Why do we eat what we eat?
Clearly, food beliefs and
food choices are emotionally laden, yet much of the nutritional and health
maintenance information provided to people has typically been based on
scientific arguments, which include rational, abstract and objective concepts,
such as nutrients and probabilities.[1] These arguments and concepts typically are not
what people listen to. Interestingly, researchers show that nutritional
information (especially, scientific) and food choice are only moderately
connected to each other (Wardle 1993, 72), suggesting that feelings may be just
as important, if not more so.[2]
Finding
Balance was certainly an
attempt to find an easy, universal theory of food. Instead, I found rather
conventional ideas for the time, which seemed completely common-sensical. Eat complex
(whole grain and or slightly fibrous plants) and avoid fat. Sugar was not yet verboten, although groups
such as Center for Science in the Public Interest were valiantly trying. One of
their most effective messages was in a film, Eat, Drink, and Be Wary, wherein 12 teaspoons of sugar were slowly
dropped into an empty coke bottle, illustrating how much sugar was in 12 ounces
of coca cola.
As I was writing, a colleague
in my department of Biology at Loyola Marymount University, Steven Scheck (he’s
now a dean at Oregon State University) read my nutrition chapter and admonished
me to downplay eating carbs and make the avoid-sugar-message clearer. What
could be more silly I thought? Eat less sugar? Sure, in liquid form, and sticky
form, to avoid dental caries, but weight loss? (This was, of course, before the
low-fat high-sugar convenience food market exploded).
I must admit that I loved the
eat-complex-carbs message of the 1970s and 1980s for its simplicity and purity
(no messy saturated fat). It was a diet echoed in Finding Balance.
Clearly, ideas about diet are changing -- they change all the time.
