My new word and my new question: Nutritionism. How do I find what I need to eat
I’ll be sharing my most recent take away assignment from class, far up to this point from , there have been a lot of interesting things that open up my mind to the way we consume our food. . This week, the term nutritionism is something new to me. Before this class, not only have I never heard that phrase, I only ate food and followed protein, carbs, and fats as a guidelines or basis to function in a “healthy” manner. I never followed anything else nor did I care to think about anything more to that. This topic opened up the ideas and beliefs of specific nutrients that need to be factored and accounted for in our food. I’m currently building a new diet for a gym goal and possible physique competition in the near future and I need to eat better than I have in the past and using this class will help me take a better look at what I need and I can use nutritionism to help me get there.
From our book, Pollan suggests that we need to just eat food, not stop… but eat more plants than anything else. I have always been bad at eating my greens, but I have to pay more attention to how I get them. When he suggested in his book to stay to the outer rims of the store for the freshest items is new to me. So, I will be doing that more often and not running to frozen food anything. Trying to navigate through the supermarket was a key topic tossed at us from pollan and our lectures. The problem here is what it takes to preserve our foods and what we are ingesting constantly and not thinking about it. We are creatures that love gratification, and we want instant gratification. This is why unhealthy foods are so much more appealing to us, because of their availability – regardless of their nutritional value.
It was very interesting reading about the ideas of watching out for additives, sugars, fats and more. Also, leaning about these industries and how they have so much invested in corn and soy. From one of our lectures, I was reading how our bodies being subjected to constant amount of soy and corn and our bodies are having “too much” of it. So, it’s not the fact that corn is bad, but the constant sweetener additives made from corn that gets into much of our foods and we may be consuming too much as a whole. With this increase we are seeing higher signs of obesity, heart disease, and the increased risk and potential for type 2 diabetes. I never thought of the “wax” on our food to preserve it and have it shipped to us nor have I thought of the high amounts of corn or soy used in our foods as additives. Not only do we have to worry about our individual health from genetics, but we are doing ourselves no justice by introducing these additives into our systems further increasing our odds to have medical issues.
This leads me to wonder, how the hell can we actually find food that we can trust?
Sure, we need to buy local but there are several limiting factors that make this difficult and in some ways unrealistic. One, is cost. Farmers markets and local foods are a little higher in cost … also, availability and convenience. Not everyone has access to farmers markets and sometimes they are farther away than supermarkets. These factors ( and many others) contribute to the lack of care and continue the invisible issues we have with our food. We can learn all about Nutritionism all we want… but from what I would assume, These factors ( and others) can weigh pretty heavily on a person to make the right or best choices for themselves.
So I end it by asking…. How do we find the right food ourselves….?