“I see only one way to know how far we can go: it is to set out and walk.” Henri Bergson, “The Perception of Change” (1911), collection: “The Creative Mind”.
“A quarter of what we eat nourishes our body, the rest nourishes the doctor.” Inscription engraved on an Egyptian pyramid, 3800 BC.
“To reach the Truth, one must, once in their life, rid themselves of all the opinions they have received, and rebuild anew, from the foundation, the entire system of their knowledge.” René Descartes
” As long as there are men who will not obey their reason alone, who will receive their opinions from a foreign opinion, all the chains would have been broken in vain.” The Marquis de Condorcet
Chronic hunger
Skipping a single meal is generally uncomfortable, and for good reason, the ritual of three fixed meals hides a dependency. Let us take a closer look at the origin of this food addiction unknown to the general public. Let us turn our gaze inward, to our intimacy, when our body tells us “I am hungry.”
Cereals were introduced, along with dairy products, at the beginning of the Neolithic, about 10,000 years ago. It is during this period that we observe the frequent appearance of dental caries, whereas they were almost non-existent among hunter-gatherers. Moreover, life expectancy dropped among these pioneers of agriculture, whose average height decreased from 1.73m (in the Paleolithic) to 1.63m (in the Neolithic), signs that living conditions were less favorable during the agricultural era. It took until the 1970s for humans to regain their initial stature and exceed it by 3 cm today, undeniably thanks to improved living conditions, the development of medicine and agronomy, without ignoring the collateral effect of growth hormones given to livestock.
While cereals are a boon to free humanity from its carbohydrate needs, the flip side is that the starch (a chain of glucose) from refined cereals (the famous white bread) and even more so industrial sugar (the average daily consumption of industrial sugar per person in France is currently 100 grams, whereas in the 19th century, it was only 5 grams), not to mention fruit juices (there is a parallel between the consumption of added fructose or fruit juices and the frequency of obesity), cause blood sugar levels to rise too quickly. Unlike fruits and vegetables, whose presence of fiber and water changes the game by slowing down absorption, which occurs gently.
The hypoglycemia epidemic
In common language, the term “sugar” can refer to any sugar. On a nutritional label, the term “sugars” refers to all carbohydrates with a sweetening power, mainly fructose, sucrose, glucose, maltose, and lactose. White sugar (or sucrose) contains 50% glucose and 50% fructose, while fruits mainly contain fructose. Fructose, which has a sweetening power superior to sucrose, by 20 to 40%, does not cause sudden hyperglycemia in sedentary individuals consuming it through fruits.
However, the rapid increase in blood sugar levels causes hyperglycemia, which, if repeated daily, is particularly harmful to body tissues. This is why our pancreas reacts with a strong and urgent production of insulin, often in excessive amounts, which will store these excess sugars in the form of fats, triglycerides, to the detriment of liver health.
This high production of insulin, in response to the consumption of foods that release sugar too quickly, can, in the long term, fatigue the pancreas and, in the short term, it causes hypoglycemia that occurs about 4 hours after eating. This coincides with clock-like precision with the time of the next meal or snack.
Here is the first of three mechanisms that encourages eating multiple times throughout the day: hypoglycemia due to a diet containing refined cereals and industrial sugar.
In addition, there is the body’s self-cleaning process that kicks in as soon as digestion is finished, a process that can hardly function except at night when one eats three times a day.
Read about this in “What if we stopped eating a little… from time to time” (original title: Et si on s’arrêtait un peu de manger…de temps en temps) by Bernard Clavière for more information on the mechanisms of fasting and its effects on the human body.
The side effects of detox
This cleaning has undesirable side effects, particularly in individuals who have never fasted, especially as the body is intoxicated by poor eating habits.
Confused mind, lack of energy, anxiety, bad mood, blurred vision, coated tongue, acne, bad breath, need to blow one’s nose, swollen face, stiffness, dizziness, general fatigue, etc., are symptoms familiar to billions of human beings upon waking, those who believe they are favored by progress.
Breakfast, by temporarily stopping this cleaning with undesirable effects, appears as the savior. That is why, contrary to what popular wisdom claims, breakfast would rather be the most harmful meal of the day since it interrupts a beneficial cleaning process that should be allowed to function a little each day.
For what strange reason, after a night of sleep, would we need stimulants to start a day? Moreover, it is observed that a healthily nourished body is not hungry in the morning.
Besides, the entire animal kingdom sleeps or rests after eating; it is unnatural and even counterproductive to go to work with a full stomach, as athletes well know.
Science has largely demonstrated that caloric reduction accelerates neurogenesis. It is generally believed that adults no longer produce neurons, but this is false. And this process is accelerated when you fast. More neurons are produced in the hippocampus. This even led a California startup to have its employees fast for 36 hours to boost productivity. If the ends are debatable, the method has once again proven its effectiveness.
The psyche
The last mechanism that conditions us operates in the psychological domain. During the fetal stage, the placenta that nourished us was rich in carbohydrates, just like breast milk (or substitutes). That is why we have, beyond our physiological needs, a great appetite for sweetness, especially in times of stress. By stimulating the production of hormones and neurotransmitters, it reassures us and unconsciously brings us back to a time of fusion with our mother or to happy moments of our childhood, just as a smell can do.
Education
Then, there is education, or rather training: fixed meal times and the obligation to finish one’s plate, a system that fortunately is living its last days. This conditioning, which has been in place since early childhood, leaves almost indelible marks on our mental hard drive, so changing eating habits requires significant willpower.
But all my readings and personal experiences had convinced me that eating three times a day every day was a symptomatic alienation of a poorly nourished body (despite abundance) that sooner or later would end up “falling ill.”
Following these considerations, I thus took the habit of skipping breakfast to only have two meals a day depending on my schedule, what is called intermittent fasting (see this article on intermittent fasting).
