Russians are told about the culture of healthy eating at school, and as part of the national project "Demography," there are programs designed to make the lifestyle of Russians healthier and improve their diet. However, habits are difficult to change, and in Russia people continue to eat tasty but unhealthy food, which leads to obesity and becomes an indirect cause of the most common fatal illnesses: heart disease. Is it possible to correct the situation and how healthy the food of the future will be - asked by Oleg Zingilevsky, a nutrition expert and founder of the Physical Transformation project.
In fact, the food that we eat now, even 30 years ago, was the "food of the future. And, remembering Soviet food, Russians usually say that it was delicious, healthy, and natural - not unlike today's food. Is this true?
Zingilevsky: Also, the grass was greener, the water was wetter, and the sky was bluer.
Now a lot of people say that food has become low-quality, foods are "all GMO," tasteless, vegetables are watery, fruits are wrong and probably contain neither vitamins nor minerals. At the same time we look at all developed civilized countries, which also include Russia, and observe the abundance and variety of food. And also the absence of diseases associated with a lack of minerals and trace elements.
And in contrast we see developing countries, some regions of which may experience terrible deficiencies. If you look at photos of African children, you can see the dystrophic legs-arms and a huge belly - that is dystrophy caused by a lack of protein in the diet. Again, rickets caused by lack of calcium - although, it would seem, here's a cow, a "real" cow, not genetically modified, not spiked with antibiotics, whose milk contains enough calcium. But no, that's not how it works. This is about the time when people "were six feet tall and did not die of cancer and heart attacks.
Life expectancy is slowly but surely increasing globally, and this is due in part to advances in medicine and diagnostics. If we look at what people were dying of at the beginning of the twentieth century, we see that there were far more deaths from injuries and infections, for example. When painkillers and antibiotics became available, people were able to survive serious injuries and serious illnesses. And now more deaths are from age-related illnesses that were simply not lived to before.
When it comes to food, we see exactly the same thing. There is now a greater variety of foods. This is both good (because it's easier to get the necessary micronutrients) and bad, because we are becoming prone to overeating and, as a consequence, to obesity.
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