by Sammy Stein

Created on: February 19, 2008

The answer has to be 'yes!' but for reasons dictated by nature, rather than the ones you might suspect.

Nature intended for us to eat. We have a natural urge to eat and to avoid feeling hungry. When our stomachs are less than full, the brain receives massages to eat and if there is food available , we eat!
Nature gave us this physical impulse in order to prevent us from starving - you never knew where the next meal was coming from so if food was available it made sense to eat it.

However, that same instinct to eat whenever food is available is now our to detriment. Food is always available!

In Okunawa, Japan, the people have a saying ' leave the table 80 percent full'. Apparently stopping eating just before you are full triggers the body into preparing for an impending disaster and it goes in protection mode - these residents have the lowest cancer incidents and many of them live to be over one hundred and still healthy.

Conversely, when residents of this island go and live elsewhere with food readily available, they still live a long time but their children don't. They are now in a society where food is abundant and different (their diet at home is high in soya and vegetables). The adults tend to stick to traditional foods but the next generation eat as the others around them do. Their bodies ar not genetically equipped to cope with the changes so children of people who live away from their island home tend to live a shorter life and diseases like diabetes, heart disease and arthritis are more common.
One the one hand, these people are gluttons but on the other, they are just eating the wrong foods.

The old formula holds true - calories in should equal calories out- and when we were physically doing more work and did not have such sedentary lives, we were able to use up most or all of the calories we took in. The food was not so calorie laden either. Chips have over 3 times the calories of an ordinary potato for example. So, the same quantity of potatoes cooked by boiling had a third of the calorific value of potatoes cooked in oil or fat.
You do not have to be a glutton to take in more calories for the same amount of food on your plate!

Given that we only need between 1500-2000 calories a day, it is difficult to keep within these limits. Food is available all around us and comes ready to eat so we do not have to even think about what we are putting in our mouths.

Some of the problem is that food manufacturers play on the fact that, while people are not perhaps actual gluttons, they still enjoy eating because this is what nature intended. Food should be enjoyed, eaten quickly (in case of attack) and as much stuffed in as you can. So, fast food, quick fills , burgers, shakes and fries.
Glutton heaven in fact and if you have even the slightest leaning towards gluttony- it is all there for you to take.

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