Nutrition, Satisfaction, Practicality and Dietary Change

Nutrition, Satisfaction, and Practicality. The NSP model and dietary change

Nutrition

• Fortunately, basic nutrition is a science and not so hard to learn. You need to learn the general ranges of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that are consistent with health and the food values for the things you eat that will land you in the normal ranges for these macronutrients, as well as the appropriate calorie goals for your gender, age, and lifestyle. That's the easy part. Many calorie websites can help with this, even with industrial packaged foods, though their nutrition effects are more complicated than apples and oranges.

• As you are developing your diet or revising it, it may help to look up food values and weigh amounts. Knowing the macro-nutrient profile of a breakfast, lunch, or dinner helps you add things up on a daily basis. Once you know that your overall diet is healthy, you do not need to track it quantitatively. Once you know the food values of many foods, you can predict the values of new foods pretty well, especially whole foods like apples and oranges.

• It is also helpful to understand a variety nutrition topics, including: the value of phytonutrients, micronutrients, and vitamins, as well as the effects of refined sugar, and the effects of different kinds of fiber, fats and carbohydrates. If you consume alcohol, you should understand something about how it metabolizes and adds to calories. You should understand the concept of "empty calories" and the risks associated with different kinds of meat consumption.

• There are many advanced nutrition topics that have to do with complex things like your personal metabolism and research on the health effects of various chemicals that you find in industrial foods. This is still science, but it is more complex, so reliable knowledge is harder to come by. Understanding what is happening in your gut (your microbiota) is pretty important and new science is emerging annually. Keep the trillions of bacteria and other organisms in your gut happy is part of good nutrition, but it doesn't necessarily show up in your calorie count or distribution of carbs, fats, and proteins.

Satisfaction

• Satisfaction is the most subjective of the three pillars of the NSP model. And that might lead you to think it is the easiest. After all, who knows better than you how to achieve satisfaction and whether you are satisfied? Even if the first part isn't always true, maybe the second one is. We should probably trust our immediate assessments of satisfaction, but we are notoriously bad at predicting our future satisfaction, especially if we are comparing something we are habituated to, like our current diet, to something new. When you are trying to improve your diet, you must often compare a current satisfaction to a potential satisfaction from a better diet.

• For example, you might be convinced that "burgers always beat beans." After all, fat from meat is pretty satisfying for humans. Our satisfactions from sugar, salt, and fat are anchored by both our evolutionary psychology and our current neural conditioning. So there is an objective basis for our subjective attractions to these dimensions of food. From "taste perception research" and neuro-gastronomy, we are learning that eating industrial foods rich in these ingredients affect the taste of other, more natural and plant-based foods. In dietary change, we are often comparing highly conditioned taste satisfactions from these hyper-palatable industrial food, with tastes and flavors in whole foods that we cannot fully detect or appreciate because of our conditioning.

• We have been talking about satisfaction from food as one thing, but it is really more complicated than that. There is "mouth feel" and relatively immediate satisfactions from eating. Many industrial foods focus on this. But there are also satisfactions from the stomach, and even the next 15 feet or so of transit! If you've had a really well-prepared and healthy meal you have probably experienced these distinction satisfactions.

• Acquiring new satisfactions from new foods and food quantities is perhaps the central challenge of dietary change. Many people who do change their diets talk about weaning themselves (their taste buds and their neuro-gastronomy) from one flavor profile to another. In other words, you might have to stop eating some foods that distort your sense of taste in order to experience satisfaction from other foods that are healthier for you.

Practicality

• Our diets have to fit with the way we lead our lives, though sometimes we need to adjust our schedules to the practical demands of our diet. This is "practicality" and it is a core part of dietary design. You can know how to make a nutritious diet that is satisfying, but if there is no time in your schedule to supply yourself with food or make it, your diet will be impractical to follow and turn into a satisfying habit.

• You can think of practicality in terms of the follow diet design principles and the challenges related to realizing them.

• You always have something great to eat and plenty of choices about dinner.

• Challenge: Make a good assessment of your need for variety and think about how you make meal choices. But you also need to have the skills needed to produce satisfying meals.

• You always know what you need at the store.

• Challenge: Making a shopping list is the easy part. You also need to engage in meal planning so that you are not going to the store too frequently and that you are supported several choices for key meals like dinner so that you can make your choice close to the time you eat.

• You don't spend more time preparing food than you can afford.

• Challenge: You don't just need nutritious and satisfying meals, you need meals that can actually be prepared under the time constraints of your schedule and lifestyle. Sometimes you need to adjust the latter to the former. How you plan and design meals can have a big effect on the time it takes to prepare them, so "prep time" and "available time" and somewhat determined by other skills.

• You have plenty of opportunities to prepare food when you aren't busy, but you never have to do it when you are too busy.

• Challenge: "Time shifting" meal prep time and having an accurate idea of meal preparation time is the remedy here, but this design principle also requires some "discipline" to use free time for meal preparation.

• Your meals are flexible when they need to be.

• Challenge: A challenge of cooking with fresh foods is that they have a relatively short shelf life compared to industrial foods. This is a constraint on flexibility. Also, sometimes you want to be spontaneous about joining friends for a happy hour or a meal out. Flexibility is about managing constraints without sacrificing nutrition or satisfaction.

• Your food is portable when you need it to be.

• Challenge: Taking your meals, often lunch, on the road might be as easy as boxing them up. But you may need to think about which meals are portable and how to keep portable meals fresh and food safe.

• You rarely waste food.

• Challenge: Even if it doesn't bother you to waste food, it is an impractical waste of money.

• And, it's all completely affordable.

• Challenge: There's no point designing a great diet that you can't afford or being unrealistic about the minimal cost of a nutritious and satisfying diet. After all, you should eat like your life depends on it!

Using NSP to think about Dietary Design

Some General Relationships

• Nutrition, Satisfaction, and Practicality are important topics on their own, but the value of "NSP" as a model has also to do with the relationships among the three topics. For example, two dishes can be equally nutritious, but not equally satisfying or practical. Your ability to create satisfaction in eating depends in part upon your skills in sourcing ingredients, cooking, and presentation. Gastronomy research tells us that it is not just the food itself that creates satisfaction in a meal.

• Likewise, you can have a diet that currently satisfies you and which you find practical, but it might not be nutritious. Of course, you cannot know that your diet is nutritious and healthy unless you understand some nutrition science. Applying that knowledge is an additional challenge, which again depends in part on cooking skills and planning.

• Another general relationship within the NSP model has to do with misperceptions of practicality and satisfaction. Many people in industrial food cultures think of the drive through window as a practical approach to supplying meals. And there are healthy fast food options that can fit very well into a nutritious and satisfying diet. But we also often do some questionable "mental accounting" when we rely too heavily on prepared foods, whether from the drive through lane or not. The time it takes to go out and get fast food is often greater than the preparation time of your most efficient meals. Fast food and prepared foods are often quick to eat because they are "high palatable," they are designed to be eaten quick and often focus on "mouth satisfaction". When you are hungry and unprepared, you might write off the more limited satisfaction without much notice. And while industrial foods can certainly be part of a healthy eating pattern, they often do not contribute as much to it as more nutritious foods.

• In general, your goal should be to optimize nutrition, satisfaction, and practicality. Understanding how they related to each other should help you do so this, at least in general.

Some Specific Relationships and Challenges in Optimizing N, S, and P

• The hard work is at the level of your specific understanding of nutrition, skills and planning, and perception of taste and satisfaction. Most of this happens at the level of choosing specific meals. Sourcing those meals is highly dependent on the food stores that you have access to. An orange from a discount outlet is not likely to taste as good, or even be as nutritious, as an orange from a premium food source. Your food budget is also a very specific constraint in optimizing N, S, and P.

"Trade-ups" are another way of thinking about optimizing.

• Appeal of design metaphor: More consistent with an aesthetic approach, beginning with the space and mood of the kitchen.

• Appeal of engineering metaphor: diets have parameters and requirements. They are "systems" with supply chains, production and storage process, and quality (satisfaction) requirements.

Some measurement and goal setting challenges:

• How much time should you "afford" for food preparation and enjoying. How often? Slow Food thinking supplies some answers to this.
• How much time do you (should you have) have for making meals? When is that time available to you during the week?
• What are the main strategies for "time shifting" your meal preparation? for batch preparation?
• How many different dinners do you need?
• On any given night, how many different dinners could you choose to make quickly?
• When you make food from scratch, how often do you make multiple dinners?