Hungry for Change

Here are my takeaways from the first 15 minutes of this documentary:

• we are not eating foods anymore, we are eating “food-like” products and they are adorned and made to look better and smell better so that people are attracted to them. They are made to have a long shelf life and the main objective is not really to give us a healthy product, its to give us a product that will make a lot of profit for the company that is producing it. 
• we’re moving less and we’re consuming so much nutrient-less calories; these two things combined is the issue. these things combined create an obesity epidemic, a low energy epidemic, a fog in cognition, and we begin to lose the will to take self-responsibility. When we lose the will to take self-responsibility, we turn it all over to a doctor who is only able to prescribe a pharmaceutical pill that doesn’t address the real issues, which are buried and complex.
• “the average American consumes more than 150 pounds of sugar and sweeteners each year.” – US Department of Agriculture
• “we are overfed, but we are also starving to death”
• as a species, the big challenge is to find calories and our body is biologically adapted to this; we seek calorie sources, particularly fats and sugars
• when we taste something fatty or sweet, our bodies want more of it because for our hunter gatherer ancestors, fat and sugar meant survival
• our bodies are programmed to “store up” for the “winter,” but the “winter” doesn’t come because we have so many sources of “food” today.
• hunter-gatherer “gardeners” have an extremely HIGH amount of nutrition and an extremely LOW amount of calories in their food. Compared to our society: we have a high amount of calories, but a low amount of nutritional value
• we have so many calorie sources, but our body still has the same signals that are ancestors had. so when we eat sweets and fatty foods, our body wants more because it is programmed to behave in a “feast or famine” environment. The problem is that we have FEAST, but there is no famine.
• we could eat 10,000 calories a day, but if we are not getting the specific nutrients we need, then we are starving on a nutritional basis. and if we are starving on a nutritional basis, our body will remain hungry to get those specific nutrients. man-made foods (like bread and sugar and table salt) trick our body into thinking we’re getting those nutrients.
• the biggest cause of obesity is addiction
• we know we shouldn’t eat bad foods, but we don’t know WHY we continue to eat those bad foods