What to Eat

In the wonderful book Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan addresses the primal question of what to eat.  This is what the field of nutrition is based on.  There are charts of how much of each food group to eat.  Whole books abound on the principle of macronutrient ratios.  Reading all these books will come up with little sense because many of them are contradictory to each other.  Everyone has their own point of view that is slightly different than someone else's.  I have tried to please all the diets at the same time but have come up with the idea that either everything is good for me or nothing is good for me.  So I trekked to McDonald's because I know that is bad for me but I don't have to think about it nor do I have to prepare it.

But this question of what to eat cannot be fully answered without asking the question of why we eat.  Is it to shut up our tummies?  To feel good?  Habit?  Because it's good for us?  Energy balance?  Social requirement?  I don't mean this in the sense of "why are you eating that thing at this moment?"  I mean it in the more general sense.  Why does something die so that I can live?  (And yes, even vegetarianism means living off dead things)  This idea of coming up from the ashes of recently dead material is an incredible feat of alchemy that our body plays out through what would appear to be a complex web of biochemical reactions but are more magic than science at its deepest core.  Recognizing that magic is key to the question of "why eat?"  At least, in my view.

Our current life we are living is so strong that it regenerates dead material.  Dead.  Meaning it has no more ability to be vibrant and alive.  It creates it into a radiant body and mind.  This is biology.  The synergy between chemistry and physics that create beyond what the laws dictate.

So our stomach cries out for sustenance.  It wants something that can become body parts and clean the messes and protect the body.  The stomach asks for energy for the brain and for the liver and the muscles.  And it asks for this much faster than we can deduce why it is asking or how it breaks this dead material down.  We just eat.  We eat what looks edible, what tastes edible, what smells edible.  Edible is what the body perceives at the time based on the raw materials it needs.

The body is not stupid.  It knows what it needs without our cerebrum.  We do not have to decide what to eat externally or theoretically before eating.  The body know why so the body knows what.

The more we overthink the individual components of our food, the more likely we have been to take that overthinking and apply the individual components individually and expect a balanced result.  Worrying about specific nutrients is an integrated art that the body has already mastered.  Why do we feel the need to stress ourselves out with these questions?  We would have more time and energy to do other things if we did not spend so much time worrying about how many micrograms of selenium we get each day, and how that relates to the amount of mercury we have in our diet.  We are slaves to our own inventions when those inventions are taken to extreme and unbalanced amounts.

Asking what to eat is an important question, and should be answered as each person feels makes him or her feel happier.  Asking why to eat helps us understand the magic and nourishes the nonphysical parts of ourselves.