The human body is an immensely complex device. Like most machines, it requires a variety of supplies to maintain it. It needs fuel, obviously, either in the form of simple sugars or complex carbohydrates. It also needs fats, protein, and an elaborate stew of amino acids and minerals. Given a deficiency—or an excess—of one sort or another, a variety of things can happen. Among them is the induction or magnification of misery.
It can sound almost impossible to get one’s body perfectly balanced—and therefore trivially simple to stir disorder and chaos. In the primitive environments in which the body evolved, however, the diet was enormously variable. One day antelope, the next day nuts. One could not supplement a meal of berries simply by swallowing a daily Senior VitaPack 50 Plus pill or ordering a macrobiotic smoothie at the juice bar. We adapted by developing the capacity to store many nutrients and by using cell walls that select what they need from the bloodstream and mostly ignore everything else. As a result, it can be more difficult than you might think to produce an imbalance.
Our challenging early environment did help us in one way, however. It left us with taste cravings. Certain nutrients, like salt, were somewhat hard to come by in times past. Nature compensated by providing us with a powerful drive to search out and ingest those substances. If they were lying around, we’d definitely want some rather than leaving it behind when the tribe moved on. “Skim milk yogurt? Umm, no, but do we have any of that salty boar’s blood?”
Enter modern agriculture. When our society developed sufficiently that we could create a reliable supply of any nutrient we could want, these scarcity-bound tastes began to lead us astray. Today we turn our noses up at much-needed sources of potassium but gobble down as much sugar, salt, and fat as we can get our hands on.
If, in our culture of plenty, we obey our primitive impulses, we are likely to ingest a diet that will naturally produce difficulties, some of which will be emotional. With bodies designed for feast and famine, we will usually overeat when food is available and store the nonessential calories as fat. And obesity is linked directly to lower mood—and indirectly to misery-inducing problems, including inactivity, heart disease, and diabetes.
It can sound like hard work to overeat enough to cause problems. It isn’t. Simply adding a single can of soda to your diet (or an equivalent amount of fruit juice) will give you about ten teaspoons of sugar per day—twice the World Health Organization’s recommended daily intake. This will provide you with forty-seven thousand sugar-based calories in a year—the equivalent of about thirteen pounds of fat.
In addition, certain dietary deficiencies have been linked (though, in most cases, not conclusively) to reduced energy and mood:
Avoiding foods containing these nutrients may result not only in lowered mood but in reduced overall health as well.
Almost everything the body needs is readily available at the local supermarket. The very fact that we need it, however, means that it has been around too long to be patented. No one has a corner on the market for broccoli, so there is no incentive to advertise it. Instead, we have a wide variety of products cobbled together from processed ingredients and chemical additives, specially engineered to suit a cave person’s urges. The recipes for these concoctions are proprietary, so companies stand to make a lot of money if they can create an awareness of and craving for the taste of their own specific products.
Consequently, you have an unintentional ally in your quest to lower your mood: the advertising industry. Simply place a notepad by your television, jot down all the products advertised, and use this as your weekly shopping list. Buy these, and you will be imbalanced, mentally and physically, within weeks. Further, you will be well on your way to a lifetime of impairments. Eat what they tell you.
If some crazed family member drags you off one day to a farmer’s market or a natural-food store or starts ranting on about the Mediterranean diet, resist with vigor. Remind yourself that these foods were, not too long ago, sitting in dirt, growing in dirt, or covered with dirt. Remember what Mom told you: don’t put dirty things in your mouth. Ensure that your diet comes out of a box instead—and that the box comes from a nice clean factory.