The Modern Diet
Today, nearly a century and a half after Banting’s diet recommendations, Amazon.com lists nearly 20,000 books available for purchase on diets.
As of this writing, 681 books have been released in the past 30 days, with another 112 coming soon. In the first six months of 2011, more than 2,000 books on weight-loss were released.
We know beyond any scientific doubt that being fat kills. For more than a century and a half, the medical community has known that sugars and carbohydrates make us fat. But we keep eating, despite all of the information and transparency—from this month’s 681 diet books, to the nutritional labels on every item in the grocery store, to chains of Weight Watchers and Jenny Craigs across the country.
Food’s scrumptious properties aside, perhaps the diet books have something to do with our obesity problem. It certainly seems as though the number of diet books available to the public correlates to obesity rates. While any economist would predict that the number of books to help people be less fat would grow with the number of fat people in the market, at what point does causation flow the other way around? Maybe all these diet books are making us fat by making it harder to figure out what a healthy diet is. At the very least, the modern obsession with weight over diet brings us a significant health issue. Imagery of being perfectly shaped and skinny trumps being healthy and happy, and as a result, scores of people suffer— and die—from eating disorders.
No matter which way you turn, abundant information makes it easy to distort our relationship with food into something unhealthy. If you’re looking to surf through a land of false promises, spend a few minutes in the diet aisle of your local bookstore. You can lose weight by thinking like either a caveman or a French woman, or by eating only food that’s cooked slowly. You can lose it, says the updated 2012 edition of
In the diet aisle, our relationship to food can take on social, political, and environmental significance. A healthy diet mustn’t just include the right number of calories and the right interaction of nutritional elements. It must also produce the least amount of carbon, and be as natural as possible. It’s no longer good enough to eat reasonable portions of lean meat; the meat must come from a cow that could roam free and eat grass.
If time is of the essence, you can get top-selling weight loss books promising change based on your lifestyle: just spend 8 minutes (
Most of what these books cover and the pseudoscience behind them appeals to the same emotional impulses as do the people peddling calories in the first place. Some of this is unavoidable in a free society: the right answers— healthy information—compete side-by-side with the answers we may want to hear but which may not be true. Only the highly nutritionally literate can easily tell the difference.
The best food journalists distill this complex world of choices into healthy ones. Michael Pollan, Knight Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is a leading example. The beginning of his
While our collective sweet tooth used to serve us well, in the land of abundance it’s killing us. As it turns out, the same thing has happened with information. The economics of news have changed and shifted, and we’ve moved from a land of scarcity into a land of abundance. And though we are wired to consume—it’s been a key to our survival—our sweet tooth for information is no longer serving us well. Surprisingly, it too is killing us.
Chapter 2. Information, Power, and Survival
Most of us don’t remember the moment we began to discover language, to understand words, and to speak—the closest we get to it is watching our children discover it for themselves.
Helen Keller was an exception. The renowned deaf-blind activist didn’t learn about language until she was seven years old. Of the discovery, she wrote:
“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.”[13]
Keller discovered not just language, but a passion to know, and to tell—a sudden connection to the entire world. She describes the moment as gaining consciousness itself. The moment she began to understand that things had names, she said, was the moment she really began to
The origins of language aren’t yet definitive. But many scientists agree that sometime between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, our brains began to change. We don’t know whether this physiological change was viral (co-evolving with language, spreading from homo sapiens to homo sapiens at a rapid rate), or evolutionary (developing over thousands of years), or a combination of slow evolution turning suddenly into algorithmic adoption. Yet one thing is certain: once we had the capacity to communicate complex forms of information, we had a huge advantage over other species.
The fossil record tells us that when our species discovered language— and thus discovered complex forms of information—human society transformed. Around the same time language was developed, humans began leaving the continent of Africa in droves. This development of language, some scientists suggest,[14] is what enabled humans to organize, move together, and explore beyond the African continent.
Most importantly, at this moment, our species began to become more aware of ourselves. While it’s evident that the mind co-evolved with language, it was at this moment that we were not only able to communicate increasingly complex concepts to one another, but also to store it in our brains effectively. Our cognition advanced.
Knowledge Is Power
With language came the ability to coordinate with each other more effectively. Nomadic tribes began to develop symbols to keep themselves better organized. Calendars appear to have been developed about 10,000 years ago, improving our ability to plant seasonal crops. Armed with the seeds of agriculture, we didn’t need to be as transient anymore; gradually, supported by the surpluses of expanding agriculture, nomadic tribes turned into civilizations, and more sophisticated governments emerged.
The Sumerians and then the Egyptians started using glyphs to express the value of currency around 6,000 years ago. Once the Egyptians settled on a standard alphabet years later, they reaped another information technology boom and reached heights no other civilization previously known to man ever had, taking on massive
