In his 1825 magnum opus The Physiology of Taste, French author Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es”: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.
If he sees what we eat now though, chances are he probably won’t be terribly impressed with who we are.
In the last 100 years or so, our diet has changed considerably, Dr. Muhammad Arif says. Most people are now eating processed foods – food that has been prepared not in a natural way but is chemically modified and highly processed. Our bodies do not know how to deal with that. We have evolved over millions of years but suddenly we have had this industrialisation of food in the last century basically, and that’s what has caused metabolic changes in the body.
Our bodies have been struggling under the weight of this dietary change, leading to diseases and health issues. In the Pakistani context, Dr. Arif feels there are a few factors in our diet that are giving us no significant nutritional value and are just making us unhealthy and more susceptible to cancer.
We as a nation have a bit of a sweet tooth, and it isn’t doing us any favours.
Dr. Arif sees this as the number one flaw in our diet. “We tend to eat a lot of sweets in all forms – mithai, halwa, bakery items, he says. It’s an addictive food when you eat it you want to eat more and again. That’s where your control comes in. Your body just cannot handle that much.
So an excessive amount of sweets are best avoided.
