We are pretty clueless when it comes to evaluating what we eat. So what do we do?
IN THE nearly 25 years I have known him, his weight has not varied by more than five pounds. His physique is so lean and toned that it once caused a wardrobe person in RTÉ to declare that he had the body of a dancer. He can effortlessly break into a jog when the need arises, sustain it as long as he deems necessary and yet does no formal exercise whatsoever, unless you count stirring three- and-a-half spoons of sugar into his tea half a dozen times a day as exercise. He can sit for hours on his heels on the floor. Apparently, only 5 per cent of western adults over the age of 40 are flexible enough to do that.
In short, if he were not my husband and if I didn’t love him to pieces, I would hate his guts. There have been only brief periods in my life when I have been anything other than tubby, and now is not one of them.
In the genetic lottery, when it comes to weight, my husband is the winner of the grand prize, whereas I can’t even match three symbols on a scratch card. My husband never watches what he eats and he freely admits to having a very, very sweet tooth. He just has the metabolism of a greyhound, whereas mine is more like a St Bernard.
So it was something of a surprise to learn that I would have been a big hit on the savannahs, oh, say, a million or two years ago. Apparently, brains are calorie hogs.
According to what’s known as the “expensive tissue hypothesis”, as our ancestors evolved and their brains grew, early humans needed far more energy-dense foods to sustain them. The result was a strong predisposition to love foods that are high in calories and easy to digest.
Given that reliable methods of storing food were a long way into the future, those with an ability to store fat easily would have had a competitive advantage. Now, being a little tub of lard would seem to increase your chances of being eaten by a whole slew of nasty predators, but our early ancestors never got a chance to get heavy. Finding enough food to sustain themselves demanded a great deal of effort and exercise, up to 12 miles walking a day. Not burning the hard-earned grub too quickly was a major bonus, particularly for women, who needed reserve stores of fat to be able to have children.
Today, calorie-dense foods are available virtually at every corner, and our houses are storehouses of every kind of goodie. The only exercise required is the ability to fill a trolley. We live in what has been termed an obesogenic society. Food in western society is cheap, plentiful and often poor quality. So if we are getting steadily fatter, our ancestral genes made us do it.
Ah, what's not to love about a theory that takes the individual responsibility off our shoulders and on to the ready availability of double choc chip muffins? There has been an explosion of books dealing with the impact of readily available food, from The Evolution of Obesityby Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin, which takes a Darwinian approach, to The End of Overeatingby David A Kessler, which paints a darker picture.
Kessler claims that gazillions of dollars are spent trying to create foods that are literally addictive. It’s known as “eatertainment”, and means that foods are designed to push all the pleasure buttons. This results in what Kessler calls “hyper-eating”, which is, he warns, akin to “other ‘stimulus response’ disorders in which reward is involved, such as compulsive gambling and substance abuse”. So it’s not just my genes that made me do it, it’s my addictive personality.
Or maybe I am just plain dumb. One of the most fascinating books in this genre is by Brian Wansink, and is called Mindless Eating. You get a sense from this book that this researcher cannot quite believe that he is one of the most sought-after consultants to the food industry simply because of what amounts to playing pranks on unsuspecting eaters, and then measuring the results scientifically.
Most people deny that they are influenced by context, or portion size. Wansink blows that comforting belief out of the water. Take the bottomless soup bowl. Wansink and his fellow pranksters, sorry, researchers, engineered “bottomless soup bowls” that secretly refilled themselves from tubes hidden by the table as people ate.
When they brought 62 people in for a free soup lunch, they found that those with refillable bowls ate 73 per cent more soup, but did not feel any more full. They responded, “How can I be full? I still have half a bowl of soup left.” (Only two individuals ever realised what was happening).
In a similar study, when Wansink’s researchers served moviegoers stale popcorn in big buckets, they ate 34 per cent more than those given the same stale popcorn in medium-sized containers. Tasty food created even larger appetites: fresh popcorn in large tubs resulted in people eating 45 per cent more than those given fresh popcorn in medium-sized containers.
The popcorn was a week old, and so stale it could have been used for industrial packing. People complained that it tasted terrible, but kept on mechanically eating it, often putting it down in disgust and then picking it up again. Virtually everyone denied that they had eaten more because it was in a bigger container.
So what do we do? Our genes are stacked against us, the industry is conspiring against us and we are pretty clueless when it comes to evaluating what we eat and why. Brian Wansink has a few suggestions. Forget rapid weight loss and concentrate on losing weight as mindlessly as you gained it.
In other words, try to engineer your environment, so that you are eating 100-200 calories less a day, which will lead you to lose 20 to 30 pounds in a year. He recommends making and tracking just three small changes that are virtually imperceptible, such as using a smaller plate, half filling it with veggies or salad, and being the last to start and finish eating in a group. I might just try it, although I have no illusions that I’ll be turning into a greyhound any time soon.