Sometimes, when faced with endless choices at the grocery store, you feel like you’d just rather live without it, but you can’t: food is our bread and butter. But how much do we really know about the sweet ambrosia we shovel down our gullets?
The truth is that a lot of people today will eat almost anything without a second thought if they are under the impression they will gain some benefit out of it. Whether the goal is losing weight, gaining weight, sleeping better, breathing better, or any number of other things that would be pleasant to accomplish, people readily jump on whatever is currently trendy in hopes that it will be the one that does it.
But is hopping on the latest food trend, be it foods like chia seeds, acai berries, or kale, or dietary movements such as veganism, gluten free, and lactose-free, really going to benefit us?
FAST-TRACKING HEALTH
“We really appreciate quick fixes in our culture,” explains Camosun anthropology instructor Nicole Kilburn. “I wouldn’t say we’re lazy, but we live in a very fast culture; we’re very busy and it’s very appealing to us if we can find shortcuts. So in terms of latching on to the next superfood, having a smoothie with acai berries that has all these promises attached to it for your health is maybe easier than eating healthy whole foods that you have to cook from scratch.”
It seems that the more “civilized” we become, the farther out of touch we grow with many aspects of the world. Kilburn explains that as time has passed we’ve forgotten that the food on our tables is much more than what we see sitting before us.
“I think we don’t have an awful lot of nutritional knowledge and we are distanced from our food,” she says. “You take a look at things in the grocery store and they’re in boxes and meat is wrapped in plastic and it doesn’t look like an animal, it doesn’t look like fields of corn. We have that distance between ourselves and what we’re eating, and so I don’t think we really know what we’re supposed to eat anymore. It’s a real vulnerability because it allows people to tell us what we should be eating.”
Kilburn says that in the last 10 to 15 years there’s been a change in the way food is marketed to us.
“We’re starting to see a lot of buzz words like ‘antioxidants’ or ‘fibre’ or ‘whole wheat’ and those things create this illusion of health that’s really useful for marketers.”
This distancing of North American society in regards to food couples badly with the all-too-common belief that everything should happen fast. “Patience is a virtue” has become more of a no-verb than a proverb and it tends to take a toll when we think about it in terms of health.
“People tend to be quick to jump on trends because we’re living in a day and age where we want things new and we want things quick,” says local registered dietician Julie Kostyk. “Nowadays everything is made to last only a limited amount of time because as consumers we want new. We want fresh, we want updated, we want new technology and people are quick to jump on anything.”
In addition, Kostyk explains that although many of these food trends can be very healthy it’s important to always look at them with a critical eye.
“I think when we talk about food trends and food crazes we sort of know that what typically happens is something becomes trendy, something becomes hot, everyone wants to do it and the pendulum swings wildly to one side. When something becomes a trend you have to sort of look at it critically and ask yourself, ‘Why is this something we haven’t always been doing?’”
However, Kostyk also says that some food fads do need to be regarded with some scrutiny. Take, for example, our friend the acai berry.
“If you look at the price of something that contains acai berries it will tend to be more expensive than, say, blueberries. Well, blueberries have antioxidants as well. That tends to be the biggest thing about acai berries: they contain a lot of antioxidants so they potentially help to fight cancer and things like that in our body. But regular berries also have antioxidants. As a consumer you have to be wary, because lots of times when something is trendy it also costs more.”
THE FOLLOWING WORDS ARE GLUTEN-FREE
The price of alternative goods is only one of many obstacles encountered by those who choose to alter their dietary habits. Often people leap before they look and end up landing in a strange land without a map. This is a common occurrence in the cases of many of those choosing to stop their consumption of gluten.
“Definitely for the last couple of years gluten-free has been a real trend and for a lot of people out there I worry that the reasons they’re doing it may not be the best,” says Kostyk. “They may not have educated themselves enough for the reasons for going gluten free. People have this perception that if they eat gluten-free they are going to be healthier and that’s not always the case. If you’re choosing your diet wisely and you’re choosing whole grains or alternative whole grains, eating more fruits and vegetables, getting your calcium from dairy or milk alternatives and eating good quality meats, fish, or legumes, for sure you can be gluten free and be totally healthy. I’m just not sure that’s the way many people who are going gluten-free are going.”
Educating people about eating healthy has become more and more important in today’s society. Victorian Ari Hershberg has seen this and to do his part has taken on a role as the event producer for Victoria’s upcoming Gluten-Gree Health and Wellness Festival.
“I think we’ve gotten to a point where we have so many options that we don’t know what’s best for us,” says Hershberg. “Some people do really well with dairy and some people don’t do well with dairy. Some people do well with gluten; some people don’t do well with gluten. Do some people just jump into gluten-free too fast? Heck yeah, people jump in things all the time. You have to educate. I want people to have enough education so they can either be like, ‘It’s not for me’ or, ‘I’m going to try it.’”
Hershberg (whose gluten-free fest is happening on February 22 at the Victoria Conference Centre) says that while every new dietary idea is considered a fad, gluten-free isn’t.
“It’s easy to call it a fad because its new,” he says. “I think that gluten-free is starting more people thinking, ‘Which foods works for me and which don’t?’ and it starts people thinking,’ What works for my body?’ without getting too crazy.”
Jumping headfirst into anything can be a major problem but there is also the risk that comes with not jumping at all. Sometimes we take an all-or-nothing approach to nutrition; it’s important to find that happy medium and think about what we’re eating.
“Sometimes I think we create these big fads or a buzz that gloss over without thinking about some of the smaller pieces,” says Kilburn. “Certainly we‘ve been having some problems with the consumption and amount of wheat we are consuming today. Going gluten-free kind of depends on what that gluten-free food is; sometimes gluten-free food may be heavily processed. You may have something that’s gluten-free but has a bunch of other foods that are a part of it that cause problems. I don’t think it’s as easy as saying yes or no, but certainly there seems to be something going on in terms of the type of wheat that we are consuming today that people should be aware of.”
LOOKING, THEN LEAPING
Whether gluten-free is a fad or not, it’s always beneficial for people to consider what they put in their bodies. In the last decade or so, North American culture has begun to shift towards thinking more critically about what we eat. And that includes thinking more critically about how that food is marketed.
“If customers feel confident that they’ll receive ‘value’ from the purchase, meaning the product or service will be worth more to them than the money they spend on it, many will make purchases based on incomplete or inaccurate information,” explains Camosun marketing instructor Glen Allen, who adds that “in today’s society, when information is so readily available it can be easy to do comparative research when shopping.”
Allen explains that food trends can only be perpetuated as long as the market will support them… and sometimes the support is manufactured.
“By telling the public, for example, ‘You need to eat more fibre,’ marketers are likely trying to create a want or demand for fibre-based products by educating the public of the ‘benefits’ to be gained by consuming them,” he says. “It’s often done through target marketing, as this type of message would likely get better reception when presented to the segments of the population whose circumstances, such as being overweight, pregnancy, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol may benefit from higher-fibre diets.”
Apart from seeing through marketing schemes, the task is for people to actually apply critical, and logical, thinking to their real lives and their diets.
“I was a vegetarian when I was in university,” says Camosun’s Kilburn, who admits her passion often overshadowed her logic. “If someone asked, ‘Why are you a vegetarian?’ I would say, ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t eat meat.’ I hadn’t really developed a good reason or rationale for it but I was very vocal about it. I find that many of my students are in the same situation; you won’t eat meat because you won’t eat meat.”
But Kilburn says the individual should evaluate that a bit more. Are they not eating meat because of animal rights, the environmental footprint, or health issues?
“Those are all really good reasons but you need to be evaluating your food choices. I was a very faddy vegetarian,” she admits. “I was a vegetarian because everyone else was a vegetarian, and that was just the thing to do when you were an undergrad.”
When it comes down to it, people have to enjoy the dietary changes they make in order to keep doing them, says registered dietician Kostyk. “If you’re following a crazy way of eating that you really don’t enjoy, if you’re suffering,” she says, “then you’re probably not going to do it for very long.”