I’ve been doing a lot of reading on food over the last couple of years, and I feel like I’m finally beginning to get a better understanding of how food works in conjunction with our bodies. To that end I feel like I should try to summarize to myself what I’ve figured out about food and how it’s going to influence my eating behaviours and other behaviours.
To begin with, a good place to start seems to be the fact that, aside from vitamins and minerals (which we are setting aside only temporarily), there are really only four types of stuff that we humans eat: carbohydrates, proteins, fats and fibers (a.k.a stuff in food that we can’t digest). All of our food is some combination of these four items, with the first three categories giving us the energy we need to stay alive.
Setting aside fiber for a second, it’s easy to realize why it doesn’t make too much sense to get rid of any one of the three remaining categories. Namely- we need all three for our body to function well because each has effects that the others can’t duplicate. For example, we need fat for fat soluble vitamins, hormones, and to provide a bit of padding for our internal organs. We need carbohydrates so that our body can store energy, and make our muscles and brains work. We need protein so that we can repair our muscles and other body parts. This page goes into a bit more detail on this front. As well, if that weren’t reason enough, any one of these three has its down side in the form of side effects, so trying to eat mostly one or the other probably won’t work out well in the long run. What that means is that, even if we were eating enough of one single type of food to technically give us enough calories in a given day, we would still get into a great deal of trouble.
Putting aside the question of too much, not enough, or just the right amount of calories for the moment, the question then remains, how do we decide what to eat. But before considering that, it’s worth considering how much control we have over what we eat and what factors influence our eating decisions. I happen to be one of the luckiest organisms on the planet when it comes to food choice, since I’m human, I live in North American and I’m a member of the middle class. As a result, I have a great deal of food availability, both with respect to amount and selection. Consequently, for me, the main external factors that influence my eating are circumstantial and social. The main internal factors are how appealing or unappealing I find a particular food, positive and negative opinions I have about the food (e.g. does it have a strong environmental impact, is it a pain in the butt to prepare?), what I know about the effects of any particular diet on my body, and what I know about the composition of the foods themselves.
It wouldn’t seem too hard to divy up available calories between fat, protein and carbohydrates, but it gets complicated quite quickly. One of the complicating factors is that, especially in the case of fats and carbs, there are a lot of different subcategories and there is a huge amount of disagreement regarding whether or not each of these subcategories is good or bad or indifferent in various contexts. We really don’t understand how our bodies work that well, so a lot of the assumptions and predictions of doctors and dietitians in the Western world have turned out to be embarrassingly, and sometimes health damagingly, bad.
Avoiding these controversies for the time being, suppose that the decision is made to have 30% of your calories coming from fat of some sort, 40% coming from carbs of some sort and 30% coming from protein of some sort. Based on my age, size and gender, according to this calculator even just lying around doing nothing, I would need 1271 calories each day. Having a light activity day- which most of my days qualify for- I would need a few more calories- namely 1692. So what does this give me to play with in terms of fat, carbohydrate and protein? That works out to 169.2 grams of carbohydrates, 126.9 grams of protein and 56.4 grams of fat a day, for a grand total of 352.5 grams, or .77 pounds of food + however much fiber I care to stuff in (with the recommended amount being something like 25-30grams a day). This sounds about right to me based on my camping book’s estimates for how much food a person needs.
So far so good- now I just need to decide… in a general way… what I
want to eat! That’s where social and personal preferences come in to play.
posted at 18:30 on Fri, 20 Oct, 2006 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.