Tuesday, October 8, 2013

What should we eat to be healthy? There shouldn't (have to) be an app for that!

A recent story on the CBC website spoke about the issues that supposed weight loss apps have in leading people to weight loss or improvements in health. Big surprise. A person who commented on the story summarized the crux of the issue, and I paraphrase : "You don't need an app to tell you that vegetables are health and candy bars are not!"

Maybe this is one this is one area where we really shouldn't have an app.

How did eating healthful, real food become such an difficult issue for us to overcome? I don't pretend to be the patron saint of whole foods and health living, I certainly have been less health conscious that I am currently, but really, this seems like a modern-day, first-world kind of problem. 

Check out some images of what families from around the world consume in one week to get a feel for the issue. This came up recently in my Ancestral Health class, and I speculated what the relationship was between chronic disease and consumption of fake food. I would be interesting to see, independent of what kind of whole food was consumed, how rates of disease varied. Maybe the study has been done already and I am unaware of it, but it sure seems like a safer bet to eat things that aren't sold in a package, driven by large marketing campaigns, if one wants real health benefits and effortless body weight management. 

Food for thought.