A couple weeks ago, studies came out addressing the evidence of meat vs. health. The researchers took a purely scientific approach to evaluating meat consumption and its effect on disease and mortality. Analyzing any food’s effect on health solely through a scientific lens strips away the multitude of factors and complexities surrounding food and treats it as medicine. But, food is not medicine and we need to stop saying, tweeting, posting, gramming and #tagging it.
Advances in medicine are what has allowed us to eradicate deadly diseases, treat chronic illness and live longer than any generation before. Let’s give credit to medicine for being amazing at what it does. Let’s not downplay medicine’s powerful lifesaving ability by comparing it to that meagre kale salad you choked down last Tuesday.
Food does not affect the body like pharmaceutical drugs. A single pill can have profound, near immediate effects on how our body works and regulates itself. Medications are precisely designed to work on specific receptors in the body to create a particular change that strongly affects how the body / organ / cell functions. Food on the other hand is much different; it’s made up of an abundance of many different ingredients, nutrients and chemicals all scrumptiously packed together. Certainly, what we eat can have influences on our health, but it can take years to decades for these changes to become significant. We often overemphasize the immediate impact that eating a single food / meal has on our health.
This overemphasis is what has led to us favouring weird green juice cleanses and extreme diets over lifesaving medicine for real medical conditions. The alternative therapy and diet industry are worth billions of dollars, and the “food is medicine” myth is central to their mantra.
Viewing food this way can also lead to unhealthy relationships with food and obsession over intake of nutrients. Looking at food this way is why we’ve made up random “Super Foods” and articles like “10 Foods Dietitian’s Would Never Eat” (for the record we eat all of them always). Focusing only on the nutrients and quantifying your food, strips the excitement and joy out of eating and leaves you soullessly trudging through life tracking your blessed macros.
Treating food like medicine has led to glorifying / demonizing different foods based purely on how many calories or nutrients they contain. If we say “Food is Medicine”, then what do we say when someone is diagnosed with a chronic disease? That they haven’t taken their “medicine”? This type of thinking is harmful as it creates unfair bias and places the burden of disease directly on the shoulders of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We need to understand that diet is just one of a multitude of factors, including the environment, physical activity, and genetics, that interact to influence health.
When we say “food is medicine”, we are ignoring the larger context that food plays in every part of our lives. Everybody eats and whether you realize it or not, food affects every part of our lives. Food is ingrained in spending time with others; in how we celebrate; in how we show love; in how we spend our money; in how our environment changes; in how we define culture; it influences global politics; it’s central to many spiritual and religious rituals; and it’s dominated by strongly held personal beliefs and values.
Comparing food to medicine does a major injustice to both food and medicine. Let’s celebrate them both for being amazing for what they are. Be mindful about food, eat with others and enjoy the &!$% out of your next meal.
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