Food Pyramid

This is a chain of reasoning that I've been thinking about... see if you agree.

Recently I've seen several studies confirming what we all intuitively know anyway: that when it comes to feeling full after a meal, we have multiple satiation points for different foods. How many times for example have you felt like absolutely not another bite of the main course, but still somehow had room for dessert? That's because feeling full isn't a simple on-off switch, it's more like a set of switches, each targeted to a specific food group.

Now hold that thought and think about this for a sec. We all know about the "food pyramid" which gives us a rough guideline about which foods to eat and in what ratios. The key that everyone emphasises is to get a variety of foods so that we don't become deficient in any one nutrient. We've all been told (ad nauseum) of the importance of a "balanced meal" hitting all the food groups.

But there's a logical assumption there that seems warrantless to me, and in fact maybe even harmful. Did you catch it?

The assumption is that just because it is important to have a varied diet (agreed), that this somehow means that each individual meal must contain a variety of foods (disagree!). I've never seen any convincing explanation as to why the nutritional variety we need must be consumed at each individual sitting. Sailors don't need limes with every meal, or even every day, to prevent scurvey; once a month will do just fine. In fact, I would assume that the ancestral diets on which we evolved were very much about one food group at a time for several days at a time, and the variety likely came over a period of weeks, not minutes. We probably had whatever crop was in season for many days in a row, followed by whatever crop came next, or whatever food we were able to forrage in the next area we migrated to in our constant search for food.

Mixing foods at every meal not only complicates matters for our poor digestive tract which readies itself for the food it is about to receive based on smell (which is why so often once you smell a certain food, you want only that -- it's very unpleasant to smell one food and then receive another!). But the greater harm is when you come back to my opening statement about multiple satiation points.

By encouraging people to eat several different food groups at every sitting, we are in fact causing them to eat more than they otherwise would, because once they've had their fill of one food (and would normally stop eating), they now turn to another food and carry on. And while dietary planners and nutritional experts keep blindly pushing this agenda, we've casually acquired an absolute crisis of obesity and obesity related ailments. And in my not-so-humble opinion, the health risk presented by obesity in this nation absolutely dwarfs whatever esoteric nutrition concern health experts are trying to address in emphasizing individually balanced meals.

Restricting the variety of foods in each sitting has already become the basis of many successful diet plans (Atkins, low fat, all fat... they all work the same way by limiting you to a single satiation point at a time). But those diet plans go overboard by neglecting the longer-term variety that we truly do need, and hence no one is able to stay on them for very long.

So to be clear, I'm in no way arguing against a balanced diet; I believe totally in its importance. I just think the timeframe over which your diet should balance has for some reason arbitrarily been set incorrectly, and strangely no one has questioned it. So I'd like to instead see a new push for balanced days (or maybe even weeks) and unbalanced meals. I believe our nations health would benefit!