Diet. What does diet really mean? Does it require an adjective? Should it ever be a verb? Let's use some imagination to consider the words definition and eliminate the confusion around its contemporary use.

Not too long ago, the word diet referred to the sustenance for maintaining life: foods humans and other creatures thrived eating or suffered from lack of. Modern human diets and their interpretations are full of vagaries. There are diets to promote health or fight disease, diets to build muscle, lose weight, or satisfy ethics. Modern diets are trendy: low fat, Paleo, keto, carnivore, 5:2.… There are diets of location: South Beach, Mediterranean, Blue Zones; diets to circumvent ingredients, such as gluten, FODMAPS, oxalates, lectins…or diets that include ‘special’ ingredients: nutraceuticals, supplements, and drink mixes. And we don't want to forget: vegetarian, pescatarian, fruitarian, flexitarian…. Modern language is embedded with words to designate what humans will and will not eat.

It is easy to conceptualize how industry benefits from these modern ideas of diet. First, they advertise and sell products that diminish health, then promote and provide products to aid our attempts to feel better. Those consuming pills, powders, and potions, or buying into notions, conform to the biases of scientific reductionists, PhDs, and misguided governmental authorities entangled in a maize of commercial enterprise.

Food for Thought

• Imagine manufacturing with inappropriate materials: beds made of concrete, clothing of steel, footwear of glass.
• Imagine an assembly line missing bots or data: forks without prongs, flat spoons, cars without seats, devises without screens. 
• Imagine assembly lines incorrectly programmed: five legged chairs, three lensed sunshades, windows lacking transparency.

Humans well understand how to use materials and technology to fulfill industrial needs, however, most fail to conceive what facilitates or hinders the processes of the human organism, allowing diets and substances of industry and commerce to hack their biological programming.

The human organism is a complex network of connections made through myriad channels of specialized tissues responding to compounds, as with air and water, found in our environments: the foods we eat or provided by the organisms we coexist, ingredients requisite to our assembly lines for function as a species. The diet defining humans and, creating human consciousness, can neither be omitted nor manipulated to fit our desires, common sense for some, although ridiculous to dieters and synthetic biologists and engineers.

Modern diets, similar to commercialized holidays, fashion and beauty, health care…, subjugate human brains to conform to a standard benefiting, not us, industry. Has your money or time returned the investment with permanent weight control, fitness, or vitality? Are you healthier than the person next to you on their special diet?

Long before science or industry, the human brain developed an AI to run our bodies programming, fueled with the natural environments of our existence, without our minds needing to contemplate an ingredient's utility or function, supporting human's evolutionary history for thousands of years into this age of profitable ideas of diet, health, nutrition, and supplementation.

                                                                                - PBJ