27 March 2023

Kabbalah speaks of the path to abundance in this way:

“Consciousness is like a muscle. The more restraint we exercise, the stronger our consciousness becomes, which increasingly puts us in control of our destiny.” (Yehuda Berg)

With food, we often fall victim to immediate gratification, and that often comes in the form of junk food. But we may not actually want what we want (ah...the power of advertising!). Nutritional wisdom is our body’s ability to choose foods to prevent deficiencies. * When “you can’t eat just one”, that’s your body’s way of telling you that whatever you ate was not nutritionally sufficient, so keep trying! This is one of the reasons we tend to overeat when consuming ultra processed foods (another reason: the money that goes into engineering bliss points and marketing campaigns, but more on that next week).

Eating highly sweetened or very salty foods deadens our palates to natural flavors. Studies (and my own experience) have shown that people who reduce sugar or sodium intake in their diet eventually find the new level of sweetness or saltiness to be more desirable. Our tastebuds only live about 250 hours (about 1 ½ weeks), so in 10 days you can change the way foods appease your palate! Conversely, repeated exposure to [healthy] foods we dislike seems to create a familiarity that improves acceptance over time. Hello, brussels sprouts!

Our genes have not changed over the past 50 years, and we’ve been hardwired by centuries of true scarcity to seek the greatest calorie bang for our foraging and hunting buck (pun intended). Now that food is available to us any time and any place (gas stations!), our bodies may not recognize the true abundance because it’s mostly empty calories. It gives us energy (albeit short term) but not much else.

Maybe true abundance is not having so much food, but rather having the right food. Perhaps “value added” products do not add value at all; they are reducing the benefit of something that was perfect the way nature produced it. A quick search on Instagram will yield millions of beautiful photos of abundant meals that are whole foods and plant based. Side effects of health and longevity might just be the icing on the carrot cake!

*If you want to learn more about nutritional wisdom, “The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor” by Mark Schatzker is a fascinating read.