Alright, so I’m not twenty years old anymore. So I can’t eat a pint of ice cream and chase it with a Guinness before going to bed and not gain an ounce. Not too long ago friends would laugh as they asked me what I had for dinner last night because I would usually respond by saying something like, “I had a roasted chicken.” As in, I ate an entire roasted chicken by myself in a one sitting. Yeah, those were the days.

In the past few years I have definitely felt my metabolism “downshift” a bit. And I have been officially tagged as having high-cholesterol. So I watch what I eat, sort of. Not really.

…A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible food-like substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food and food is what you want to eat.” ~ Michael Pollan, Unhappy Meals

I have actually heard this angle before, and honestly, I agree with it. It seems to be based on common sense rather than being a precursor to some “new” diet plan. This whole food approach is also the basis of the Dr. Oz approach to dieting and lifestyle. What I find most intriguing about this article is that it seems as if the author is taking the perspective of the Western/American Diet as a pandemic of sorts. Which, by in large, is not a bad one (is that a pun?);

What we know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets. (Four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving to America, people from nations with low rates of these “diseases of affluence” will quickly acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes the Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its most deleterious effects by isolating the bad nutrients in it — things like fat, sugar, salt — and encouraging the public and the food industry to limit them. But after several decades of nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the ’50s, but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.” ~ Michael Pollan, Unhappy Meals

This view is quite disconcerting as an American and more importantly as a HUMAN BEING. So the advice of my Dad’s generation, “everything in moderation” is no longer applicable. We are now haunted by the new Voice of Reason which would need to include a clause about avoiding high fructose corn syrup, bleached flour, enriched flour, hydrogenated oils and of course trans-fat. Oh yeah, and there would need to be something in there about walking 10,000 steps (that’s a little over five miles) a day!

This is actually a critical point in the discussion of health, diet and lifestyle. In the last couple of generations there has been a dramatic shift from physical labor (working in the factory or in the field) to more passive ones (sitting in a cubicle or on a forklift) for the most part. I am not saying we as a country do not do our share of physical labor on the job. Not exactly anyway, but technology has changed the way we do things at work in the past hundred years, whether it is the invention of the hay baler or fax machine. Meaning, we simply do not require the same level of physical labor to achieve the same results as we did 100 years ago. I do think we as humans (as animals dare I say) are built for walking and for labor but we don’t need to do as much. We are definitely not designed for sitting for long periods of time. All of this affects our physiology over time in profound ways because we are consuming the calories but we are not matching it with physical labor and activity.

Part of the problem for me is the distinction between dieting and “lifestyle. “Dieting” implies that you are changing your eating habits to achieve a short-term goal of losing weight and once that goal is achieved you will go back to your usual ways. I tend to agree with the approach outlined by Dr. Oz, that a “diet” should be viewed more as a lifestyle change, assuming it is based on balancing your eating (input) and your activity (output) levels. I begrudgingly try to remind myself that when I get stuck parking in the outer portion of the parking lot at the mall which inevitably means I will need to walk five or ten minutes just to get to the mall. I just remind myself of those 10,000 steps a day.