Eat food like medicine because if you don't one day you will be eating medicine like its food.
I heard this quote a while back and it got me thinking, you truly are what you eat!
Food is a huge market, globally, fast food generates revenue of over $570 billion and shows no signs of slowing down. This is over $200 billion in America alone which comes as no surprise to me. # Fast food is by its very design set up to be quick, convenient and cheap, this is no better done than in America.
It is estimated that one in three consumes fast food on a daily basis. # But one thing that is missing is nutrition. Most fast foods tend to be high in trans fats, undergo extensive processing and contain many additives. They typically are calorie-dense while providing low nutritional value, which is the worst combination for the body. Nutrition is vital to our bodies maintenance, growth, reproduction and resistance to disease, food that is low in nutritional content taxes our body of the energy required to digest this food without giving us the benefit for doing so. This imbalance over the long term has a permanent effect on our overall health.
The biggest cause of deaths is Heart disease, this comes in at almost 25% which is more than cancer. The majority of this is from the build-up of plaque in the arteries, as this builds up it significantly increases the chances of a heart attack or a stroke. Now if we follow the trail back, what causes this build-up of plaque, you guessed it...... our diet.
There is also a very strong link between what we eat and cancer, removing hereditary and external causes we increase our risk of cancer by eating certain foods. Two major ways -
The first type is direct as certain food are known to cancer. An example of this is processed meats such as bacon, hot dogs and salami. These types of food have been listed in group 1 on the IARC carcinogenic classification, this means that consuming these food types directly caused cancer.
I would class the second type as overconsumption. There is now more choice of food than ever before, its accessibility is also easier than ever. Food is a big business and every product is designed to grab your attention, we are bombarded with so many choices and one byproduct of this can be overeating. Overeating consistently leads to obesity and the health implications of overeating are numerous.
For the first time in history, more people now die globally from diseases relating to obesity than from malnutrition.
The world food organization state that overall, about 13% of the world’s adult population (11% of men and 15% of women) were obese in 2016. # The rate is increasing as well, from 1975 the rate of obesity has tripled.
Cancer Research UK says bowel, kidney, ovarian and liver cancers are more likely to have been caused by being overweight than by smoking tobacco.#
Most of us (including myself) don’t eat food like medicine because we tend to forget that what we eat has a direct effect on our long term health. The major decision when choosing food is based around taste, its nutritional content is an afterthought and in some cases is not even considered. In isolation, this has little direct consequence, who doesn't like ice cream or chocolate! But........when we use this logic of taste over everything when choosing what to eat, what to drink and how much to consume the negative side effects begin to result in a deterioration of our health. This is then compounded by the general response which is to consume medicine which "fixes" only the symptoms and not the cause.
The reason we based so much of our choices around taste when it comes to food and drink is complex and could take up another post, but to summarize the factors include, culture, marketing, misinformation and instant gratification to name a few.
Medicine is the remedy while eating healthy food is the prevention of needing a cure to most of these in the first place.
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Thanks for reading!