How Our Food Tastes Have Changed Over Time

If you’re honest with yourself, your main goal in life is to live well and be as free from disease as possible.  You may think what you eat today won’t make a difference how well you live but you would be wrong.  In order for our bodies to function at optimum levels, it must have the proper nutrition and fuel.  The food we eat has everything to do with how well we live.  To understand this more fully, let’s take a step back in time and analyze how our food choices have changed over time.

 

Let’s start with the caveman.  Have you ever wondered what the caveman ate to stay alive?  What about the pioneers that traveled west by wagon?  These people ate to stay alive whereas now most of us live to eat.  Most foods that we eat were not invented but they have evolved over time.

 

The early diet, as far as we know, consisted mainly of water, salt, fish, insects, rice and nuts.  It then evolved to include meat, fruits, vegetables, wheat and oil.  Over the past 20 years, the foods that have been added into our diet include different varieties of vegetables along with many different varieties of soda pop and many fried foods.

 

Over the past 50 years, we have embraced different foods and trends in part because of the growing cultural diversity and our easy access to travel throughout the world.  Most of what we eat is influenced by our culture.  Sure our tastes do change over time but overall our culture defines the foods that we eat.

 

So what has changed?  After World War II, we were encouraged to drink milk because of its high nutritional value.  Our high consumption of milk continued until the mid-1970’s but since then, we’re drinking much less milk.  One of the reasons for this is due in part to the high variety of soft drinks that are now available.  We are eating about the same amount of cheese as we used to.  The number of eggs that we eat peaked in the mid-1960’s and has been declining since that time.  We now eat half the number of eggs we did in the mid-1950’s and 1960’s.  We are eating less beef, lamb, pork, ham and bacon as we were in the 1950’s.  However, we are eating more chicken and turkey.  We are actually eating less fish than we were in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

 

Despite the fact that vegetables are packed with vitamins, minerals and fiber, our consumption has declined over the past 50 years.  However, we are eating more fresh fruit than we did 50 years ago. 

 

We come to today and look at the foods that many of us eat.  So what is the reason why obesity has become so rampant today?  Here are a few possible reasons:

§         Many of us indulge ourselves with food that may taste good to us but are very bad for our body to function properly. 

§         We have changed from cooking all of our meals at home to eating out several times each week.   

§         Processed foods have been shown to be the one of the main reasons why obesity has become rampant in our society today.

§         We are now much less active than in past generations.

§         We may be eating more snacks and sweets than we would like to admit to.

 

So what can we learn from this?

 

Some of the changes we’ve made have been very good.  The change to eating more chicken and turkey is very good.  But we need to be eating much more in the area of fruits and vegetables in our diet.  This means we should choose a balanced diet rich in fruits and vegetables with fewer foods that are high in fat or sugar.

 

Another area that needs to change is that of being physically active.  If we are to see a reduction in conditions such as heart disease, strokes, cancer and obesity, we need to start moving.  This isn’t a difficult change to make, simply take a walk 5 minutes – 30 minutes each day.  This one change will go a long way in improving our overall health.

Simple changes made over time, can bring amazing results.  Make a decision today that you will add one more serving of a fruit or vegetable each day plus  take that short walk and you will see those pesky pounds start to come off.  And you can say, I’ve never felt better now that I’m at my Perfect Weight!

 

 

 

 

Tagged as: become healthy, exercise, health problems, lose weight, obesity, overweight, perfect weight, relationship to food, weight loss