The Western diet is focused on “living to eat” instead of “eating to live.” This results in a food mindset that says you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. The quintessential “quantity over quality” motif.
Reductionism feeds into this diet and nutritional approach. Reductionism presumes that by narrowing a thing down to its base elements, you can understand everything there is to know about that thing. Often this line of thinking is simplified by the phrase, “the sum of its parts equal the whole.” This line of thinking is flawed when it comes to food and our interaction with it.
In our Western society, if we think there is a health problem associated with food, the problem is with the food alone and not with the eater of the food. Or how the eater is growing the food. Or what the eater considers food. Ultimately, the blame is put on something and not someone. And it’s a lot easier to blame food than ourselves.
Reductionism experiments on the food parts and says “this fat is bad” or “this carb is good” or “these many calories are needed.” The whole time they are doing this, they are ignoring the bigger picture of how the individual parts make up something much grander than just looking at it through a microscope.
How we approach growing our food is based on a reductionist mindset as well. More and more of our food is being grown on less and less land. This has caused a depletion of the nutritional content of the soil we use for agriculture. The soil we have now contains fewer vitamins and minerals compared to years gone by.
We’ve also reduced the standards by which we define our food. Our food is only defined by size, shape and color (quantifiable measurements) and not at all by nutritional value (more of a qualifiable measurement). A genetically-modified apple might look prettier than an organic apple, but it is not better for you. Western society has manipulated our want to “eat with our eyes” and ignored all other aspects of healthy nutrition.
Reductionism tries to turn nutrition into a math problem. And it could work if we could reduce all human physiology into a single math problem. But the problem is humans have dynamic physiology. We are more than the sum of our parts. And if we are more than the sum of our parts, than the food we eat that becomes us, is also more than the sum of its parts.
Nutrition based on a vitalistic principle doesn’t “count calories” but instead understands that what those calories are made of, counts. A Vitalistic mindset doesn’t ignore the parts but understands that the whole is more than its sum. Vitalism sticks closer to the definition of nutrition: the process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth. Nutrition is dependent on complex variables associated with digestion, absorption, storage and excretion; all things that can’t be measured under a microscope in real-time.
Vitalistic nutrition takes the old adage “you are what you eat” to term; it is more than just a turn-of-phrase but a biological fact. Our body makes new cells out of the food we eat. Having a more vitalistic mindset when it comes to our nutrition, empowers our choice of what we want out of our food. We are our environment and our environment is us. This includes what we eat, how we eat it and how we grow it.
In a vitalistic understanding, dieting is not the answer when it comes to nutrition. You have to change your habits first, not what foods you restrict or eliminate. Habit drives lifestyle choices. Bad habits will breed bad choices, good habits breed good choices. Eating healthy takes time, energy and conscious choice.
- Jarek Esarco, DC, CACCP
Jarek Esarco, DC, CACCP is a pediatric, family wellness and upper cervical specific Chiropractor. He is an active member of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association (ICPA). Dr. Jarek has postgraduate certification in Pediatric Chiropractic through the ICPA. Dr. Jarek also has postgraduate certification in the HIO Specific Brain Stem technique through The TIC Institute. Dr. Jarek is happily married to his wife Regina. They live in Youngstown, Ohio with their daughter Ruby.
