There are two reasons we eat: homeostatic eating and hedonic eating.

Homeostatic eating a name derived from the word homeostasis (the tendency toward a stable equilibrium maintained by the body’s physiological processes) is eating for the sake of balancing our biological systems. Simply put, it’s eating to get our body the energy it needs.

Hedonic eating, a name derived from the word hedonism (being in pursuit of pleasure or self-indulgence), is eating for pleasure or to manage our emotions. Stress eating is a good example or hedonic eating.

Most of what we eat, most of the time was once a mix between homeostatic and hedonic eating. Of course, there are habits and hormones that drive our hunger and our cravings. But if eating were just about hunger and cravings, humans would not eat; we would simply feed, like animals. Throughout history, eating has been a social event for people, community rituals and family traditions had us gathering around, making meals together and breaking bread in groups.

In recent years traditional eating has been put aside for Nutritionism, the focus on our personalized macronutrient and micronutrient needs. As scientists discover new things in our foods and label them, like vitamins and minerals, or discover how these nutrients react on their own or together, for example how fat will help slow the absorption of carbohydrates in our system, new nutrition suggestions are recommended based on those discoveries. And this is not necessarily a bad thing even when we consider the fact that just about everyone these days has a list of nutrients they must either avoid, or need to get more of. Think gluten, carbohydrates, fiber, Omega 3s, trans fats, proteins, cholesterol… the list goes on and on. These are all key words that while once meant nothing to us, now center our food focus, change up our meals, and stop of us from passing down family recipes… all the while quite possibly, have us getting less and less healthy. Bare with me, I’ll explain…

As our traditional focus shifts from the whole food meals we lovingly prepared for ourselves from fresh products, to pre-packaged foods brightly advertising with the added nutrients like extra fiber, or Omega 3s, or even louder what the packaged food is lacking, fats or trans fats, gluten, carbohydrates, we are blindly ignoring that we don’t know what we don’t know. As we discover and learn more about macronutrients and vitamins, food manufacturers add or subtract these nutrients based on the most current scientific finds or health trends. Processed foods are slapped with a new ‘health label’ and we will buy and eat them – without giving a second thought to the macro or micro nutrients that were once eaten along side those recently discovered highly advertised health claims, when we got all our nutrients from whole foods. While processed food may be getting better with the addition of fiber, or calcium, or omega 3s, they cannot possibly contain all the nutrients found in fresh, whole foods – simply for the fact that we have yet to discover what all those nutrients are – let alone how they act in combination with each other or on their own within our bodies.

Eating is confusing. And we don’t know what we don’t know. What we do know right now is that we are far from having all the answers. We know that people eating diets that consist primarily of processed foods are sicker, fatter and living shorter lives than those who eat primarily whole foods: whether those whole food diets are primarily plant based or meat based.

We know that the trend towards Nutritionism may be taking away from the once varied, whole food diets that once sustained homeostasis just fine – because we believe what’s listed on our nutrition labels is a comprehensive list of what matters; is enough to sustain good health and as such think and feel that processed foods are equally as good for us as whole foods. We also know that nutritionism is taking away from some of the hedonic eating rituals we once had – like preparing and eating meals together. When everyone insists on eating precise diets it’s hard to get together for a meal everyone can agree on. And it may even mean we’re meeting our hedonic eating needs in other, less healthy ways – like filling up on all that extra sugary sweet food to help us get over a bad day. Why not eat the whole tub of ice cream? No one’s there to watch anymore…

Sources:

• In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen – I highly recommend reading this book.
• Precision Nutrition – Coaching Breakthroughs