Eating to Live Not Living to Eat

I don’ t look at food the same way most Americans do. I grew up on my grandparents’ small farm in the village. Everything we ate came from our garden and our livestock—fresh vegetables in season, canned vegetables in winter and spring, goat and cow’ s milk, butter, goat cheese, eggs, smoked meat, lardy bacon, fatty sausages in natural casings, and eggs.

We ate to live; we did not live to eat. Food was for nourishment, not for entertainment, gorging buffets, or for bourgeois socializing. From time to time, adults ate better meals with family and friends at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Kids were generally not included in such occasions. They stayed home.

When I went to first grade, I moved to the city with my parents, 6 miles away. Our food then came from the benevolent government planners who made us wait every day in endless lines at the grocery store, the butcher store, the dairy store, the bakery, the greengrocer, and the farmer’ s market if we could find food, if the store did not run out, if there was enough for everybody, if we had rationing coupons, and if we could afford it.

Not at all. It’s changing how you eat more than what you eat. Let me take the concept a bit deeper.

For many years, historians were puzzled with pre-industrialization references to “first sleep” and “second sleep”. Finally they figured out they were literal. That is, people had a very different schedule.

They would start the day with breakfast, often on farms before the sun came up. Then the big meal of the day was dinner, what today we call lunch. Then an hour or so after dusk, before bed, they would eat a lighter supper. Then they would sleep until around midnight.

Then they would get up, use the pot, stoke the fire, prepare breakfast and set it to cook, then go back to sleep.

This all changed with industrialization and illumination at night, to pretty much the schedule we follow today. (Which may explain a lot of sleep disorders, with the theory that people are not really designed to sleep the whole night through.)

In any event, by the earlier schedule, breakfast and supper were not very elaborate, but dinner was the feast of the day, with a morning’s work in front of it, and an afternoon’s work after.

So having the big meal at noon, not in the evening, may be a key to healthier eating. I say may, because there are so many variables.

But it does raise the question how to get a better deal out of how and when we eat. More in tune with out particular metabolism, etc.

Personally, I’m trying to deal with my food at the intestinal flora level. And it is something of a challenge.

To start with, the better the bacteria are at digesting, the more nutrition you get from your food. And some bacteria are known to contribute to weight gain, others to weight loss. But there’s another twist.

Archaea look like bacteria, but aren’t. And they don’t eat what bacteria eat, either. But they do eat bacterial waste gases, that can inhibit bacteria. So indirectly they make it so that bacteria can increase the amount of nutrition we get from our food.

The bacteria genus Enterobacter in particular, are known to cause weight gain. And making things worse for obese people, instead of having 30-40 types of dominant intestinal flora bacteria, about a third of all the bacteria in their gut are Enterobacter.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.