose which is converted to glycogen in the liver. If we maintain an adequate amount of glycogen in both the muscles and the liver, we benefit from sustained energy. Goop that!
The point here is that not everything works for everyone and this is not an attempt to get people off of products which are tried and true, but the point is that food is food, supplements are just that and if we eat food, we give ourselves the best form of nutrition.