The American Diet: A First World Problem

Something is wrong with the American Diet.

While this isn’t necessarily an epiphany, when author Lisa Selin Davis polled her Facebook friends to ask about “rich people’s complaints”, she found one answer, “obscure dietary restrictions” (such as diet fads) particularly unsettling.

“As a person forced to abide by obscure dietary restrictions,” Davis reported, “[…] it pains me that people view the concept of nutritional medicine as akin to Gwyneth Paltrow Kegel-ing jade eggs.”

Both medical professionals, and the public, she adds, disdain such connections, often linking dietary needs with dietary fads.

Yet, the number of Americans suffering from the food they eat is on the rise: Food allergies are on the rise, and approximately 70 million Americans suffer from gastrointestinal troubles, notes the National Institute of Health. To add to this, disorders, like constipation and bloating, “rank second in the causes of absence from work or school,” according to the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

As the author reports, in some ways, she’s got the ultimate first world problem. She doesn’t live in a war zone, but realizes that health is significantly deteriorating in the U.S.

Stanford University’s Justin Sonnenburg describes the overuse of things like antibiotics, and poor diets as “insults of industrialization,” which wreak havoc on the microbial community in our guts. Research shows that replenishing the microbes in our guts can directly affect even our mental health.

So why does such disdain toward diets exist? “Some sites make wellness a commodity, obtainable only by the elite,” said Davis. Just because “gluten-free food is a fad and a billion-dollar global industry doesn’t mean there isn’t real scientific and medical merit in investigating the steep rise of celiac disease, among other GI disorders,” she added. But perhaps there’s also truth to the beliefs it’s a rich people problem, because they’ve got the privilege to embrace such restrictions.