Nearly every failed dieter caught sneaking a candy bar in the supermarket has been admonished with the old standby, “You are what you eat.”
According to Sausalito nutritional scientist Deborah Kesten, that’s only the half of it.
“What you eat is as important as how you eat and with whom. And eating with that awareness may enhance your health and certainly enhance your whole quality of life,” said Kesten, author of “The Healing Secrets of Food.”
And, among world religions and cultures, “Judaism is probably the strongest in terms of appreciation [of food], eating with gratitude, eating from the heart.”
One’s demeanor, Kesten points out, can greatly alter how the body processes food. For example, in the 1960s, cardiologist Meyer Friedman fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol, butter-laden “killer meal” to two groups of men: loud, aggressive Type A personalities and a mellower Type B group.
The late Jewish doctor found the Type B group metabolized the fatty meal more effectively than the “hard-driving, competitive and impatient” Type A group.
Kesten, who is also Jewish, urges people to slow down and enjoy meals, a tendency she believes to be deeply ingrained in Judaism. Food, she contends, is seen as a “blessing” and “a gift from God.”
Before eating, Kesten suggests inducing the proper mindset via meditation. Her method involves envisioning a golden light over one’s head which “melts through your entire being. With this, let go of all your mind chatter and envision the golden light traveling through your heart, your hands and into the food.”
After explaining the process to U.C. San Francisco students and running “taste tests,” Kesten says that 99 percent of the test subjects said food smelled and tasted better than they expected it to, though “there’s always that one person who says, ‘I don’t smell or taste anything different.'”
It is not enough, however, to be relaxed, mellow and spiritual and then scarf down mounds of greasy pizza, sugary snacks or, for that matter, too many latkes and cream-cheesy bagels and lox.
Americans “are the fattest people in the world. Different kinds of cancer are increasing; high blood pressure, diabetes and congestive heart failure are on the rise, as is heart disease in young people,” said Kesten, who has worked with Dr. Dean Ornish and specifically explored the Jewish relationship to food in her last book, “Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul.”
One should “eat mostly plant-based food and a small amount of animal-based food, instead of the inverse, which is common in America. We eat mostly animal-based food and think we’re doing great if we get in some lettuce and tomatoes.”
Kesten urges a diet based on eating “fresh, whole foods in their natural state,” such as whole grains and legumes as often as possible. These foods can be supplemented by lean, fresh fish, meat and poultry, in smaller amounts than is standard American fare. This is the staple diet in many parts of the world, she says, despite Americans’ perceptions to the contrary.
“In the Mediterranean, our interpretation is buckets of olive oil, white-flour pasta and wine. But in Greece, for example, most people have fresh, whole plant-based seasonal food, meat two or three times a month and chicken or fish two or three times a week,” she said.
“Every day they have fresh feta cheese, which is naturally low in fat, and some yogurt. That kind of pattern exists in Mexico, where it’s mostly beans and rice, and Japan, where it’s mostly tofu and rice. Meat is not as prevalent in Israel or the Middle East as it is here. We have an inverse eating pattern from the rest of the world. Americans are out of whack with that.”