Brian Explains: Food

Food has had an interesting existence in man's evolution. We have always needed to eat, but what we ate hasn't always had the same importance. When humans walked the earth as cavemen, they didn't care if they ate buffalo meat or bugs as long as they ate enough to not starve. Cavemen were no geniuses, but they knew that their hunger pains were caused by a lack of food. Today, we have better working brains than cavemen, but we use them to come up with justifications for the items we put in our mouths. Food is a social event, a status symbol, an art form, and a personal statement. We don't just eat to get rid of the pains within our stomachs, we eat to get rid of the pains within our hearts. It is food therapy.

If you eat crap, you are going to feel like crap (and probably look like something resembling crap). If you eat healthy and nutritious food all the time, you are going to make everyone else around you feel like crap. And isn't that the point of living - to make everyone else feel like crap. (The preceding paragraph was brought to you by the word "crap.")

I am not saying that I have studied food and/or nutrition my whole life, but I have studied people my whole life. People search for meanings in everything (look at religion) and food is no exception. They want their next meal either to transform them into a ravaging hunk of a healthy muscle or to transport them to the land of the quenched tastebud people. I only give these two extremes to illustrate how most people think. Life should not be lived in the East or the West, but somewhere in Nebraska.

Ultimately, it's your choice to eat whatever you want. The only guidelines exist in your goals. If you want to be a couch potato, take two bags of chips and lounge in the morning. If you want to run a marathon, however, you need a psychologist (because you have to be crazy to run that far when all you get out of it is looking like a skinny, emaciated freak). If you are fat because of a glandular problem, buy some acne medicine. If your fat because you eat too much, you're probably eating too much sugar so you could still use some acne medicine.

But seriously folks, what you put in your mouth is a serious indicator of your longevity in life. Those people who say, “Well, I don’t want to live to be a hundred, anyway,” are kidding themselves. Their hundred is going to take place at forty-five. They’re going to get the same aches and pains as that hundred-year-old who ate correctly. To eat crap your whole life and be surprised when you get illnesses and ailments when you’re older is to live in ignorance. Don’t just eat food for how it tastes. Eat food for how it makes you feel. Wait a minute, isn't that the opposite of what I said a couple paragraphs back? Most people who are allergic to strawberries simply avoid strawberries. Conversely, if you feel sluggish after you eat certain things or certain amounts of things, stay away from those things or those amounts of things. That is all I have to say about food, I'm going to go have some strawberries. I'm alergic to them, though, so I won't have too many.