This Is Your Body On Fake Food

Real Food, Real Signals. Fake Food, Fake Signals

Hello!

It’s hard out there. So much junk food and temptation. Adults living in this society have the deck stacked against their food choices. And now we have to take care of children in this atmosphere of food dysfunction.

We don’t have to ONLY eat real food. We just have to eat more. More veggies, more fruit, more home-prepared animal and plant products.

Squeeze out the processed food by getting in the other stuff.

“But Tim, real food is expensive! All I can afford is hot dogs and boxed Mac and cheese! I don’t have time to pack lunches for my kids. And these food pouches are cheap, easy to store, and the kids love them!”

Listen. Can you put a price on your children’s long-term health? For sure you can substitute in a little bit of SOMETHING.

Raw carrots in the supermarket are cheap and plentiful. Apples and eggs are still within the realm of possibility, especially if you stop buying the food pouches, Sugar Smakx, and the Oreo cookies.

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Have you heard? Everyone is feeding their toddlers food pouches full of baby food instead of teaching them to eat actual food.

Yup. The kids aren’t even learning to eat real food anymore. They are eating baby food, rebranded as “food pouches.”

Baby food for kids as old as ten.

If you want to know more, read this: Kids Are Sucking Down Baby Food Pouches at Record Rates

“Food” pouches contain a processed slurry of nothing good for you. Those kids don’t have to chew or expend any effort. Just slurp down the ultra-processed high-carb mush. No fiber, low nutrients, and high sugars in most cases.

The kids are on meal replacement pouches.

For most of them, it’s several a day. They would be better off eating donuts. Then at least they’d have to chew.

What Happens In Your Body When You Eat Fake vs. Real?

Have you ever wondered how your body reacts when you eat a doughnut versus when you eat raw wheat seeds? It reacts quite differently because the donut is an ultra-processed food and the wheat berry is not.

You can eat a donut so much faster than you could eat raw wheat, with a lot less chewing. So this means that that donut doesn’t get mixed with as much spit, and the appropriate hormones are not released in your body. If you eat a donut fast, you might release extra hunger hormones too. This is because the donut is an empty package, while the wheat berries are a tightly wrapped present that your stomach would have to unwrap slowly.

If a donut or a bagel is a way to take a shortcut around our natural body mechanics, how much of a shortcut do you think a food pouch full of baby food is?

Over the hundreds of thousands of years that we evolved, our bodies have adapted and calibrated themselves to whole food. Foods like we would’ve found in the wild, such as animal flesh, plants, seeds, berries, etc. We are calibrated to those natural foods, and that is how our body knows what hormones to release, how much of each thing we should eat, and how many nutrients of various kinds we have taken in.

When we eat unnatural foods, such as food pouches, we aren’t getting those signals. And that is because all of those natural signals have been stripped from the fiber-less mush. All of the calibration items that we would use to understand what we are eating on an intrinsic level have been ground up and either thrown away or incorporated in another fashion.

When we eat an apple, especially if we eat it slowly and let all of the signals percolate through the system, we will get a certain amount of saliva mixed with it, which will start the digestion process, and then the hunger, hormones, etc. will get influenced by the apple. A certain amount of insulin will get released in the appropriate amount, and if the apple satiates you, then you won’t look for anything else. You will just stop eating.

What giant profit-driven corporations do instead is take a whole bunch of apples, and make applesauce. They squeeze it into little pouches with some added sugar and mystery chemicals. Then they market it as an easy lunch or snack for busy parents.

The caloric content of a food pouch is much higher than an apple, yet it takes up less space inside the children’s bodies. You can drain that pouch and have leftover space because it is much more energy-dense than an apple would ever be.

However, that food pouch did not have the signaling elements, so now the child’s body doesn’t even know that it ate. It’s still hungry or even actually more hungry than if they would never have had the food pouch.

They will be in graze mode.

But the problem is, they won’t be looking for natural foods, they will be looking for more of that sweet processed glucose that they just had. They could suck the slime out of another baby food pouch, or they could eat a granola bar, which is also jam-packed full of way more calories than an equivalent serving of more natural food, like a piece of fruit.

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Ultra-processed Foods Are like Empty Boxes

It’s like opening presents at Christmas, but the boxes are all empty. All wrapper and excitement, but no substance. Our bodies just want to open more boxes and eat more junk.

This is what we as a society are letting happen to our children. We are training them to eat junk.

What will happen if they never learn to appreciate real food? Is this the beginning of the outcome in the movie Wally, where everyone lies there all day and drinks liquid meals, their flabby bodies unable to even get off their hover couches?

I’m not blaming the parents. But this is an opportunity to look at our actions and see if they make sense. Does it sound right to be feeding a four-year-old (or a ten-year-old!) what is essentially baby food? We used to only give that to our kids until they were a year old. Then we did the work and taught them to eat real food.

Eat more real food.

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