\u201cSo much of the wellness conversation is about self-denial,\u201d said Dr. Emanuel, a bioethicist and oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He thinks that approach is all wrong. \u201cIf all you\u2019re ever doing is stopping yourself from doing things, you\u2019re not going to have the willpower.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the suggestions in his book, like staying away from soda, are uncontroversial. But he condones alcohol, despite its risks. As long as you don\u2019t have more than three or four drinks a week, Dr. Emanuel says, it\u2019s useful for facilitating the distinctly human pleasure of sitting together around a table. He points to studies showing that social interaction can reduce depression, stress and anxiety. In a larger sense, though, sharing good food and drink is one of the major ways we bring meaning to our lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cLife has to have purpose, and part of that purpose has to be enjoyment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
One Bite at a Time<\/p>\n
One of the most influential defenses of the idea that pleasure can sit at the center of a well-ordered diet originated outside Western medicine.<\/p>\n
In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist, persuaded University of Massachusetts Medical Center to let him work with patients whose chronic pain and other symptoms were beyond the reach of traditional treatments. His new program, mindfulness-based stress reduction, was drawn from his study of Buddhist meditation. Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught patients to tune into the flickering screen of consciousness, taking note of thoughts, feelings and sensations \u2014 from sorrow to joy, pain to pleasure \u2014 as they zipped past.<\/p>\n
That method, applied to people with troubled relationships to food, grew into a practice known as mindful eating. Rather than relying on outside data like, say, how many calories are in a French fry, mindful eating encourages tuning into the actual experience of smelling a fry, biting into it, registering the way the salt hits your tongue, whether the inside is firm or mealy or hollow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cSo much of the wellness conversation is about self-denial,\u201d said Dr. Emanuel, a bioethicist and oncologist at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[241348,47527,49,48,25915,9075,241345,241346,2998,84,241347,1229,241344,12098,4554,8447],"class_list":["post-649365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-bee-1974","tag-brewer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-diet-and-nutrition","tag-dopamine","tag-emanuel","tag-ezekiel-j","tag-food","tag-health","tag-judson","tag-obesity","tag-processed-and-ultraprocessed-foods","tag-vegetables","tag-weight","tag-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}