The first words of the first chapter in the study material for Precision Nutrition’s (PN) level 1 certification pose the question: What is food?
Before I summarize their answer, spend a second or three considering and answering that question for yourself. I’ll wait.
Got your answer? Good. Now set it off to the side momentarily. We’ll come back to it in a minute.
An encompassing definition
The answer that PN offers starts off predictably.
Food is fuel.
But then they immediately take a hard right by pointing out that, while food does provide energy (via fat, carbs, and protein), it also provides a lot of other “stuff” including vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals (i.e. nutrients that only occur in plants), zoochemicals (i.e. nutrients that only occur in animals), fiber, water, and possibly other molecules we haven’t yet discovered.
These other nutrients do serve a multitude of roles in the body including controlling inflammation and cellular damage, promoting muscle and nerve function, protecting against cancer and heart disease, delivering signals to the body to release (or not) certain hormones or express (or not) certain proteins, and about a million other tasks (perhaps only slightly overstated).
None of those tasks really “provide fuel” for the body in the way that gasoline provides fuel for an engine. Rather, they provide direction for the body to do or not do certain functions.
So, food is fuel. And food is information.
But even that’s not all. What we eat (or don’t) has emotional and social elements too.
We include food as part of our rituals and celebrations, experience a sense of enjoyment when we consume it with others, build discipline and gain comfort from it, and sometimes even use it to define ourselves (i.e. I’m a vegan/carnivore/healthy/adventurous/low maintenance eater).
In other words, food is also a story.
What’s your story?
Let’s go back to your definition of food now.
Did you define it in a similar way or as something more or less? Even if you hadn’t consciously considered an answer prior to a few minutes ago, how do you think your (subconscious) views of what food is have affected the way you approach your nutrition? How has that approach impacted your life? And do you want that to continue or would you prefer to change it in some way?
Whether or not you’ve experienced the extremes, it’s hopefully obvious that taking an all-or-nothing approach leads to suboptimal outcomes.
On the “food is purely fuel” side, we miss out on all of the positive social and emotional components that food provides. Sometimes—more often than you might think—this can lead to even more extreme habits of restricting to the point of negatively affecting both long-term health and short-term performance.
And on the “food is purely emotional/social/story” side, we run into many of the chronic health issues that are prevalent in today’s society. (This is certainly an oversimplification for the sake of brevity. But it’s also still in the middle of the right ballpark.)
A viewpoint that contains a broader range of components—whether that’s “food + info + story” or “that & more”—is more likely to lead to the best outcomes in terms of physical and emotional health.
Of course, there’s no single “right” answer as to where on the continuum might be best for any of us. We each need to figure that out for ourselves. But having a clear understanding of our starting point will only make the process easier (or, at least, “less difficult”).
Putting it into practice
A few weeks ago on a virtual call, another coach suggested “objectively observing whether our physiology aligns with our nutritional ideology”.
Her point was that it’s easy to follow nutrition dogma because we’ve mentally convinced ourselves that it’s “right” for whatever particular reasons, even though our bodies might be telling us otherwise (via bloating, indigestion, brain fog, energy slumps, poor sleep, skin irritations, and the like).
A lot of others (myself included) thought it was an insightful comment. So I’m passing her challenge on to you today.
Spend some time (re-)considering what food is to you as well as the physiological outcomes that you seem to be experiencing. If you like what you see, carry on. If you don’t like what you see, consider what it might mean to explore alternatives.
And if you find yourself stuck, consider some private coaching. I’m here to help.