Calories on menus

Have you ever had a disagreement with someone and it became all you could think about for the rest of the day? Or have a meeting or exam in the future that you are worried about, and just can’t stop playing it over in your mind?

Have you noticed that when you have a problem (and it can be absolutely anything) it becomes the centre of your focus. It’s all you can think about. That’s because our brains work in specific ways when it comes to our problems. Any problem is dealt with as if it is a ferocious polar bear bearing down on us ready to eat us. The brain’s survival response has no intellectual capacity and will do what it thinks is helpful in the moment of crisis or when we are faced with a problem. Once activated the survival response impairs our prefrontal cortex (left prefrontal cortex to be specific; our control centre) and starts to dictate behaviours;

Anxiety, anger & depression (flight fight freeze) are the default opt out clauses encouraging us to run, fight or hide from the polar bear. It’s also entirely negative and will encourage us to look for the worst case scenario associated with our problem. (if there’s one killer polar bear it would be wise to assume that there could be more). It’s obsessive ( you would t want to turn your back on the polar bear, you’d want to know exactly where it was at all times. It’s vigilant, always on the look out for the next problem.

That same survival response is driven by reward. It’s where our addictive behaviours come from. All associated with the release of dopamine. Some rewards are for survival purposes; high fat and sugar content foods would have restored energy quicker had we been chased by the polar bear. Plus, learned rewards associated with satiety; mother’s breast milk combining a perfect balance of fats and sugars. Then we can throw in taught behaviours from childhood; you bump your knee and a sweety fixes it.  So you can see that the survival instinct that becomes active when we face a problem has a library of behaviours that it will throw at the problem that we are facing. And it is very powerful.

So let’s paint a picture; a person is restricting their food intake in a bid to loose weight. They restrict to the point that their brain identifies a problem ; it’s not being fed enough so it creates it’s own problem and starts to dictate behaviours for the person. They loose intellectual control and start to be controlled by their survival centre. We know through experimentation (Ancel Keyes to name one) that a brain deprived of what it needs ( glucose, fats and amino acid, protein) becomes obsessed with food. Anything and everything to do with it in a bid to bring some sense of control to the situation.

So, putting cals on menus for this person is a death sentence. They are already irrational in their choices around food. Their brains have created some crazy ( and often damaging) restrictive behaviours that encourage them to restrict more and more and they micro manage everything that they eat.

So to those with no “issues” (does this person exist? i would argue that it is almost impossible to not have some rules associated with food these days) around food putting calories on menus really isn’t a big deal; McDonalds supported this when they researched the effect on their customers behaviours and choices around their food and having to add calories. (maybe they knew the dopamine reward centre was strong enough to drive a person to choose what they liked over any calorific info or maybe people didn’t really know what the information meant?)

But, with a growing number of young people (adults too) exhibiting poor mental health and turning to food as a means of coping with their crisis, we are at risk of making a bad problem a huge amount worse. The current support system already can’t cope so we are at risk of causing more deaths as a consequence.

The real irony is that for those who are of larger weight (and for who this initiative was aimed at) the reducing of calories  (in many cases their brains are so heavily led by reward (dopamine) that even when presented with information like cals on a menus their brain will override this and still go for the high reward option) is not the solution to their effective weight loss anyway. In order for an obese person to loose weight they have to address a multitude of factors before the equation of cals in vs cals out can be effective and find an alternative dopamine “hit” or a happier serotonin led disposition with less cortisol being created as a starting point. This is really hard to do. So we could argue that even for those who the initiative was meant to help will be hindered as a consequence.  Feeling that they are failing! Which is “problem” and we know what the brain does when faced with a problem!

So, am I in favour of cals on menus? Sometimes! It won’t help to solve the obesity problem and will make a lot of other people more unhappy and potentially very very ill. But, for some who need that information as part of a recovery it could be useful. Let’s face it, if they want to know they would find the information anyway, so having it on the menu in these cases could make eating out and freedom to choose an easier process.

In my day to day work I help my clients to regain a healthy relationship with food. Whether that means through eating more, eating less, not binging, etc.. we work together to find freedom from food (and enjoyment). In a world where we are constantly bombarded with before and after pictures, messages about what we should and shouldn’t eat and when the majority are focussing on weight loss it’s not surprising that food obsession is prevalent.

In nearly all cases that I see my clients have incorrect information that they are measuring their success and failure against ( what ever their presenting problem) and they are not eating enough of the right foods for them!