The importance of moderation in diet

For maintaining a good, resilient health, we need to eat healthily. One of the keys to sustaining improvements in the way we eat is the ability to practice moderation in our diets. As a society, we tend to take an 'all or nothing' approach to food; eating too much of something or trying to eliminate that food or category of foods all together. That tendency towards extremes becomes even more obvious when we look at what's happened to the food on the shelves of our local supermarkets. On the one hand, we've super sized everything, and on the other hand, we see claims like fat free and sugar free everywhere in the supermarket, and these claims attract us because they're absolute.

However, if we can master the skill of eating with moderation, then no single food needs to be forbidden. We can eat the foods we enjoy as long as we don't consume too much of them. How much we eat is a very important question. But how to regulate our appetite is very hard for most of us. We socialize to eat until we're full. That's not a natural thing. And it's not a universal thing.

In France when you're hungry you say, "I have hunger". And at the end of the meal you don't say "I'm full"; you say "I am no longer hungry". That's very different than being stuffed. The moment at which you're no longer hungry is many bites before the time when you're stuffed. And we ask our kids the wrong questions. We ask, "Are you full?" We should rather ask, "Are you satisfied?" or "Are you still hungry?"

So you see, there are cultural ways and manners that help us deal with quantity of food we eat. We have to look at things like the way we talk about food. Are people really looking for lots of calories when they eat? I think they're looking for lots of food experience, an intense satisfying food experience. If you look at the French, and many other cultures as well, they get more food experience with less food. And they do that partly by eating more slowly, eating socially, and eating better quality food. There is a trade off between quality and quantity.

 
In fact, one of the biggest contributors to the obesity epidemic throughout the world has been our tendency to consume enormous quantities of low quality food. This is not to suggest that the foods we eat need to be expensive, but we need to spend our food budget wisely on the foods that will support both good health and enjoyment. What about having less of the better food so that every bite is enjoyable? So let's focus on those first few bites-- smaller portions of better quality food. Many cultures actually have a rule that basically says stop eating before you're full. Japanese suggest to eat until you're 80% full, Chinese say eat until you're 75% full, and in the Ayurveda it says you should eat until you're two thirds full. Everything but a 100%, which is what most of us do.

Next time you're going to eat something, ask yourself a few questions about it. Will this food bring me pleasure or Am I eating is because it's a food I feel I'm allowed to eat? Eating food that doesn't bring you any pleasure is another form of taking in empty calories, because they're empty of enjoyment.

The very next question to ask about a food you're considering eating is this, "Is this food worthy of me?" And it means, will this food support me in achieving all of the things I want to achieve, including good health? If the answer to this question is yes, then the very next question is, "How much of this food do I really need to eat to feel satisfied, knowing that I can have it again tomorrow or later this week because I've mastered the art of moderation?"

Each day should include moderate amounts of food that bring us pleasure. Moderation allows us to enjoy our food, knowing that subtle variations won't be make us sick!

The curse of processed foods

One of the biggest problems with our diet today is that much of our food is refined, or highly processed. I call it the 'curse of processed foods'! Let me explain why?

A refined or highly processed food is one which lasts longer on the supermarket shelf because pests, like mold for example, are less attracted to foods that are low in nutrients. But the question is, if highly processed food is so low in nutrients that even the pests don't want to eat it, how healthy can it be for us?

In fact, the nutrient content of any given food is directly related to the spoil rate of that food. Foods that are very low in nutrients spoil much more slowly than foods that are rich in nutrients. One of the best predictors of a healthy diet is whether it is cooked by a human being or a large corporation. And the reason is that when we outsource our food preparation to big companies, they tend to cook in a certain way that isn't very healthy. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar, all of which are problematic nutrients for our health, and they tend to use the cheapest possible raw ingredients.

Thinking about the nutrient density of the food is another conceptual way of making sensible food decisions. The nutrient density of a food can be thought of as the amount of nutritional value, including vitamins, minerals, and fiber, divided by the calories, or energy content, of that food. Foods that provide lots of calories with very little nutritional value are sometimes called energy dense foods, but their nutrient density is low. For example, a glass of soft drink is high in calories without providing much in the way of nutritional value. A bunch of fresh spinach, on the other hand, would be an example of a nutrient dense food because its nutritional value is relatively high compared to its caloric content.

When people talk about fast food being cheaper than fresh food, they're often referring to the fact that the cost per calorie of highly processed food is lower than that of fresh, whole food. This is often true because highly processed food is so high in calories that the cost per calorie is relatively low. But, if we instead look at the cost of food per unit of nutrient density, then buying fewer calories of higher nutrient density food is a much better use of our food budget.

In the midst of a serious epidemic of obesity, avoiding empty calories should be on the top of our list of priorities. One of the reasons why highly processed food is usually higher in calories is that in order to make these products sell, significant amounts of fat, sugar, and salt are added to make the nutrient-stripped foods taste good. Additives like colorants, artificial flavors, stabilizers, and other preservatives, are also added to enhance packaged products and increase their shelf lives.

The last thing we need to be aware of are highly processed foods that are sold as healthy foods. These are products that have synthetic nutrients added back to them after they've been refined, and this is usually done to make the product seem healthy to the nutrition aware consumer. It's important to remember that the most nutritious foods, like broccoli, don't come in packages which tell us how healthy they are. So we need to be 'beware' of the curse of the processed foods!

Differences between male and female behaviours

Have you ever wondered why men behave differently than women?

It is no secret that men and women are different; in fact, very different. Research shows that there are differences in behaviour due to major differences between male and female brains in some ways. Scientists have generalized four primary areas of difference in male and female brains: processing, chemistry, structural differences, and brain activity. As with all gender differences, no one way of doing things is better or worse. The differences listed below are simply generalized differences in typical brain functioning, and it is important to remember that all differences have advantages and disadvantages.

Processing

Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter. What does this mean? Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information- and action-processing centers in specific areas of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings.

White matter connects the brain’s gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that women tend to more quickly transition between tasks than men do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects.

Chemistry

Male and female brains process the same neurochemicals but to different degrees and through gender-specific body-brain connections. Some dominant neurochemicals are serotonin, which, among other things, helps us sit still; testosterone, our sex and aggression hormone; estrogen, a female growth and reproductive hormone; and oxytocin, a bonding-relationship hormone.

In part, because of differences in processing these chemicals, males on average tend to be less inclined to sit still for as long as females and tend to be more physically impulsive and aggressive. Additionally, males process less of the bonding hormone oxytocin than females. Overall, a major takeaway of chemistry differences is to realize that our boys at times need different strategies for stress release than our girls.

Structural Differences
A number of structural elements in the human brain differ between males and females. “Structural” refers to actual parts of the brain and the way they are built, including their size and/or mass. Females often have a larger hippocampus, our human memory center. Females also often have a higher density of neural connections into the hippocampus. As a result, girls and women tend to input or absorb more sensorial and emotive information than males do. By “sensorial” we mean information to and from all five senses. If you note your observations over the next months of boys and girls and women and men, you will find that females tend to sense a lot more of what is going on around them throughout the day, and they retain that sensorial information more than men.

Additionally, before boys or girls are born, their brains developed with different hemispheric divisions of labor. The right and left hemispheres of the male and female brains are not set up exactly the same way. For instance, females tend to have verbal centers on both sides of the brain, while males tend to have verbal centers on only the left hemisphere. This is a significant difference. Girls tend to use more words when discussing or describing incidence, story, person, object, feeling, or place. Males not only have fewer verbal centers in general but also, often, have less connectivity between their word centers and their memories or feelings. When it comes to discussing feelings and emotions and senses together, girls tend to have an advantage, and they tend to have more interest in talking about these things.

Blood Flow and Brain Activity
While we are on the subject of emotional processing, another difference worth looking closely at is the activity difference between male and female brains. The female brain, in part thanks to far more natural blood flow throughout the brain at any given moment (more white matter processing), and because of a higher degree of blood flow in a concentration part of the brain called the cingulate gyrus, will often ruminate on and revisit emotional memories more than the male brain.

Males, in general, are designed a bit differently. Males, after reflecting more briefly on an emotive memory, tend to analyze it somewhat, then move onto the next task. During this process, they may also choose to change course and do something active and unrelated to feelings rather than analyze their feelings at all. Thus, observers may mistakenly believe that boys avoid feelings in comparison to girls or move to problem-solving too quickly.

These four, natural design differences between brains listed above are just a sample of how males and females think differently. Scientists have discovered approximately 100 gender differences in the brain, and the importance of these differences cannot be overstated. Understanding gender differences from a neurological perspective not only opens the door to greater appreciation of the different genders, it also calls into question how we parent, educate, and support our children from a young age.