Processed food: What life would be like if we took nutrition back to basics
- Jul 13, 2016
- 3 min read
There's an alternate reality some like to imagine, a world without processed food in which everyone would be healthier and happier. Only they don't imagine it well. Or rather, they don't picture it in its purest form.
The term is thrown at the likes of McDonald's, Burger King and TV dinners, but it means so much more than that. To understand what life would be like without any processed food, you would have to go back more than 3 million years, not merely a few decades. And you have to understand the effect of the very first form of food processing: cutting.
This might sound ridiculous, but bear with me, because it's the most primitive form of food processing (cooking, which substantially alters the composition of food, is a significant form of processing, too), and it has changed our lives in ways few people, if any, appreciate.
"If we were to go back to the very beginning of this process that has gone to an extreme today, I think it would really surprise many people," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological sciences at Harvard University. "We used to spend a disproportionate amount of our days chewing."
"You can go for an entire day without chewing today, and that's really bizarre from a historical standpoint," he added.
Lieberman pointed to the eating habits of chimpanzees, who spend about half their day chewing, for perspective. That might sound ridiculous, but it's not as far off from how we used to eat than one might think. Our teeth, Lieberman said, just aren't capable of breaking certain foods down efficiently without any form of extra-oral food processing (a fancy term for any and all changes food undergoes before it enters our mouths).
"If I were to give you a piece of goat that's raw, it would be like chewing bubble gum," Lieberman said. "You can't break it down."
But something as simple as cutting it into smaller bits, the first of what has become an endless list of ways in which we change edible things before ingesting them, makes an enormous difference. The process didn't exist until the development of stone tools but marked the beginning of a long and winding road toward where we are today, when chewing our food is more an afterthought than a several hours affair.
People might balk at primitive tools, or primitive processes, such as slicing food into smaller parts, but these mundane forms of processing food have actually had sizable effects on our lives.
"There's pretty good evidence showing that people who chew less and chew less hard grow smaller jaws," Lieberman said. "The problem is they tend to have the same size teeth, and that creates all sorts of problems, like crowding and impacted wisdom teeth, which used to be incredibly rare."
"If you eat a mass of corn, and you eat the same amount of corn but ground into flour, you get more calories from the corn flour than the whole kernel," he said. "We have taken this way too far, processing food to a point where the processing itself is probably confusing our bodies."
Of course, there is a tipping point. A world without any extra-oral processing would mean a world in which we spend way too much time with bits of food in our mouths. It would probably also mean a food world without much variety.
"Food is an intensely aesthetic experience today -- when we process food, we also perceive it and enjoy it in different ways," Lieberman said. "The earliest forms of food processing allowed for the beginning of cuisines, which is something we take for granted."
To read this article in its entirety, please click on the following link:
Comments