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A few days ago I saw an unsettling video about ultra-processed foods. A doctor in the UK who had a diet of about 20% ultra-processed foods switched to an 80% diet for one month and recorded the changes he experienced.
One immediate change he noticed was that he had a desire to eat much more often. He practiced intuitive eating for the duration and would simply continue to eat when he felt he wanted food. At the end of the month, a study of his hormones confirmed that his body was making much more of the hormone ghrelin, which increases appetite, and less of the hormone peptide YY, which reduces appetite. Further, a scan of his brain after 30 days revealed that new neural paths were being created, specifically linking reward centers of his brain with simple, repetitive activities such as eating.
His body quite literally told him to eat more and feel good for doing it. He gained 6.5 kg (14 lbs) of weight that month alone.
Ultra-processed foods were invented in the 20th century, and they were created for a variety of reasons. Of course one motivation was to make foods taste better in order to market them. Companies also wanted to try make their foods more nutritious. One major reason, however, was to extend the shelf life of food products so they can be stored for longer, either by stores or by consumers after purchasing them.
But to many people, the end result of all this processing isn't really food. It's an artificial approximation of real food that only bears a superficial resemblance. One ingests it by eating, and it activates the parts of the brain that are activated when eating food, but it doesn't nourish us or satisfy us like more natural foods do.
Modern society is good at creating approximations of natural phenomena--approximations that mimic some aspects of the natural thing almost exactly while getting other aspects wrong or lacking them entirely. The desired result is for the approximation to remove the negative aspects of the real thing, but in the process, most good things are removed as well.
A good example of this phenomenon is with light. For millions of years, the only sources of light on Earth were all-natural processes like sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and phenomena such as lightning or auroras. Sunlight was of course the primary source of light for life on Earth, but it doesn't just provide visible light: it also contains warming infrared light, as well as vitamin D-producing (and sunburn-producing) ultraviolet light.
The first artificial light was controlled fire, which also gave visible and infrared light, but it didn't contain the amounts of ultraviolet radiation the Sun does. This means people don't get sunburns from fire--but they sure do get regular burns from it! Other shortcomings of fire include the fact that its warming range is short, it requires supplies to burn, and it doesn't give off enough light to help plants grow. Large conflagrations like campfires are also a safety hazard, so humans invented devices to help control it further. Open candles gave way to lanterns and oil lamps, containing fire inside a clear container to stop it from spreading. These reduced the chances of igniting or burning things by accident, at the cost of reducing light output and heat.
Enter the introduction of the electric light bulb, which did away with many of the dangers of fire. Incandescent bulbs could still be hot enough to burn one's fingers but not usually not hot enough to start a fire. The filaments often stop carrying electricity if the bulb breaks. They also create the same amount of visible light using less energy than a fire. LED bulbs and fluorescent tubes improve this efficiency even more. However, the downsides kept accruing: electric light bulbs require a constant source of electricity, and LEDs and fluorescent bulbs emit almost no light at all outside the visible spectrum. As a result, lights no longer produce heat, and they provide no vitamin D to us--it's now a common problem for many people in developed societies to have a vitamin D deficiency due to being indoors too much. Their ease of proliferation has led to massive light pollution. They are difficult to make without specialized tools, and thus replacements cannot be made independently or by hand.
Other modern conveniences had the same problems. Pornography perfectly recreates the aesthetic appeal of sexual intimacy, and it doesn't come with the emotional burden of having to navigate the feelings of another person, but that comes at the cost of emotional gratification that intimacy provides--and of course there isn't another person there to actually have sex with. Video games trigger the parts of our brains that react to the thrill of adventure, discovery and problem-solving without having to take risks, but the result is no notoriety for the "adventures" we undertake, no wealth from the "treasures" we discover, and no real-life improvements from the "problems" we solve. Even driving cars and flying planes gets us to our destinations faster, at the cost of much of the personal enrichment we could get from the journey.
In short, modernity has a tendency to blunt the extremes of the "real" or natural world. We make things that hurt less or inconvenience us less, and those things in turn satisfy us less. The lows of life are muted, but so are the highs. Everything slowly becomes a gray, temperate middle where nothing really displeases us, but nothing really pleases us either. I don't know if I would call this phenomenon a defining feature of modernity, but it's definitely an inevitable result.
I used to roll my eyes at the phrase "no pain, no gain". I often heard it from people who were just using the phrase to justify why others should get by with less while they take the lion's share. But there really is some truth to that saying. I think it's part of what attracts me and many other people to older tech like turntables, typewriters, terminals or telephony. It's part of what I like about camping, going for a walk on a cold day, or even just reading a book next to a candle under the stars. If the things we do are difficult, we feel more fulfilled when we do them. And the natural world certainly is a difficult place to live in.
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[Last updated: 2024-01-05]