The Lost Art of Cooking and Chronic Disease

There is a trend below which is a problem if you are concerned about health:

Outside Food = Less Healthy Food

I wrote a post explaining why mixing capitalism, food, and human biology predictably leads to chronic disease (though it is not inevitable and we can do something about it – see the orange box at the end). The chart above shows that we are falling victim to this increasingly as time goes on. The basic finding is that we are eating more of our food outside the home and relying on those who sell food to us to nourish us and our families.

Cooking is Hard

Admittedly, cooking is sort of hard. It is time consuming. Then there are dishes to clean. On top of that, we have to have all the ingredients. We need to regularly go grocery shopping. In a fast paced world where we have so much to do, it’s hard for many families. While some can’t afford eating outside food, some seemingly can’t afford not to.

Also processed food is often tastier than real food. Just think about your favorite sugary dessert. Are there any natural foods that can match that?

Many of us don’t Know Cooking

Moreover, today, fewer people know how to make food. They don’t teach this in school (and maybe that is good judging by the quality of the typical school lunch). Each generation loses more and more of our cooking skills (much like most people today don’t know much about farming whereas nearly everyone farmed in the not so distant past). As parents lose those skills and kids don’t learn from parents, we can expect the trend above to continue.

This of course is a disaster for our health. As more of us lose our ability to cook for ourselves, fall victim to mistaking pleasure for happiness and enjoy the convenience and taste of largely processed food made for us without the need to clean, it’s a recipe for a worsening of our health problems.

Homemade Food is often not Much Better

Of course, this post is really a subset of a larger problem. There is nothing that says eating homemade food is necessarily healthy either. Today homemade foods in America is often too high in refined carbs, sugars, and highly processed ingredients. On average you probably do better than relying on most outside food but the truth is that a whopping 60% of are calories come from ultraprocessed foods (and 70% of kids).

Natural Food is Best

We do best for our health when we rely on what nature intended for us to eat. We evolved with the ability to digest and extract the nutrients from the foods produced by the Earth with minimal processing. It takes time to prepare this food but in the long run it saves time and money that we would otherwise spend treating the many chronic diseases we suffer from on account of our modern way of living.