Markola
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
^^^^ It’s the right question, isn’t it? Here’s my unprofessional, unoriginal observation as a history major, and my hypothesis.
For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, there was no processed food, not much variety in what there was to eat anyway, and the biggest problem was finding enough calories to survive at all. People were lucky to live to 30.
We have a hard time zooming out to see it, but the problem of not enough calories for most people was finally and more than fully solved within only the last 75 years or so, with refrigeration, corporate agriculture, modern distribution and petrochemicals. As a result, people in advanced countries are faced with a deluge of calories from every direction, diverse foods from all over the planet, and our appetites and bodies simply cannot cope with it all. At the same time, we reduced the need for physical action by rebuilding society with cars and sedentary jobs and recreation. For several decades in this radical transition, many people smoked cigarettes, which helped suppress appetites and kept people thinner, but now most of us don’t smoke, of course, fortunately.
Today, for the first time, rather than out of the necessity to survive, we are left with motivating ourselves to move around and to eat smaller portions of a massive array of food, much of it processed and full of hidden sugar, salt and fat. The food and cosmetics industries are also subjecting our bodies to an unrelenting, complex, unregulated toxicological experiment with god knows what effects, which we don’t and can’t understand.
I know it’s entirely depressing and alarming but people alive today are living in a wildly unique moment of our species’ history and evolution and our bodies are behaving weirdly in response, governed by our random genetic lottery selection and our abilities to exert optional will regarding movement and portions in ways that our ancestors were required to exert automatically to survive. It’s a bizarre time and it’s no wonder we have an obesity epidemic and lots of other first-time-in-history side effects. I try to have empathy for us humans, who are struggling in ways no one ever had to before, mostly because we didn’t live as long. We fiddle with nutrition fads but science still cannot explain why Keith Richards is still alive.
My .02 and YMMV.
For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, there was no processed food, not much variety in what there was to eat anyway, and the biggest problem was finding enough calories to survive at all. People were lucky to live to 30.
We have a hard time zooming out to see it, but the problem of not enough calories for most people was finally and more than fully solved within only the last 75 years or so, with refrigeration, corporate agriculture, modern distribution and petrochemicals. As a result, people in advanced countries are faced with a deluge of calories from every direction, diverse foods from all over the planet, and our appetites and bodies simply cannot cope with it all. At the same time, we reduced the need for physical action by rebuilding society with cars and sedentary jobs and recreation. For several decades in this radical transition, many people smoked cigarettes, which helped suppress appetites and kept people thinner, but now most of us don’t smoke, of course, fortunately.
Today, for the first time, rather than out of the necessity to survive, we are left with motivating ourselves to move around and to eat smaller portions of a massive array of food, much of it processed and full of hidden sugar, salt and fat. The food and cosmetics industries are also subjecting our bodies to an unrelenting, complex, unregulated toxicological experiment with god knows what effects, which we don’t and can’t understand.
I know it’s entirely depressing and alarming but people alive today are living in a wildly unique moment of our species’ history and evolution and our bodies are behaving weirdly in response, governed by our random genetic lottery selection and our abilities to exert optional will regarding movement and portions in ways that our ancestors were required to exert automatically to survive. It’s a bizarre time and it’s no wonder we have an obesity epidemic and lots of other first-time-in-history side effects. I try to have empathy for us humans, who are struggling in ways no one ever had to before, mostly because we didn’t live as long. We fiddle with nutrition fads but science still cannot explain why Keith Richards is still alive.
My .02 and YMMV.
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