I’d like to start this entry on a personal note. Last week I was with my father as he had an exploratory heart procedure done. The doctors ran a camera through his leg up to his heart to see what was going on in there. As it turns out, my father has some significant heart damage, most likely caused by a heart attack that went unnoticed. The left ventricle of his heart now moves slower than it should, it’s not a repairable problem, but one we can try and monitor closely and keep from getting worse. He also has a 50% blockage in one of his major arteries, that he’ll now be treated for (to prevent it from getting bigger, not to decrease its size) through cholesterol medication. Having to watch what he eats is foreign to him. I’ve always been concerned about his diet, but hope that this will scare him into taking better care of himself. We are a society of instant gratification, and that comes with the good and the bad, but heart disease takes a long time to materialize to the point where active treatment is needed, and it’s something that can easily be avoided, by a diet that’s moderate in fats and high in fiber and supplemented with regular exercise.
Having said that, I read an article that I found fascinating in the New York Times, it was a diet study, done by a Marketing Analyst. The study didn’t have statistical data about good fats or bad fats, but instead turned a keen eye to the behavior of eating.
If you’ve ever been around a baby when it’s eating, you’ll notice that the baby knows when it’s satisfied. It doesn’t keep drinking till the bottle is empty, or check what the other baby’s are doing. It just turns its head and refuses to take anymore. Many dieticians say there’s a similar trigger in adults that goes unnoticed, it’s called “the sigh” (sounds very ominous, doesn’t it?) The sigh theory says that adults tend to sigh when they are satisfied, but this sign usually goes unnoticed. Try it, pay attention to your breathing patterns while you’re eating. I happen to have a hiccup, I’m very strange indeed. When I’m hungry or when I’m full, I have a single hiccup. All of my close friends and family members are aware of the hiccup, and it generally creates a fair amount of pressure to stop eating when I’m full and start eating when I’m hungry.
Now that you know an awful lot about me, back to the study Dr. Brian Wansink of Cornell University, conducts regular lunch experiments. He offers willing participants a free lunch and watches their reactions to different eating scenarios. He uses a bottomless soup bowl, rigged to never get below half full. Some participants ate more than a quart of soup in a 20-minute period. Another experiment gave movie-goers free popcorn, either large or medium in size. The popcorn they gave out was stale, and not particularly appetizing. Those with the larger sized popcorn ate 53% more stale popcorn than those with the medium sized bag. He says, “We don’t have any idea what the normal amount to eat is, so we look around for clues or signals,” he said. “When all you see is that big portions of food cost less than small ones, it can be confusing.” What is it about our society that we have completely forgotten to listen to our own bodies when deciphering what and how much we need? Basically, his studies show, we eat until we have some sort of external signal to stop, like there being no more food, or someone else has stopped eating. We eat even when the food isn’t good; we eat when we’re not hungry. Who hasn’t eaten a whole bag of chips while watching TV or eaten an entire pint of ice cream?
The positive aspect of this experiment is that food manufacturers are now trying to use this information to market things in a healthier fashion. There are now single serving sized bags of popcorn, containers of cottage cheese (I’ve never known anyone to overdo it on cottage cheese, but I’m sure there’s someone out there somewhere), there are 100-calorie pack cookies and crackers, and single serving bags of things like chips and pretzels. Trader Joe’s even sells single servings of nuts. These are definitely things that can really help to improve the public’s knowledge of what an actual serving is. People don’t intentionally gorge themselves, we live in a culture of abundance, restaurants serve gigantic portions, and we’ve began to come accustomed to eating that much. If people are constantly exposed to things in healthier portion sizes, that knowledge may start to slip into their daily life, the servings they serve themselves, and the amounts they’ll eat while they’re out.
As critical as I am of our society’s lack of knowledge about nutrition and exercise, I do believe that there are a lot of really great things happening in the world of nutrition, in our school systems and our business world that can really benefit our health in the years to come. Our bodies are capable of doing so much, and they deserve to be treated well and respected. Although I wish that societal changes brought about more changes within the world of big business, sometimes the opposite happening can be a good thing.
