Spring is finally here! I am sure we are all looking forward to warmer weather and reaping the rewards of winter training.
It is now a good time to start to think about transitioning to a summer diet by adding more nutrient dense vegetables and perhaps leaving behind the comfort food of winter.
We all like to think that one day the meaning of our life will be clear, and the great philosophical question of why we exist is as simple as eating chocolate.
Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
This statement may be obvious, but it is not practical, we are now more educated and informed than ever before, and still we are lead by the chemical processes of our brain.
Take for example the craving for chocolate: dark, delicious ambrosia.
The science is simple, chocolate is made combining roughly a ratio of 50/50 sugar and fat. This ratio is perfect to trigger powerful feel-good hormones.
When we feel good, we will act in a rational and productive way. In fact, our history describes a people from Aztec to modern Nobel laureates consuming processed foods such as chocolate and the making great innovations to humanity.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine 2012, revealed that countries with high chocolate consumption had high Nobel Prize Winners.
In the study, Switzerland had the highest number of Nobel Laureates and consumed the highest amount of chocolate. Coincidence?
Nature does not combine fat and sugar in this ratio. Natural food predominately contains either fat or sugar not both. Therefore, the double hormone hit of combining fat and sugar in a food is hard to resist by us, mere humans.
It is little wonder that these foods trigger in our brain strong hormone craving for “comfort” processed foods such as chocolate.
Sadly, we cannot live on chocolate alone, notwithstanding the science to say we can.
Our human body is designed to survive on a variety of whole foods. Living on one type of food (processed) sends messages to the chemical brain that the body is experiencing a time of feast, and famine is close.
The body then automatically stores the feast as fat, the more we feast, the more urgent the body fights to store fat. It is not until changes in diet include large quantities of whole vegetables (not juiced) does the body regain its ability to regulate its fat stores.
The bittersweet truth of eating chocolate (or processed foods) is that they make you feel good. With feeling good, you must also engage your modern intelligence and eat lots and lots of vegetables in their whole form, and exercise!
Forrest Gump said: “My mama always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’”
Despite Forest Gump’s low IQ, he understood that he could not eat the whole box of chocolate at once, and while life’s fortune is unknown it is sweet.
Live well and eat well.
Anna
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