Yoga and Ayurveda, as opposed to manufactured functional foods, are the gateway to health
Functional
Foods are commonly touted as both solutions to
our emerging chronic health problems and new
opportunities to make profits.
The idea behind functional foods is that we can add
back functions that were removed from food in the
manufacturing or refining process.
The very idea of "manufacturing" stability into food
is an oxymoron. The solution is to eat unprocessed
foods that our digestive systems and body feedback
loops evolved to cope with in our evolutionary
environments.
Manufacturing breaks down the complexity that slows
down the digestive process. Refined products by
definition have accelerating effects on the system.
Our bodies are the end result of a long evolutionary
process of living in specific environments. The
feedback loops that maintain homeostasis evolved in
response to these environments. They did not evolve
to cope with refined foods or many of the foods that
now form a staple part of our diets.
Many people today have health problems that have
their roots in consuming dairy products and wheat for
example. All of us exhibit an inflammatory response
and a momentary "leaky gut" response to wheat. Why?
Because wheat- like milk - is a relatively new food
in the evolutionary time scale. It is a product of
agriculture which started around 10,000 years ago.
This is not long enough for our body to adapt to
these foods.
In my opinion the attempt to create functional foods
- that attempt to add back into the food what was
removed in the manufacturing process - might sound
like a good idea. However it is reflective of what is
known as reductionist thinking. This is the belief
that we can reduce things into parts - analyse the
parts separately - and then expect that when we put
the parts back together we will get the effect of the
sum of their individual impacts.
Systemic thinking on the other hand recognises that
things are more than the sum of their parts. Systemic
thinking - like yoga - recognises that nothing
actually exists by itself - everything exists in
relationship to other things. Just like the behaviour
of an individual changes according to the person or
people they hang out with, the components of food
behave differently when they are combined with other
food component. Moreover, because the nature of the
universe is constant change, there is no single
silver bullet solution to anything.
So my suggestion is to take a look at Ayurveda which
is a essentially a study of integrated complex
adaptive systems in action.
If we want to be healthy we need to understand the
natures of our individual body systems and adopt
diets and lifestyles and relationships etc. that are
conducive to our health. This is an act of self
responsibility that is based on the development of
internal self awareness, experimentation and the
capacity to regulate the flow of energy and
information in our individual body systems - with
recognition that this occurs in relationship to the
people and the larger environmental systems that we
are embodied in. These are the basic skills that we
seek to get you to develop in yoga classes.
Health is the product of the harmonic coherence
between our own individual environment/nature and the
larger environmet/Nature. This is a dynamic process.
It is not something that is fixed. Therefore it is
not something that is amenable to mass marketing and
"one size fits all" manufactured solutions based on
reductionist thinking like functional
foods