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We open our mouths and taste a dish: sense organs are totally receptive, as during an embrace. The body prepares to receive something that sustains it, that saves it, that confers that principle of pleasure from which one cannot escape. The daily activity of eating is not limited to the introduction of a mechanical fuel, but feeds mind and spirit, senses and perception, pleasure and enjoyment. But good food is not enough, healthy food is also needed, what children still don't understand, what teenagers don't accept, what adults try to forget.

So, the initial aphorism takes on a different meaning, an interpretation that makes it more acceptable and sensible. If it is true that we don't live to eat, in short, we don't just live to eat; but we eat to continue living and to be able to continue eating. Food is functional to life, but life is happiness and joy, it is the pursuit of pleasure and constant experimentation with it. We eat to live, of course, but we live to be happy, to enjoy the life and food we live with. Consuming the foods, we like can lift our spirits and make us feel satisfied and relaxed. On the other hand, the consumption of our favorite foods can sometimes cause negative effects such as the feeling of be guilty and remorse. How to minimize the negative impact that food has on our mood and maximize the positive one?

The Pleasure Principle

Eating is one of the pleasures of life and, when possible, we love to consume the foods we like, and avoid ones we don't prefer. Would you like to always have a healthier and tasty diet? Give up on the restaurant and prepare your meals with your own hands. Eating at home is a reason for better health and fitness, experts say. Those who eat at home have better eating habits than those who often eat outside. This is what the Daily Mail reports of research conducted by the University of Washington. According to this recent study, cooking at home, (even alone or with someone) has several long-term benefits. Those who prepare their meals at home tend to eat better and stay in better shape than those who go out.

Furthermore, eating at home is good for your health, and for your pockets. It is no surprise that eating out is sometimes very expensive, while eating at home saves money. But that this savings is associated with physical benefits is less obvious. Of course, there is a tendency to think that the meals eaten at the bar in the little hysteria are less 'dietary' because they are enriched with seasonings and prepared with complex procedures. However, it is not only in this that eating out is less healthy than preparing meals at home.

The study has in fact highlighted how home lunches and dinners are on average richer in fruit and vegetables than those eaten outside. To find this, researchers used a unit of measurement called the 'Healthy Eating Index' (HEI). Taken 437 adults, they were asked to indicate all the foods consumed during the previous week. Specifying where they had eaten them. Crossing data, it emerged that eating at home leads people to consume more vegetables and fruits. While at the restaurant we tend to order meats, first courses, compound dishes more easily, at home we cook vegetables, we eat a fruit. Why?

Let me venture some hypotheses. When you order a dish in a restaurant, you tend to choose something that you do not ever eat often at home, perhaps because the preparation is long or complex. It is difficult to order a plate of broccoli. While at home, the vegetable side dish is practically omnipresent. In addition, the restaurant tends to order a dessert after a meal. While at home it is much easier to peel a tangerine than to prepare a cake. So, if these choices are made with a certain frequency, we can imagine how they affect the health of the body in long term.

Eating your favorite foods has been shown to stimulate the release of -endorphins which, as is known, enhance mood. However, the attractiveness of a food is not only linked to its sensorial properties, but also depends on the hunger that one has, on the experience lived on previous occasion when that food was consumed and on social circumstances in which it is consumed. In other words, the right food, at the right time, with the right company makes us feel good.

"Food Cravings"

Food cravings, or the burning desire to eat a particular food, seem to be very common. A survey indicates that, depending on the population studied, the people who reported being taken from food cravings vary between 60 - 90%. Interestingly, men and women attribute to these cravings conflicting behaviors and emotions. Normally men think that food cravings arise from hunger, while it is easier for women to attribute them to negative moods such as boredom and stress. Women are also more likely to experience negative feelings, such as guilt and remorse, if they have succumbed to temptation. At one time going out to dinner with friends was a pleasure. The restaurant was chosen in anticipation of the idea of tasting the specialties praised by the gastronomic guides, and delicious evenings were spent evaluating the dishes with the others, chatting and laughing, and in the end, we returned home happier.

You can no longer: who is vegan, who is lactose intolerant, who is allergic to pine nuts, or to pork, rabbit, strawberries. There is what the moon diet does, the other that of the Paleozoic, or that of asparagus for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Who the Atkins, who the Dukan, who that of the blood group, and then often you find the one obsessed with healthy food, who does not eat if not the things prepared at home, washed hundreds of times and bought only in a shop of his absolute trust. And then there are those who do not eat fish, those who do not eat meat, those who eat only raw food, but the worst is the one who exhausts you by pontificating that what you eat is pure poison, and only what he eats could make you live healthy, up to a hundred years, and he believes it with absolute certainty of a religious person: only he has seen the light, and you, unfortunate, who still put sugar in coffee and even drink it again, you are destined to die quickly. In short, it is now almost impossible to be happy eating, at least in company.

We are so obsessed with food that we talk about it all the time, venerating or demonizing it, but we have lost its primary and essential meaning. Food is the basis of life, without nourishment we would die, and it is true that without respect for what we ingest we could get sick, but we get sick not only for the insane, but also for the too healthy. Obsessiveness hurts in every field, like integralism, which does not respect the culture and culinary choices of others. We often forget that before the advent of intensive agriculture and new cultivation methods we were suffering from famines, we ate little, rickets and scrofulous were widespread in the poorest sections of the population, life expectancy was much lower, and on average, people died much younger than now.

At our times, there is much more food available and we ingest more calories than before, our bodies develop much more robust bone structures and withstand diseases much better, not only because of the sacrosanct scientific progress, but also because we are more nourished, and therefore stronger. And we forget we are basically omnivorous, and this feature has allowed us to evolve, allowing us to adapt even to extreme situations: we have always managed to find something to put under our teeth to survive, even during the worst wars and the most epochal famines.

Being omnivorous also helped us to develop very important brain skills, such as observation skills, curiosity and memory: eating only bamboo shoots, such as pandas, we would not have gone anywhere, said with all the love possible for Panda. So, to stay healthy and awake we need the greatest possible variety of foods, if we do not do not even perceive the goodness and variety of food that nature offers us, and above all we deprive ourselves of a fundamental primary pleasure, which is to feel joy in feeding us. Instead, eating is now a struggle against everything and everyone, and it is this situation of omnipresent tension that hurts us a lot, not a teaspoon of sugar.