Quotes About Health

We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat. Since the birth of farming ten thousand years ago, most humans haven't been hunters, but never before have we been so insistently pursued by our own food supply. The calories hunt them down even when we are not looking for them.

What all of us need is to find a way to eat regular meals, to take pleasure in a variety of foods, and to be able to eat them without being consumed by negative emotions.

The problem with lunchboxes is the problem with the way we feed children in general. Parents trust that anything they place in this magical box will be good for the child, because it comes with their love.

In the US from 1980 to 2011, it became more than twice as expensive for Americans for purchase fresh fruit and vegetables compared to purchasing sugary carbonated beverages. Tomatoes and broccoli are far more expensive on average than they used to be for American shoppers. Energy-dense foods such as cakes and burgers have become far cheaper now in comparison to fruits and vegetables.

Inequality among siblings goes all the way to the gut: we are born with different microbes inside us, outnumbering our cells ten to one. Some of them affect our chances of becoming obese in later life and others affect how well we digest our dinner. What we eat is constantly changing the composition of our microbiota, but, equally, the nature of the microbes inside us determines how well we respond to the food we eat.

Our childhood experiences with food can trap us in destructive patterns for the rest of our lives.

It is curious that we talk so little about the flavour of formula, given that it is the main food many babies taste for that crucial first year.

What is so damaging about our gendered approach to food is that it encourages both boys and girls to feed themselves in ways that go against what their bodies require. We have got things the wrong way round. It is girls more than boys who need the most haemoglobin-boosting foods. And boys more than girls are lacking in salad and vegetables. Girl food and boy food are dangerous nonsense that prevents us from seeing the real problems of feeding boys and girls.

Contrary to the impression given by the health pages of newspapers, the greatest single nutritional shortfall in our diets right now is not our failure to eat enough 'superfoods', whatever those might be. It is the iron deficiency of girls.

When our preferences are in order, nutrition should take care of itself.

Too many overweight teenage girls are being pressurised by their families to lose weight when what they in fact need is better nourishment (which would almost certainly help them lose weight along the way).

My premise in First Bite is that the question of how we learn to eat - both individually and collectively - is the key to how food, for so many people, has gone so badly wrong. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices.

Once the pattern of not being hungry in the morning is set, it modifies the way you eat for life.

Many people have absorbed the lesson from childhood that vegetables and pleasure - and more generally, healthy food and pleasure - can never go together.

Prolonged chronic malnutrition affects children for the rest of their lives because it affects both brain development and growth.

Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating, and the one that we leat often master.

If food is a fuel, we should feel that the tank is emptiest when the longest time has elapsed since it was filled - usually in the morning.

You did not choose the environment in which you learned to eat, nor did you design the shops in which you buy your food. If you eat too much sugar and refined oil, that says less about you than it does about the world you are eating in.

Dietary change comes not from forcing someone to eat what they do not like, but in helping them to discover their own passions.

If you can cancel a child's hunger during those first three years - from conception to toddlerdom -you create possibilities that stretch decades into the future. If not, the consequences can last for generations.

Contrary to the popular view, malnutrition is very seldom about an absolute lack of food.

Hara hachi bu is a Confucian principle, popular in Japan since medieval times, that you should eat until you are only eight-tenths full. This principle has since been given backing by nutrition scientists who note that when we eat there is a time delay between the body receiving the food and the brain registering that we are full. When the urge comes to have a second helping, it's worth waiting twenty minutes, and the feeling may pass.

One of the commonest ways our eating goes wrong is that we consistently choose foods that offer immediate satiation in the belly rather than longer lasting satiety.

If we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become children again. Bad food habits can only change by making 'healthy food' something pleasure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion - something requiring willpower - it can never taste delicious.