By now you have a detailed picture of a global food system that has gone devastatingly wrong. Some might say you have all you need to know to start making better choices as a shopper, eater, and voting citizen. But unless you are able to identify and change your mindset about food, all of this information will be useless.
Suppose, for example, that your mindset includes beliefs like What Dr. Leaf calls real food will be hard to find, is expensive, and tastes like sawdust. Cheeseburgers make me feel good. These deeply rooted beliefs will cause you to disregard much of what I’ve said. Or suppose you feel discouraged and believe that There’s nothing I can do about the global food business. It’s too big and I’m too small. That emotion and belief can also short-circuit your willingness to take action.
Because mindset is so important to what we actually do, part 2 is devoted to the mindset behind the meal and the meal behind the mindset. How does thinking affect eating, and how does eating affect thinking?
Research shows that 75–98 percent of current mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral illnesses and issues come from our thought life; only 2–25 percent come from a combination of genetics and what enters our bodies through food, medications, pollution, chemicals, and so on.1 These statistics show that the mindset behind the meal—the thinking behind the meal—plays a dominant role in the process of human food-related health issues, approximately 80 percent. Hence the title of this book: you have to think and eat yourself smart, happy, and healthy.
God has given us a “sound mind” (2 Tim. 1:7). We have the mind of Christ that enables us to think well (1 Cor. 2:16). You will learn about the enormous impact thinking has on your brain and body as you choose and eat food. Indeed, the power in our mind to think and choose is incredible. Since God gave us this powerful ability to think, feel, and choose, we therefore have a responsibility to understand this power and use it well in every aspect of our lives, including what we choose to eat and how we eat (1 Cor. 10:31).
If we do not have a healthy mind, then nothing else in our life will be healthy, including our eating habits. This discussion of the impact of thinking on eating incorporates the elements of choice and its consequences (Deut. 30:19), bringing all thoughts into captivity to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5), renewing the mind (Rom. 12:2), being led by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:5–6), respecting the temple God has given us (Ps. 139:14; 1 Cor. 3:16–17; 6:19–20; 2 Cor. 6:14–18; 1 Pet. 2:5), and respecting the earth and animals God has entrusted to us (Gen. 1:26; Lev. 25:23; Ps. 24:1–2; 50:9–12; John 1:3; 3:16–17; Col. 1:16–17).
The Meal behind the Mindset
Although your brain is only 2 percent of the weight of your body, it consumes 20 percent of the total energy (oxygen) and 65 percent of the glucose—what you eat will directly affect the brain’s ability to function on a significant scale.2 Your brain has “first dibs” on everything you eat. I call this the “20 percent factor,” or the eating behind the thinking, and it underscores the fact that how and what we eat affects our mind, brain, and body.
Even though this factor is only 20 percent of the story, you can’t just eat whatever you feel like and expect your life to improve if you think good thoughts. On the contrary, God wants us healthy in our spirits, souls, and bodies (1 Cor. 6:19–20; 1 Thess. 5:23; 3 John 1:2). All three are important and are supposed to work in an integrated way, influencing and feeding into each other in a cyclical fashion.
Thinking is fundamentally intertwined with our mental and physical health. In fact, one of the things you will learn in part 2 is that if you eat while emotional, your body does not digest your food correctly. If you think right, you will eat right, and if you eat right, you will think right.
I hope you have begun to see the reasoning behind eating and our spiritual and physical responsibility to eat a healthy diet. Many people ask me, “If our minds are so powerful, why does it matter what I eat?” Some individuals have even declared passionately that “I can eat whatever I want and pray God will bless it to my body even though I know it isn’t healthy.” Certainly, you are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequences of your choices.
Those of us who can afford to purchase better quality food, once we understand how dysfunctional our current food system is, have a responsibility to change the way we eat. Turning a blind eye for the sake of convenience is not worshiping Christ in everything we do (1 Cor. 10:31). To make this choice indicates a lack of respect and stewardship for our own body and the blessings of the earth God has graciously provided. We cannot pray God will turn our cake into kale. This may sound hard, but the reality of what we eat is truly a matter of life and death. We cannot survive, let alone thrive, without proper nourishment.
And the situation is urgent. As we saw in part 1, the MAD diet has morphed into the global industrial diet. Even though people in other countries disapprove of American fast food and TV culture, this MAD diet has invaded virtually every country. As mentioned earlier, it is, unfortunately, one of the largest US exports.3 On a daily basis, more and more of us are consuming foods that destroy rather than nourish our bodies and our planet. Changing our mindset behind the meal, and the meal behind the mindset, is a global issue.
Yet in this book I am not going to give you a list of what to eat and what not to eat to improve brain and body health. I am going to teach you how to think about what and how you eat. The thought of writing yet another diet book that you may read and use for just a few weeks, with minimal long-term changes in your life, does not interest me. As a clinical therapist and scientist, I want to help you make lasting changes in all areas of your life by teaching you to use your incredible mind. You do not have to be a nutritionist to know how to eat. You have to learn how to think before you eat.
Renew Your Mind, Renew Your Plate
As a culture, we have become so accustomed to our current, global MAD food system that it has become a part of our nonconscious minds. When was the last time you thought about what the chicken who laid your eggs ate? Or how the sugary breakfast cereal in your pantry was made? Or how long ago your neatly shredded and packaged lettuce was picked? It is a learned and habituated food system.
Most of us do not even stop and think about the principles of cheap, easy, and fast that this system is founded on. The MAD establishment, from supermarkets to fast-food restaurants, did not dominate the food landscape fifty years ago, yet in just a few decades it has taken away the most important part of eating: thinking has been supplanted by convenience.4
We saw in part 1 that with the large-scale industrialization of our food system came big agribusinesses dominated by the logic of short-term economics and extensive food marketing campaigns to keep profits high. One thing we will see in these next several chapters is that research on the mind shows how marketing has changed our thinking both about what food is and how, when, and where to eat it.5 We have been subtly shaped by a culture of convenience.
Yet we are not doomed to follow the ways of the MAD. God has designed our minds to control our brains—our biology does not control us!6 When we change our mind, we change our brain, and our body follows suit. We can undo the effects of marketing.