Nourishing By Heart

Pleasure! Yesssss!

And no -seems it would be bliss but as the sign to the left states to devote our life to pleasure is less than pleasuring.

The seeking of pleasure is seen clearly in our culture around eating. I am the first to practice and teach that eating is a pleasurable activity and it adds much to our lives day in and day out. Actually with out the pleasure and desire for certain foods and tastes we would not have evolved to where we are today.

It was the non-edible and rotten foods that made our palate revolt and spit it right back out to where it came from. We desired, enjoyed and  found pleasure in the foods our body’s thrived on. Consider the sweetness and heavy on fat found in mothers milk the perfect taste for the baby -perfect pleasurable taste.

So where on earth has this gone wrong? If following our pleasure tastes has kept us alive, growing and thriving for all this time why is it now killing us with obesity, coronary artery disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes (metabolic syndrome)?

Lets look at what else, in the timeline of evolution, might have changed right along with our pleasure seeking going haywire in our brains (we used to actually stop eating because we had the hormonal signal to stop and we also did not ingest foods that were actually drug like causing us changes in brain chemistry that would have us jonesing for  food like it was a drug.)

Dr Loren Cordain (professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University) has done a beautiful visual using a football field (100 yards) as a timeline for the evolution of modern humans. (There is a lot that goes on in the 99 and 1/2 yards but that is not the focus of this post.) When we travel to the final 1/2 yard of the entire football field of evolution, Dr Cordain explains, we finally see grains, dairy, and legumes being consumed regularly with the onset of the agricultural revolution. Interesting but not the end of the story!

Lets travel now to the last 1/5 of the last inch of the field,  let me say that again, because its a teeny tiny measurement we are talking about here, the last 1/5 of the last inch to the start of the industrial revolution, to finally see where processed foods become a regular staple of the diet. Now we are talking super recent!

The evolution of even eating grains, dairy, and legumes is still in it’s infancy and we come along and start processing the foods we don’t even have down pat yet.

Here is where we have a huge glitch, we are eating drugs (processed, refined, food-like substances that cause drug like chemical and hormonal actions and reactions) and calling it food. Interestingly most people are completely unaware of this and consider anything in the store edible.

We can no longer devote our taste buds to pleasure, as we have seen in this grand digestible experiment, it is absolutely less than pleasuring!

Maybe now it’s time for an “evolution revolution”…using our brains, all those yards of evolution that cultivated the amazing thinking brains we have today, to say “no” to anything short of real, nourishing and evolutionary food so we can continue to evolve.

Aloha!