First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read Online Free Page B

at all. This is one of the reasons that constipation is now such a huge—though little mentioned—problem in Western countries, giving rise to 2.5 million physician visits a year in the United States.
    Some hold the view that it doesn’t really matter if children have unhealthy tastes, because once they grow up, they will effortlessly acquire a penchant for salad, along with a deeper voice and mature political opinions. Sometimes it does work out this way. Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change. In the 1970s, it was a common rite of passage to reject the conventional bland watery foods of a 1950s childhood and embrace mung beans and spices. Many tastes—for green tea, say, or vodka—are acquired, if at all, in adulthood. When we learn to love these bitter but lovely substances, we undergo what psychologists call a hedonic shift from pain to pleasure. You may overcome your childish revulsion at the bitterness of espresso when you discover the wonderful aftereffects, how it wakes up your whole body and infuses you with a desire for work. The great question is what it takes for us to undergo a similar shift to enjoying a moderate diet of healthy food.
    The process will be different for each of us, because each of us has learned our own particular way of eating. But wherever you start, the first step to eating better is to recognize that our tastes and habits are not fixed, but changeable.
      
    There’s a danger here that I’m making the process of changing how you eat sound easy. It isn’t. In particular, it isn’t easy for those who feed themselves on a tight budget. Many have observed that—in developed countries—obesity disproportionately affects those on low incomes. Poverty makes eating a healthy diet harder in numerous ways. It’s not just because it is far more expensive, gram for gram, to buy fresh vegetablesthan to buy heavily processed carbohydrates. Maybe you live in a “food desert” where nutritious ingredients are hard to come by, or in housing without an adequate kitchen. Growing up poor can engender a lifetime of unhealthy food habits, because a narrow diet in childhood is likely to narrow your food choices as an adult, even if your income later rises. When the flavors of white bread and processed meats are linked in your memory with the warmth and authority of a parent and the camaraderie of siblings, it can feel like a betrayal to stop eating them.
    Yet it’s striking that some children from low-income households eat much better than others, and sometimes better than children from more affluent families. The problems with how we now eat cut across boundaries of class and income. It is possible to create decent, wholesome meals—bean goulash, spaghetti puttanesca—on a shoestring budget. Equally, one can have the funds to buy chanterelle mushrooms and turbot but no inclination to do so. According to feeding therapists with whom I have spoken, there are successful businesspeople who will—literally—pass out from hunger at their desks rather than allow an unfamiliar meal to pass their lips, just because their preferred junk food is not available. Assuming you are not living in a state of famine, the greatest determinant of how well you eat is the way you have learned to behave around food.
    This behavior is often immensely complex. As we grow up, we become capable of second-order preferences as well as first-order preferences. A first-order preference is simple: you love crispy roasted potatoes, smothered in butter and salt. A second-order preference is more convoluted: you want to like eating carrots instead of the potatoes, because you think they would be less fattening and healthier. Indeed, you probably can, at least sometimes, limit yourself to eating raw vegetables instead of the carb-laden potatoes. But the real question is what happens next. In 1998, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister did a famous experiment. Baumeister, who is known for his work on self-defeating