What happens if you eat healthily, but don't exercise?
This is what Smallsteps asked me while she was eating her breakfast this morning, which I found an interesting question. We often talk about healthy eating and getting enough movement, but it is also good to consider alternatives, and this one was a pretty easy one to explain. In order to do this, I went to an extreme of "not moving much at all" so that while good food would feed the body, a person would still have physical problems due to a lack of muscle activation, bone density issues and various other problems. Because good food is not enough. Food is just energy.
Of course, there is the physical energy used by our body, but we can think of food supplying different forms of energy also, like vitamin and mineral energy, or fibre energy, or whatever else we need from food in order for our bodies and minds to function well. It feeds more than our muscles, it also feeds our hormones, so it affects they way we feel. And it is interesting because it is our feelings that tend to make us eat poorly and not exercise enough.
I mentioned to Smallsteps how funny it is that we often choose our food on whether it tastes good or not, which means that we are making a decision to make our tongue happy, without considering the rest of our body that is going to be affected by what we eat.
The human tongue makes up about 0.13% of total body weight.
That was a new search for me.
But that means we are making decisions based on the learned preferences of a tiny fraction of our body. And it also means that men thinking with their dick are on average using over three times as much of their body mass, than those thinking with their tongue. Something to think about - which body part you use to think with, is up to you.
As someone who struggles to maintain healthy eating habits, what I find interesting with this is that the tongue from an evolutionary standpoint has become a little redundant. The tongue is responsible for assisting eating, swallowing, speaking and cleaning the mouth, and of course taste. But taste is no longer as important as it once was, when we needed to seek out sweet foods or recognise if something was rotten. We are surrounded by sugars and we have fridges, freezers, packaging, and takeaway food. We have the knowledge to keep food fresh and even little dates printed on the food to know if it is edible.
Yet, despite not being as important for us, the taste sense is still overpowering good sense of what we should be eating. It is not like we don't know what we should be eating, but for some reason, many of us struggle to overpower the desires of the tongue. and because of this, we struggle with our weight, our thoughts, our feelings. The wants of 0.13% of our body mass is having a huge effect not only on us as individuals, but as communities that have to deal with the repercussions of poor diets, poor thoughts, and poor feelings.
What if we couldn't taste anything?
It would be really interesting, because while eating would become just a mechanical, utilitarian activity that needed to be done, we would rely on other senses. Food would supply no emotional taste reward, but our smell and sight of food would become keener. The texture of food would also be heavily weighted. There would be little point to add sugar and useless fats into food, as well as salt. The chances of malnutrition might go up in some factors, but it can definitely be argued that even with all the availability we have with taste receptors, we are still malnourished today.
Food complexity diminishes.
So too does the market for commercial foods that rely on advertising, sugars, fats and various taste additives to sell. Because eating is largely a function to survive, the products would be around efficiency and health benefits. Most of the restaurants would disappear and those that remained, whether fine or fast dining, would have a very different looking menu.
But it would be interesting to make food decisions using smell instead of taste, because fresh food would likely be weighted far more highly. Texture also, since a lot of the sweetened foods don't have much texture to them. Yes, markets would adjust still, but perhaps overall, the simplification of food into the energy it provides our various systems would likely lead to us being far more healthy overall. And perhaps if we were all eating far better, the will to collectively increase our movement would also improve.
I think it is safe to say that as a collective, we aren't in very good condition. But a collective is made up of many individuals and we are not making very good decisions for ourselves. Letting the tongue dictate what is good for the rest of our body seems to look very much like what the economy looks like, where probably 0.13% of the population has any say over what actually happens and, they are making the decisions for their own desires, not for the body of people. It seems like we are satisfying the tongue, while the body remains malnourished and is becoming increasingly sickly.
An interesting parable?
I don't know. But at least I am hoping that framing my eating habits this way will be a method to help me make better decisions than I have been making based on flavour. If my heart, intestines or brain were to decide, would they make the same choices, or would I be better off as a whole?
Taraz
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