Nutrition and ignorance

I enjoy thinking about the endless ways that human beings are stupid. How we’ve been on this planet for a very long time, but it feels like we’ve learned nothing. More than that, it feels like we are just sort of getting here and figuring things out—even though we’ve been on this planet for a long time. Human ignorance is both old and new—it has always been there, and it is revealed in new forms in countless ways all the time. Each day we all discover new forms of human stupidity—and whenever we think we’ve reached the bottom, we realize that we are in fact just scratching the surface.

Nothing exemplifies the remarkable depth of human ignorance like nutrition. Human beings have been around for a long time, and we still seem to have no real idea how to feed ourselves. This is the most basic thing there is—how to eat, what to eat, when to eat. And yet we have no idea how to do any of it. There’s always a new fad diet, a new superfood, a new food to avoid, a new study about when to eat, how much to eat, etc. etc. Most of it conflicts—a study that everyone followed last year will be disproven this year. What was considered unhealthy five years ago is healthy today, and will be considered unhealthy five years from now. And on and on.

Shouldn’t we have this figured out? We are always starting at square one, even with this most basic thing.

Same goes for education. This is the most basic thing—how to make sure that when new human beings are created and developing, they know things. This should have been figured out a while ago, but it seems like collectively we have no idea how to do it.

Both nutrition and education seem to be getting worse. How to eat and how to learn—in both of these most basic areas, human beings are starting from square one, over and over. Square one might be giving us too much credit—we’re actually losing ground, forgetting things that we used to know.

We don’t know how to learn and we don’t know how to eat. Without at least these things as a foundation, we can’t hope to do anything else well either.