Healthy Eating Revisited, Part I

The diet industry has realized that strict diets focused solely on calorie restriction and limiting of foods are no longer in vogue. Healthy eating and clean eating are the new catch phrases that may mean the same thing but invoke a different understanding of what food means today.

Diet foods created in the lab and filled with chemicals that we as humans can digest but are not a part of naturally occurring foods are no longer the center of the diet industry. Instead, healthy eating has supplanted the idea of dieting.

Currently, diets are comprised of actual foods eaten in very limiting amounts and usually in the forms that have the least amount of calories. The idea of health masks the fact that these diets have minimal calories and insufficient nutrition to sustain a person’s actual health.

At the extreme, most dieting turns into the concept of orthorexia, a variant of anorexia which involves obsessive thoughts specifically about healthy foods and thinness. It’s minimally different from anorexia except that the thoughts about health confuse people into believing the eating disorder is somehow less serious and more health focused. That is not the case.

When actual health is taken into account with eating, the available substantive advice is limited: eat mostly real food, be sure to include fruits and vegetables and eat the right amount, in other words enough to sustain your body and brain.

This last piece of information can be very challenging and relies on an understanding of one’s own body, something the diet industry encourages us all to ignore. 

Most advice from the diet industry involves eating insufficient food, being hungry all the time and constantly feeling uncomfortable and bad about your body.

Conflating eating and health is a dangerous way to figure out how to eat in today’s world. If someone is ill, for instance with diabetes, then dietary changes are necessary to maintain health, but an ordinary person needs to learn how to eat as a part of their daily routine and not consider what and how they eat as symbolic of who they are and how they live.

The next post will address why and how the concept of healthy eating has taken off. Why are we as a culture so susceptible to using food as a proxy for our identity and our reason for living?