Historical Overeating Causes
Overeating causes are many. Tasty addictive easily available foods an a lack of discipline are a major over eating cause. The cure starts with understanding overeating causes.
There are historical overeating causes span throughout most of human history. Most people had to work hard to obtain food. The earliest humans hunted game and gathered fruits and other plant-based foods. Even after humans domesticated cattle and began to farm, producing food required hard labor. People did not casually slaughter their cattle.
As societies evolved different social classes, the upper classes could afford meat and other rich foods more readily than most. They could also better afford refined grains and decide who else could have them.
In seventeenth-century Bologna, servants of the city government received a loaf of bread every day; servants with higher status received white bread, but lower ranking servants got only black bread (unrefined whole grain?).
As recently as the Great Depression here in the United States, white sugar cost more than brown sugar, and thus seemed special. From pre-historic hunter-gatherers until very recently, the calories people ate roughly balanced the calories they burned. Not many people became overweight.
That balance, of course, has recently changed. We now have an epidemic not only of overweight, but obesity. Why? According to David A. Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (Rodale, 2009), it is because our food industry has, quite unintentionally, made foods that do not satisfy our hunger, but make us want to eat more of them. We have become addicted to these kinds of foods.
Before Americans became hooked on certain foods, they became hooked on convenience. Although our technology has made cooking and cleaning up much easier and less time consuming than it was even fifty years ago, it has also provided microwavable meals and a range of restaurants from fast-food to upscale.
We no longer need to cook at home in order to eat. Increasingly, therefore, people do not cook. They essentially outsource food preparation to others. Preparing food for others to eat has therefore become a big and highly competitive business.
Like most businesses, the food industry depends on repeat customers. Careful research has gone into the development of products that people will like and want to eat again.
Certain foods are what scientists call reinforcing. That is, people and animals will work to obtain them and will also respond to other stimuli associated with them. For humans, certainly, reinforcing foods are fat, sugar, and salt–nutrients that were not easily enough available to eat daily.
Overeating Causes – Addictive Foods
Kessler reports that food industry research into what tastes good has led them to develop foods with layers of fat, sugar, and salt. For one simple example, a bacon cheeseburger starts with a white bun.
While it isn’t technically sugar, the refined flour in the bun quickly becomes sugar in our digestive system. Layered on top are a ground beef patty, a piece of cheese, and some bacon, all high in fat and salt. Some condiments, such as ketchup, have a lot of sugar. The rest of the bun goes on top of all of that.
Remember, before the days of fast food, and before the days when so many families outsourced their cooking, such rich fare was not easily available. From hunter-gatherers to factory workers, people might well have overeaten any time they had the opportunity eat food like that, but then their diet would get back to normal.
Foods rich in fat, sugar, and salt are available in larger and larger servings. They beckon temptingly not only from restaurant menus and the prepared food sections of grocery stores, but also from checkout counters in many stores that otherwise don’t carry food at all. We are hardwired to become addicted, and we have.
Preventing Overeating Causes
To recover from this addiction, as a society, first we must give up trying to assign blame. Obese people do not simply lack will power. Overeating is not simply a crutch for people who don’t want to deal with emotional issues. The food industry has not cynically engineered our addiction to rich foods to enrich itself at everyone else’s expense.
Next, we need to stop making lists of forbidden foods. That never accomplishes anything more than making them more desirable and giving dieters the thought that they are burdening themselves with an onerous sacrifice.
Finally, every one of us must accept personal responsibility for our own choices. One way to accomplish that is to plan ahead instead of giving in to impulses. Will there be donuts at an office party? Plan to eat one slowly instead of three or four quickly.
Have you been in the habit of eating junk food you don’t really enjoy just because it’s there? Decide in advance you are not depriving yourself if you don’t eat it.
Learn to cook. Using fresh ingredients, you can have many meals on the table in half an hour or less–little or no more effort than fixing something from a box. You can control what goes into them. You can choose foods that satisfy your hunger instead of urging you to eat more.
Learn to estimate appropriate serving sizes. If you eat out, you can probably take half of the entre home and have the rest of it another day. You can avoid eating too much home cooking, too. Reasonable servings can be compared to the size of your fist, a deck of cards, etc. You don’t need to weigh, measure, or count calories to figure the difference between enough or too much.
Eating well or not is a matter of habit. We all have the power to examine our habits and decide to change them if necessary. We can enlist the help, encouragement, and cooperation of friends and family. With time and patience, we can beat our addiction to unhealthy foods.
David Guion writes for the Facebook Download Chit Chat for Facebook. Chit Chat is a Facebook Messenger that enables it’s users to connect to Facebook Chat.
