How understanding the seven ages of appetite could help us stay healthy
Be
Healthy: Do you eat to live or live to
eat? We have a complicated relationship with food, influenced by
cost, availability, even peer pressure. But something we all share is
appetite – our desire to eat.
Increased
appetite might have a physical or psychological dimension, but while
hunger – our body’s way of making us desire food when it needs
feeding – is a part of appetite, it is not the only factor. After
all, we often eat when we’re not hungry, or may skip a meal despite
pangs of hunger.
Recent
research has highlighted that the abundance of food cues – smells,
sounds, advertising – in our environment is one of the main causes
of overconsumption.
Our
appetite is not fixed, it changes across our lifespan as we age. But
as our choice of food will be an important factor to our health and
wellbeing throughout our lives, it’s important that we get into the
right habits.
As
Shakespeare might have put it, there are seven ages of appetite, and
a better understanding of these phases would help us to develop new
ways of tackling undereating and overconsumption, and particularly
the health effects, such as obesity, that follow.
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