I was reading an article the other day about calorie labeling on food packages.

The gist of the article was that labeling was inaccurate, because the more processed the food (in this case meaning anything that changes it from it’s raw form, like cooking), the easier the body would absorb it.

For example, hypothetically our bodies would expend less energy to process a cooked potato than a raw one (fiber structures, etc., easier to break down), hence absorbing more of the available calories in said cooked potato.

Fascinating, and not something I’d not thought of before. Maybe it’s true?

And then I thought, why the fuck does it matter?

For centuries and centuries we didn’t have obesity epidemics, and for most of those centuries no one had any idea what a calorie was, let alone how it affected our bodies and our weight.  (Ironically this is part of today’s problem)

And we cooked food.

Mmmmmmm fire.

Now we juggle factors like: for my height and weight I need XXX calories, and we do metabolic baselines to adjust that intake, and guestimate calories burned in exercise.

But in reality, is that focus actually doing us any good?

We get so caught up in the numbers (both caloric and on the scale) that we neglect to check what’s in the fuel we’re using. Assuming you could, would you use diesel instead of gas because it was cheaper?

Now imagine you did just that, used the completely wrong fuel because of the price difference. The maintenance and repair costs resulting from that decision could potentially be exorbitant.

… If this isn’t starting to remind you of our current health care system…

The fact is, in the case of food and our bodies it seems like too much knowledge isn’t helping us live better. It is quite possible to be skinny and very, very unhealthy.

^^does that mean you should be over a healthy weight? Nope.

It means the real question should be healthy or unhealthy, not fat or skinny, through giving the body fuel it understands and can use.

This seems very granola-crunchy-treehuggery-like on the surface, but it actually brings to light a change from our past that is affecting everything we do today-

We finally busted out of the feast-or-famine cycle.

Believe it or not, up until the turn of the 20^th century we didn’t have the means to consistently supply food to the masses.  This helped regulate not only the world population, but our weight.

So for centuries and centuries our “training” was to eat as much as we could, because we never knew when the next cycle would hit.  (this is of course expressing this very broadly, but go with me here)

We’re still wired that way, even though the availability of food has changed, consistently, in our favor. Nowhere near enough time has passed for nature to adjust those signals in our brains.

This is not a, “it’s not your fault” deal, so take no solace: If you’re unhealthy only you can fix it.

What it is, however, is knowledge that will help you infinitely more than calorie counts on the back of plastic packages.  It must be factored in with your lens adjustment for you to have control.

Availability and low cost of fuel doesn’t magically change it into the right fuel.