I was sitting in the food science building at school the other day and noticed a display on the wall entitled "Role of Nutraceuticals in Cancer Treatment." There was a picture of some broccoli and another picture of carrots, along with explanations of how nutraceuticals, or extractives of food, combat cancer.
Nutraceuticals. In other words, food? Reterming food as a drug? Rethinking food as a drug? This struck me as very odd.
What's so odd? Well, if people taking "nutraceuticals" had eaten these things in reasonable quantities in the first place, it would have been "food" and they would have been much less likely to develop cancer. Instead, many people in the western world eat copious amounts of things that are not really food. Sure, you can eat them, but they provide no nutrition to your body and often have adverse affects, like raising blood pressure, cholesterol, clogging your arteries, giving you diabetes, making you obese, giving you heart disease, cancer, so on and so forth. You CAN eat a lot of things, but that doesn't make them food. People have eaten bikes and I don't even know what else. Little kids will eat their own shit if you let them.
Our concepts of food, I think, are often defined by those who produce and market food. If it's on a shelf, in a package, then it's fair game. If someone will sell it to us, then it's food. They wouldn't knowingly sell us things that are so bad, right? People will decline to eat things based on taste, but seldom out of some objection to its quality, or whether or not it counts as food. Realistically, much of the food available to us is ridden with bug spray, which they've somehow convinced us is safe to eat, and of course ingredients that make us sick, slowly poisoning us, especially high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oil, and monosodium glutamate. We consume dairy products and flesh rife with hormones, antibiotics and literal disease - see any outbreak of e coli or salmonella.
And that's normal. Those are our diets. That's what we're sold, so that's what we buy. That's what we grew up eating, so that's what we keep eating. No one wants to think that we were raised on shit. No one wants to think that our parents fed us poison. Understandably, we do not want to believe that the society around us, of which we are a part, and especially those in control of it, is so perverse and ignominious.
So nutraceuticals, yeah. Food. You ate shit and didn't take care of yourself, and you have cancer or diabetes. Now you want the benefits of those "healthy foods," but you don't really want to eat them or change your diet all that much. Besides, it couldn't have been related to your diet. It just happens.
It's complicated to parse out responsibility for this mess. In the end, the overarching blame rests with the food industry, no doubt. The proliferation of shit food is absolutely a case of supply creating demand. Were people ever clamoring for twinkies? No. People made these foods in labs, packed them with artificial flavors, colors and scents, and made sure to incorporate ingredients that have physically addictive properties, particularly the sweeteners they use. Sugar is certainly addictive on its own, but much more so when distilled into more potent forms, such as white sugar and the worst, high fructose corn syrup. Then these foods were unleashed on the public and here we are, fat, sick and dying.
Still, we need to take responsibility for ourselves, you know? We need to take a good look at what we eat and what it does to us. We need to listen to our bodies. Getting in tune with your body is so important - what makes you feel good, what you should eat, what your body does not want you to eat. We've all been raised to ignore our bodies and take what we want, trying to fix the problems we make with drugs. Our bodies know best.
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