Considering environmental impacts

When food environments change permanently, animals (and humans) evolve new strategies to adapt to the changed circumstances. If the changes are too rapid or too extreme, the adaptation involves crises of poor health, premature death, and even extinction.

Humans have used cultural means to change our food environments in several stages:

• the control of fire,

• the invention of tools,

• the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture,

• and more recently the industrialisation of food production and globalisation of it’s distribution.

Globalisation is causing unhealthy industrial foods to displace healthy traditional diets in cultures around the world, as they have in developed countries over several decades. The impact of the Western-style diet and the rise of ultra-processed foods illustrates how the two drivers of our diet – what foods we choose to eat and how much of each we consume – have worked together to drive the obesity crisis. Low fibre and high fats and carbs make foods tasty, causing us to choose them over healthier alternatives. At the same time, the low protein content of these foods makes them cheapest to produce. And the combination of low protein, low fibre, and low cost causes us to overeat – the final triumph of ultra-processed foods.

Our capacity to balance our nutrition has become seriously impaired due to the industrialisation of the food system. We have:

a.     Made low-protein processed foods taste unnaturally good by adding sugars, fats, salt, and other chemicals;

b.     Diluted the presence of protein in the food supply with cheap and abundant ultra-processed fats and carbs;

c.     Disconnected the brake on our appetite systems by decreasing our intake of fibre, which promotes fullness and feeds our gut bugs;

d.     Changed food cultures globally by aggressively marketing these products, including to kids, to establish them as the norm;

e.     Increased animal production unsustainably to meet the world’s hunger for meat protein, with associated environmental harm; and

f.      Driven a decline in the protein content of our staple food plants by increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Extracts taken from David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson’s book, “Eat Like the Animals.”