I am looking at Food and Diet with my Startup thinking hat. Like all typical research I went to the ultimate source of research data, Google. No seriously, there are a number of documentaries and books related to Food and Diet. So the first one that I am listening to is How do we know what’s good for us? a podcast by BBC. It is fascinating. Give it a listen. In addition to that I was watching this video by Big Think – Diet Secrets of Living Past 100
Although I have no illusion of living past 100, it is interesting to learn from the above video that there are some common themes of diet for people who live long and healthy lives. Here is another documentary by BBC: The Truth about Food.
Last night there was a documentary on BBC, the filming was done all over the world including Iceland. My brother-in-law Sigfus Sigurdsson was interviewed, he works in a Fish Store. And I am told that Iceland apparently has the world’s best diet. If only I know where to find it. Obviously the film crew and interviewer went to some remote farm in Iceland and documented what the family there eat. Unfortunately, we live in Reykjavik which is a city and I don’t think our diet is any different than any european or american city diet. We do our shopping in the grocery stores and I don’t think we get the traditional Icelandic fresh food in those stores.
I am pretty sure that my father-in-law and mother-in-law’s generation ate healthy food because they grew in farms. Once we move into the cities and streamline the process of getting food into grocery stores, a number of things vanish i.e bad or unhealthy food is cheap and abundantly and easily available where are healthy fresh and organic food is expensive and no where to be found. The minute you are made to compare these things, unhealthy and bad food items always win. I am still waiting for a grocery store to do the reverse. What if we reversed the trend through Startup thinking i.e make healthy food cheaper than the unhealthy alternative? Put a juice or fruit and vegetable based food next to the hot dog stand? I mean would that make us choose better? I don’t know…
