First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read Online Free PDF

choices we do, says that food habits “can almost exclusively be changed by relearning through experience.” That is, if we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become like children again. Bad food habits can only change by making “healthy food” something pleasure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion—as something requiring willpower—it can never taste delicious.
    It’s seldom easy to change habits, particularly those so bound up with memories of family and childhood; but, whatever our age, it looks as if eating well is a surprisingly teachable skill. This is not to say that everyone should end up with the same tastes. Life would be dull if everyone preferred satsumas to clementines. But certain broad aspects of eatingcan be learned and then tailored to your own specific passions and needs. There are three big things we would all benefit from learning to do: to follow structured mealtimes; to respond to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness, rather than relying on external cues, such as portion size; and to make ourselves open to trying a variety of foods. All three can be taught to children, which suggests that adults could learn them, too.
    For our diets to change, we do need to educate ourselves about nutrition—and yes, teach ourselves to cook—but we also need to relearn many of our responses to food. The change doesn’t happen through rational argument. It is a form of reconditioning, meal by meal. You get to the point where not eating when you are not hungry—most of the time—is so instinctive and habitual that it would feel odd to behave differently. In truth, governments could do a great deal more to help us modify our eating habits. In place of all that advice, they could reshape the food environment in ways that would help us to learn better habits of our own accord. A few decades from now, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar—now present in 80 percent of supermarket foods—may seem as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on airplanes. Given that our food choices are strongly determined by what’s readily available, regulating the sale of unhealthy food would automatically make many people eat differently. Banishing fast-food outlets from hospitals and the streets surrounding schools would be a start. One study shows that you can reduce chocolate consumption almost to zero in a student cafeteria by requiring people to line up for it separately from their main course.
    But at an individual level, we won’t achieve much by waiting for a world where chocolate is scarce. The question is what it might take to become part of that exceptional group of people (one-third of the population, give or take a few) who can live in the modern world, with all its sugary and salty allurements, and not be agonized or seduced. Having a healthy relationship with food can act like a life jacket, protecting you from the worst excesses of the obesogenic world we now inhabit. You see the greasy meatball sandwich and you no longer think it has much to say to you. This is not about being thin. It’s about reaching a state where food is something that nourishes and makes us happy rather than sickening ortormenting us. It’s about feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits.
    Changing the way you eat is far from simple; nor, crucially, is it impossible. After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.
     
    a Even milk is complicated. Formula will never be the same as breast milk, as the breastfeeding campaigners often remind us. But nor is human milk a single substance. It’s been found that breastfed babies in Spain have a different range of bacteria in their guts than breastfed babies in Sweden. A mother’s milk will vary in composition and flavor depending on her own diet. It may taste garlicky in France