You are What You Consume

Most of us know about the Super Size Me documentary. In it, Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald’s for a month and shared his physical and mental decline during this period. Dr Chris van Tulleken conducted a similar experiment using ultra-processed food instead of fast food. He documented his health and well-being over a month when he ate a diet composed of 80% junk food in order to draw attention to the heavily processed food that children in the UK are routinely fed. This can be seen in the BBC Documentary, What are We Feeding our Kids?. What strikes me most about these two experiments is the fact that these people experienced such negative results in just a matter of a few weeks. It does not take long to create significant imbalances in the body.

Whether fast food or junk food, both of these men experienced physical and mental symptoms including weight gain, fatigue, addiction to food, erectile dysfunction, depression, and more. Luckily both were capable of reversing those symptoms once they switched back to a healthy diet. It’s so easy to go through our busy days without thinking about how our food affects us, but it clearly has a fundamental impact on our mind, body, and emotions.

Mind vs. Reality

Everyone thinks they have a healthy diet. Seriously, ask anyone and they will say that yes, they eat healthily. But the truth is we all have a tendency to go with the flow, and ‘the flow’ has been toward ultra-processed, fast and easy foods. It’s understandable. We are busier and more distracted than ever. We lack the time to even think about the food we eat, much less cook it from scratch. Most first world countries are indeed experiencing a longer life expectancy, but America is in fact, getting less healthy.

Consumption Beyond Food

These experiments have been on mind lately for a different reason than the connection between food and health though. I’ve been thinking about how fast it is to take a healthy body and make it unhealthy. It took less than a month for those two men to have serious consequences from their unhealthy diets. What about our minds? Can an intelligent person become less intelligent in a similar amount of short time due to what they consume?

For example, if we take a person with average intelligence, and give them books, time to process information, classes with instructors who mentor them, work that builds cognitive thinking skills, and discussions that encourage using them, won’t that person get smarter? If we take that same person of average intelligence and fill their days with social media, entertainment disguised as news, podcasts and articles that simplify issues and play on emotions and implicit bias, won’t that person lose intelligence? I’m just asking questions, but when I look around, these seem like reasonable questions.

Personal Responsibility

Some people might take issue with my saying that we gain or lose intelligence, and perhaps I should say cognitive thinking skills instead. I use the word intelligence though because it seems like the right word. We are not guaranteed health, just because we were born healthy. We have to support our health through what we eat, how we move our bodies, prioritizing sleep, hygiene, and more. I think it is the same with intelligence. We are not guaranteed to keep our intelligence just because we made decent grades in school or have a certain career. We have to support it, continue to be aware of what we are consuming, when our emotions are being played upon, and when we are goaded into thinking that aligns with our implicit biases.

I’m trying to stay hopeful about the state of the world. It seems to me that if we can collectively use less social media, respect the integrity of journalism, build communities in real life, and have a growth mindset, we might be able to survive, and perhaps even evolve.

Again, I’m just asking questions. I would love to hear what your thought and opinions are about the state of the world. So tell me, what do you think?

Wishing you days of fulfillment, and rejuvenating nights 🌱🍓🍜🫖💜