Nutritive Mismatch

There are many factors contributing to our current health woes. The recent rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement has highlighted a number of the reasons why our culture has an obesity epidemic. In his latest book, “THE END OF CRAVING”, author Mark Schatzker’s central theme to our eating disorders are due to Nutritive Mismatch. Our bodies are confused. Many of the things we put in our mouths these days, do not compute between the sensors on our tongue, what our brain tells our body to expect, and what actually ends up in our gut.

Good Intentions

In agriculture, over the past century, we have implemented practices under the theme that the U.S. farmer needs to “Feed the World”. Under this “theme”, industry and research has sold farmers to focus almost entirely on PRODUCTION or YIELD. Well guess what? American Farmers do not need to feed the world. In fact, women produce around 70% of the food consumed world wide, many in small-scale-agriculture providing day-to-day family subsistence.

The latest sales pitch from industry and research is that we need to keep focusing on yield to feed the world’s population by 2050 and beyond. Guess what? This is a lie. We currently produce enough food to feed the projected world population in 2080. We do need to solve the problem of food waste, not food production. Let’s face it, we have a God of Abundance, not at God of Scarcity. What is the best way to solve food waste? Buy your food locally.

Unintended Consequences

Here is a list of Agriculture/Food Practices that have been implemented under Good Intentions and their Unintended Consequences.

Good Intention	Unintended Consequences
Synthetic Fertilizers to boost YIELD.	Dilution of nutrients and satiety in the food raised.
Crop Hybridization to boost PRODUCTION.	Loss of nutrient density in food while selecting for Yield.
Herbicides and Pesticides to boost YIELD.	Food with toxic residue, and killing of non-target species.
Processed shelf-stable “food” for convenience.	Toxic chemicals added for preservation and presentation.
Synthetic flavorings added to processed foods.*	Flavor no longer associated with nutrition in “food”.
Fortification or Enrichment of “food” with vitamins and minerals.	The first time you could get vitamins while eating a donut or other empty carbohydrates.

* In retrospect, out of the list above, I am not sure the advent of “flavorings” was for good intentions? For the most part, it appears flavorings were developed for junk food sales and the corporation bottom line.

ABOVE TABLE SUMMARY, “Food” That We Consume Today:

• Our food today is less nutrient dense for powering and healing our bodies.
• The food we consume these days confuse our bodies.
  • What our tongue tells the brain is coming in, does not match what ends up in our stomach.
    • Nutritional Mismatch

We hate to lose – uncertainty drives us

In his book, Schatzker points out that when we are confused, in about any situation, the thing we gravitate to the most, is to prevent a loss. Preventing a loss is the a way we subconsciously react to help us stay alive to fight the next fight. All of the items listed in the table above cause uncertainty in our bodies. For example:

1. Why isn’t this food item providing the nutrition that is expected from the information delivered from the tongue (sensor) to the brain, versus the feedback from the gut (sensor)?
   • I guess I’ll just have to eat more to get the nutrition that is missing.
2. Based on the tongue, this food item should provide 75 calories to burn, but why is there now 150 calories sensed in the gut?
   • I don’t know what to do with any of these calories, and won’t try to metabolize them, they will eventually get stored as fat.
3. This food item carries B Vitamins to metabolize the calories being delivered. But through most of human history, these were empty calories, they should just past through the system?
   • I guess I’ll metabolism these calories and store them as extra fat.

To Prevent the loss, our bodies when confused with these nutritional mismatches, will in many cases try to consume more to correct the mismatch. The food companies take advantage of this innate drive within us. We sit down with a bag a chips, and once we start eating, we can’t stop. Our bodies are trying to auto correct the mismatch. Schatzker says, “In the span of decades, the taste of food went from highly certain to highly uncertain.”

What should we do?

I would encourage you to read the book for more background on the topics of how our bodies react to eating. Such food and eating topics as “liking”, “wanting”, “pleasure”, “taste”, and of course “craving”. You can go down the rabbit hole of eating, but for the most part, we like to keep it simple. Here are some things that we have suggested in the past to help you and your relationship to food:

• Buy your food locally (remember this helps with food waste)
• Get to know your farmer.
• Buy and eat whole food.
• Be mindful when you eat.
• Avoid Junk Food (there is no such thing as Junk Food, it is Junk)
• When you find flavorful whole foods, enjoy it.
  • In nature, nutrition always follows flavor.