Why Do We Eat Too Much?
From eNewsletter 3/14/2022
DID YOU KNOW that a team of scientists from Oxford University just built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity? While the impetus of the study was to create an even better understanding of how all humans are linked genetically, for today, it offers us a reminder that we are all human, and genetically, almost identical. May this family tree help us rise above the tribalism that has dogged us since our humble beginnings? As long as we are waxing poetic about utopian ideals, there is no better time to promote optimism, something in short supply with the various horrors the world has offered up recently. A new study from The Journals of Gerontology: Series B suggests that optimism not only promotes emotional wellbeing, but can also promulgate healthy aging. In older men, the more optimistic their outlook was towards daily stressors, the longer they lived, and more importantly, their quality of life was better.
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Why Do We Overeat? Being able to produce food efficiently and consistently has been a blessing and a curse for the human race. Innovation has accelerated much faster than we have evolved, which has created the worldwide obesity issue we experience today. Focusing on overeating and the obstacles we face from a physiological, psychological, and societal standpoint is of the utmost importance. Researchers in Nutrients examined this issue and elucidated the main reasons we overeat. Physiological obstacles to overeating are genetic and therefore are difficult to directly abate. They include an absence of feedback control against gaining weight; motivations to be physically active and weight gain; dependence of hunger and satiation on the volume of food ingested by mouth and processed by the gastrointestinal tract and not on circulating metabolites and putative hunger or satiation hormones. Further, stomach size increases from overeating and binging, and there is difficulty in maintaining weight reductions due to a decline in resting metabolism, increased hunger, and enhanced efficiency of energy storage. Finally, we bear the evolutionary burden of extraordinary human capacity to store body fat. However, we can mitigate these factors to a degree. Understanding our genetic risk can help us take steps to ameliorate risk of negative expression. Optimizing our gut microbiome is critical. Using functional foods and targeted nutraceuticals can also assist. Of the psychological barriers for overeating, human craving for palatable food, tendency to overeat in company of others, and gullibility to overeat when offered large portions, can be overcome consciously. The tendency to eat an unnecessary number of meals can be mitigated by techniques such as time-restricted feeding. Setting up your kitchen workplace properly can help to avoid temptation. Mental techniques such as mindfulness and hypnosis have shown to be efficacious for overeating. Social barriers of replacing individual physical work by labor-saving appliances, designing built environments more suitable for car than active transportation; government food macronutrient advice that increases blood sugar imbalance; overabundance of inexpensive food; and profit-driven efforts by the food industry to market energy-dense and nutritionally compromised food are best overcome by informed individual food choices (personalized nutritional advice) and appropriate timing of exercise with respect to meals, both of which can decrease blood sugar imbalance. While the aforementioned is just a smattering of reasons and solutions for overeating, the best defense is to appeal to the public to provide understanding of factors, eliciting them, and strategies that can avoid and mitigate them. This is where our government and public health officials have failed us. With the relative ease of spreading information these days, using this strategy would make a major dent in our overall wellness.