Statistics and news’ articles about food and obesity in our world today are regular features in our media – for instance:
- “The World Consumes More Than 11 Million Pounds Of Food Every Minute Of Every Day – 2014.” (1)
- Overall, roughly a third of the food produced in the world for human consumption is wasted per year, which is 1.3 billion tonnes. (2)
- “Worldwide, obesity has more than doubled since 1980. In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.”(3)
- “Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally, with at least 2.8 million people dying each year as a result of being overweight or obese.” (4)
It may seem that our world is bountiful in some ways – and certainly in my life we have more variety of foods than we did before the 1960’s. We have countless books, videos, TV shows, internet sites all about food, recipes, cooking, and even eating disorders and obesity or dieting – and in many of our health systems we have healthcare practitioners such as dieticians and nutritionists to support us. We also talk about food a lot in our daily lives, in our homes, and in our workplaces.
Why then is so much food wasted? And why are we already in an overweight and obesity crisis worldwide?
One of the things that strikes me is the type of education we have about food in our homes, families, schools and workplaces. I am not here saying it is all bad, but if it was ‘hitting the nail on the head’, these statistics would surely look different.
What if we were raised to understand the truth about food, around what is needed, the addictive nature of certain foods (e.g. sugar), right down to our relationship with food; the process of eating, from the way we shop, to preparing food, to the way we eat it, why we eat it and looking at our ideals and beliefs about food. Food is a deeply revealing and important study for us all.
Animals in the wild eat only what is needed, yet we as humans – who claim to be the most intelligent species – eat so many foods that aren’t good for us, we buy food we do not eat and waste it, and we eat in such a way that we become overweight, obese, developing diabetes or other ailments and conditions, seemingly seeing these things as ‘normal’ today despite the shocking statistics e.g. in the rise of obesity. Why is this?
I don’t know about you, but whilst in my family home we ate reasonably well-balanced meals (meat or fish and two veg, always freshly cooked), and my mother taught me to cook and prepare food, and at school we did have cooking lessons, I was never taught that eating is purely to truly nourish the body – and whilst I was taught about calories, and not to overeat certain foods (e.g. salt, or certain fats) – I was also never taught that the way you eat today is an investment in how you will feel tomorrow: eat poorly, under eat, or overeat, and you will feel the knock on effects later that day or the next day.
More so, our physical body actually knows which foods truly nourish it and which foods deplete or burden it. And whilst I have felt indigestion, or got tummy ache after eating certain foods, or felt sleepy or bloated when eating gluten or a runny nose when eating dairy for instance, it never dawned on me to listen more to my body about what it had to say about food and nourishment – and I kept on eating those same foods day in day out, despite the obvious symptoms they were causing.
That raises a few questions for me:
What if we were taught from an early age, or educated in our schooling, about the true value and purpose of food, and that it is purely to nourish the body?
What if we were shown that there is a ‘cause and effect’ of food so that we can learn for ourselves how to listen to our body as a marker? And if we were supported and encouraged to experiment for ourselves from a young age – to feel for ourselves the impact of foods that make us sleepy, foods that make us bloat, and foods that feel truly nourishing?
And what if we were educated to live in a way that it was normal to use our body as a daily barometer of our wellbeing – ‘The Body Is the Marker of All Truth.” Serge Benhayon (5)
Given the exponential rise of illness and disease in our world today and in particular the rise in obesity (3) (4) and diabetes (6), isn’t it time we started the conversation… to talk about these issues and our attitudes towards food? Only when we understand and build a true relationship with food will the statistics on obesity and diabetes, and on related issues such as food waste, be different.
By Jane Keep, Phd, MPhil, MSc, FCIPD, MIC, CMgr, FCMI, London, UK
References:
- Thomson, J.R. (2104) The World Consumes More than 11 Million Pounds of Food Every Minute of Every day. Huffington Post. March, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/18/world-food-consumption_n_4978947.html
- Endfoodwastenow.org (2013). End Food Waste Now – Facts. http://www.endfoodwastenow.org/index.php/resources/facts
- World Health Organisation (2016) Fact Sheet – Obesity and Overweight. June. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/
- World Health Organisation (2014) Fact files on obesity. May. http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/obesity/en/
- Serge Benhayon. The Practitioner. Sergebenhayon.com. http://www.sergebenhayon.com/the-practitioner.html
- World Health Organisation (2016) Ten Facts about Diabetes. April. http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/diabetes/en/
Further Reading:
Food Choices – From Eating for Taste to Eating to Nourish
6 best ways to lose weight authentically (hint: it doesn’t involve fad diets or gym memberships)
What is living medicine?
The human face of sugar addiction
930 Comments
It is incredible how blindly we continue to consume so much that is detrimental to our health and also staggering that we waste a third of the food we produce each year – that is an enormous amount of resources that are going into producing food that will never be used. A complete overhaul of the way we produce and consume food is long overdue and a great place to start would be with children and encouraging them to listen to what their bodies communicate with them but for that to happen we need to recognise how far we have strayed from our connection to our bodies’ wisdom that it never ceases to communicate with us patiently waiting for us to be ready to listen.
I feel some children and adults do listen to what their body is communicating to them, but they have a bigger trigger to numb this communication, and so will eat to try and silence their body and what it is saying.
Food has become an indulgence so it is no wonder obesity has increased in our society but food and the variety of food we have today is not to be blamed but the relationship we have with ourselves and the need to overeat to comfort ourselves as opposed to eat to nourish the body.
What is not considered is that it is our relationship to food and other substances in life which are not really talked about. If we understand that way that we eat and also what we eat can change our awareness of our feelings and connection to life, then we have the possibility of choosing differently.
There is nothing like the personal experience of knowing how and which foods have a detrimental effect on our bodies. But this so often gets ignored or overruled so many times by those that think they know better because they have evidence to say otherwise. There is nothing like anecdotal evidence to portray the absolute truth of how something affects us.
I find it always interesting how that when I eat out for example in a restaurant versus when I make a dinner at home the nourishment of home-cooked food far outweighs the dining out experience whatever the cost of the meal or however fancy the restaurant. Nourishment comes from preparing, making, cooking in the quality of love; a love that you can always taste when it’s there and also when it’s not.
What is truly nourishing is developing a relationship and connection with our bodies that is self-caring and self-loving.
Many of the health care systems, like hospitals and community care givers are having to adapt to a growing population of people who are becoming obese, with larger beds and chairs, scanners and other machines, as well as special training on how to manoeuvre and take care of a person during their hospital stay. This is all in response to what is happening with people’s bodies, with our bodies. And while I do not feel that anyone is to blame, I am concerned that as we continue to think up better and better ways of managing the situation, the real causes are perhaps not being addressed.
It seems that we only scratch the surface when it comes to being educated about healthy food. As you say, we are not educated in the types of food that are addictive, or why we want to overeat, binge eat or even gulp our food down and then there is all the cultural associations around food that we uphold which may not actually be supportive for the body. To get deeper with this topic and how our relationship with it affects our vitality, wellbeing, the knock-on effects that we tend to ignore is a very needed thing.
perhaps one of the reasons we are not educated to the degree you share here Rachel is that while we live in a way where we do over eat, binge, or gulp etc we are not seeing there is another way – and hence we would not see the need for education.
I think being educated from young to be more aware of and in tune with our body would for sure support how we are with food, but also the understanding that our relationship with food is really about our relationship with everything in life, and so zooming out so to speak to see the bigger picture of how we are reacting or responding to situations can help us connect with how we are with food.
and in that its about learning that we are in relationship with everything all the time, so if we connect with our body we can discern our daily choices from our own inner knowing of what is needed.
If as a society we got this one single thing right – the effects would be enormous.
We clearly are not eating to nourish our bodies for the potential of our Soulful beingness to shine through. It in actual fact feels like we are doing the opposite, that we are deliberately hindering our living true potential. Food has become a medication, a form of entertainment and an addiction in order to escape from the emptiness we feel from not living in honor of who we are within. If we were taught and fostered from a young age that our bodies are the marker and truest guide to knowing all that is true, then our relationship with food would be naturally honoured as one that supports true nourishment for our body, as medicine.
A really supportive sharing on food and its effects on us that we are not taught and the addictive nature of so much being added to it . The reality that we are what we eat and how we eat is very real and so it is easy to see the healing power of food and our living way in life working with us and our health and well being from here.
Listening to our body as a marker provides the true support we need as it clearly communicates to us all the time how it is feeling and what is necessary to maintain harmony and balance and what is causing a reaction and taking our body out of its natural rhythm and flow.
Jane I was listening to a video talk on food and genetics and was amazed just how much of the worlds illness could be transformed by adjusting our food, something I’m sure we all know. What I love here is that we have to look beyond just what we eat to heal the reasons why we turn to foods. That transforms insights into a living way that is medicine.
The whole education system could be overhauled to be based on teaching children self care, including nutrition, cooking and respecting their bodies. It’s necessary to teach children knowledge so they can work and contribute to the world as adults, but what’s the point when we have tired, unwell and overweight bodies, and the misery of not knowing our value and worth? If we only use self care to function but are unable to care for ourselves in a way that supports us to live truly vital and joyful lives, then we need to reassess how we parent, educate, and care for human beings.
We have been lied to so much about food it’s become a nonsensical game with sickness as a prize for the winners and losers, and yet we have to take responsibility here for we have called for the non sense to fill a hole in us from our separation from our essence. We demand what the food industry is happy to supply.
If food and true nourishment was taught, then we would have to look at all that does not work. That would mean we would have to change… this we do not want to do. We want to hold onto all our comforts (that are in truth poisoning us) with everything we have got.
A rather glaring omission from our education both at school and in the home is to listen to the wisdom of our greatest teacher, our own body.
I absolutely agree – and the nourishment we need from food also changes day to day, according to our work load, and things going on in our lives and whether it’s a quiet week and we need to eat lighter or a busy week and we might need to rebuild at the end and how our bodies are feeling etc. There is so much detail we need to each personally feel into to know the exact nutritional nourishment we need at any particular time.
There is so much about food and the way we eat it, that does not support true nourishment. We are not taught about the need for flexibility depending on what we are living day-to-day, how our health is and what our bodies actually need. Instead, (I also include myself here) we often eat not to nourish, but to comfort and dull what we don’t want to feel. The end result is that our bodies have to cope with the double whammy of the un-dealt with emotion and the food that wasn’t needed.