Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Re-Visioning of Nutritional Health

by | Mar 11, 2024 | Integrative Eating

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Could returning to our ‘food roots’—going back to a dietary lifestyle that nourished humankind physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially—be the answer to turning the tide of today’s pandemic of diet-related chronic conditions?

—By Deborah Kesten

 

Even though nutritional science has made amazing discoveries about food, nutrition, health and healing—especially during the last few decades—the prevalence of diet-related, chronic, body-mind conditions continues to surge. From obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, to some cancers, ischemic stroke, metabolic syndrome, osteoporosis, depression and more, these chronic conditions have been skyrocketing for decades. In 2012, 133 million Americans (1 in 2 Americans) suffered from chronic conditions, and if trends continue, the number is projected to grow to about 171 million by 2030.1

Referring to medicine, Larry Dossey, MD, wrote, “We have stopped our investigation of healing well short of its potential.2 In the same way, is it possible we have limited the potential of nutritional science to live up to its potential by focusing on a singular scientific framework, a reductionist perspective that reduces food to functional fuel and nutrients for our body? Might a broader view, an integrative approach that addresses biological, psychological, spiritual, and social well-being, provide the foundation for nutritional science to live up to its potential as a powerful health and healing tool for preventing, managing, even reversing a plethora of diet-related chronic conditions?

EVOLUTION of Whole Person Integrative Eating:

Moving Forward by Looking Back

The prevalence of obesity is daunting, with almost 75% percent of adults in the United States either overweight or obese, as are one-third of children and adolescents.4,5 Overweight and obesity significantly increase the risk of death from a range of chronic conditions—from diabetes and heart disease to metabolic syndrome, certain cancers, and hypertension. Indeed, for the first time in two centuries, due to the prevalence of chronic conditions, life expectancy in the United States is projected to decline.3,4 And 32 percent of infants are obese or at risk for obesity.6

Weight loss programs and diets, which I’m defining as “a prescribed, regimented way of eating,” are not an effective solution for maintaining weight loss for the long-term, because most people who lose weight tend to regain it. At the same time, a well-controlled study reveals pounds lost appear about equal across the popular diet approaches, ranging from a low-fat, high-complex-carbohydrate diet to a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet.7 Such results suggest that it does not seem to matter what diet overweight subjects follow and that overeating, overweight, and obesity, and other diet-related chronic conditions, will not be solved with a singular focus on what and how much to eat.

To explore a broader solution, I researched and studied cross-cultural food- and nutrition-related guidelines, beliefs, and rituals from both Western and Eastern nutrition and food systems and sciences for guidelines about optimal eating. This includes the following:

(1) Western nutritional science;

(2) major world religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism);

(3) cultural traditions (i.e., yogic nutrition, African American soul food, Native American beliefs, the Japanese Way of Tea, Chinese food folklore);

(4) Eastern healing systems that include food and nutrition guidelines (i.e., traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Tibetan medicine, etc.).

For thousands of years—prior to the evolution of nutritional science in the 20th century—humankind turned to the above major world religions, cultural traditions, and Eastern healing systems—for guidelines about what and how to eat. Results from this research about ancient food wisdom were published in my first award-winning book Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul8—which includes more than 50 interviews with scientists, religionists, and spiritual experts.

Discovering the Four Facets of Food:

The Power of Food to Heal Multidimensionally

Merging ancient food wisdom with modern nutritional science provided the foundation for the authors to identify a broader, cross-cultural, integral approach to food and nutrition; an integrative eating model and program consisting of seven perennial food and nutrition themes that recur so often, they can be considered universal guidelines: fresh food, positive feelings, mindfulness, gratitude, loving regard, and eating with others.9

To make meaning of these themes, which encompass seven specific principles—I wrote about them in my second book called The Healing Secrets of Food. What also emerged is that these perennial principles comprise four facets of food. In other words, they provide guidelines for biological (what to eat for physical health), psychological (how food affects feelings), spiritual (the life-giving meaning in meals), and social (dining with others) nourishment.

Here’s how the seven cohesive guidelines look from the perspective of the four facets:

BIOLOGICAL NUTRITION
1. Eat fresh whole foods in their natural state as often as possible.

PSYCHOLOGICAL NUTRITION
2. Be aware of feelings and thoughts before, during, and after eating.
3. Dine in pleasant psychological and aesthetic surroundings.

SPIRITUAL NUTRITION
4. Bring moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness to every aspect of the meal.
5. Appreciate food and its origins—from the heart.
6. Create union with the Divine by “flavoring” food with love.

SOCIAL NUTRITION
7. Unite with others through food.9-13

The four facets of food tell us what religions, cultural traditions, and Eastern healing systems discovered instinctively and intuitively and what modern researchers are beginning to conjecture: that food empowers us to heal multidimensionally. The authors use the term “whole person integrative eating” to describe the “four facet” way of eating, because the facets make connections between food and body, food and mind, food and soul, and food and social well-being.9

DEFINITION: Whole Person Integrative Eating

A re-visioning of optimal dietary care is emerging. It is a multi-factorial, whole person dietary lifestyle that addresses biological, psychological, spiritual, and social well-being; at the same time, it embraces evidence-based global nutrition guidelines and healing systems. Called Whole Person Integrative Eating, this cross-cultural model and program is a distillation of optimal food and eating principles gleaned from many disciplines, with a special focus on nutritional anthropology, medical anthropology, and nutritional science. It is a model developed as an outcome of research by behavioral scientist Larry Scherwitz, PhD, and me, over the last two decades;8-13 and our more recent study, which links each element of Whole Person Integrative Eating, i.e., biological, psychological, spiritual, and social nutrition, to overeating, overweight, and obesity.14

Based on these findings, Whole Person Integrative Eating is defined as a holistic, integrative approach to food, eating, health and healing that addresses the power of food to heal multidimensionally. At its core, Whole Person Integrative Eating reaffirms an optimal therapeutic relationship between food and eating, and ‘whole person’ health and healing.

Does Whole Person Nutrition Weigh in with Weight Loss? 

To find out if there is a link between perennial food wisdom and weight, we partnered with Spirituality & Health magazine. In its cover story on the four facets and seven guidelines, readers were invited to take my six-week, eighteen lesson e-course on the magazine’s website. Participants first completed a 76-item whole person nutrition survey and entered their height and weight. Of the 5,256 participants, throughout the e-course, those who increasingly ate according to the six perennial themes were the ones who lost the most weight.14

While the implications were enormous in relation to the question of how to lose weight,15,16 with another turn of our statistical kaleidoscope we realized that the food choices and eating behaviors elicited by our 76-item questionnaire could be clustered into seven styles of eating that predict overeating and weight gain. We call these “overeating styles”:14

  • Food Fretting (dieting and obsessing about the “best” way to eat)
  • Task Snacking (eating while doing other activities)
  • Emotional Eating (turning to food to self-medicate negative emotions)
  • Fast Foodism (consuming mostly denatured, processed food products)
  • Solo Dining (eating alone more often than not)
  • Unappetizing Atmosphere (eating in unpleasant psychologicaland aesthetic environments)
  • Sensory Disregard (eating without attention to flavors, aromas, presentation, etc.)

Clearly, all seven overeating styles strongly diverge from the six perennial principles that served as eating guidelines in the past. Psychologist and obesity expert Kelly D. Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, might explain our findings as “modern food conditions and their mismatch with evolution,”17 because the essence of our findings is that there is a huge disparity between what (food choices) and how (eating behaviors) we eat today and what and how human beings ate and evolved for millennia (see our Whole Person Nutrition Program for more about this).

As a society, we have systematically moved away from the time-tested, integrative modes of eating and living that kept us slimmer and healthier for centuries. The way we ate and lived for thousands of years worked. The “new normal,” the way we’ve been eating and living for the past few decades, doesn’t.

Such findings suggest that an integrative eating approach may provide a basis for comprehensive approaches to reduce overeating, overweight, and obesity based on the realization that overeating is not merely an isolated behavior. Rather, it is part of a web of related food choices, feelings, sensory experience, and social behaviors that reflect the original meaning of the word diet as a way of life. We may ultimately find that spirit and emotional connectedness is nourishing. When we are nourished this way, we may not need to compensate with overeating and satiety.

Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Re-visioning of Nutritional Health

Whole Person Integrative Eating presents a broader scope of nutrition than the dominant biomedical nutrition model. Indeed, an editorial on the authors’ research described whole person integrative eating as “…a fresh perspective on our epidemic of overeating, overweight, and obesity…that, if replicated, could signal a paradigm shift in the field of nutrition.”18 Such insights are based on a growing recognition that reductionist, eating-by-number nutrition, while helpful for certain food-related health conditions, does not and cannot effectively address the escalating epidemics of obesity and other diet-related chronic diseases.

The authors are positing that a comprehensive, whole person integrative eating approach has the potential to prevent, manage, or reverse many diet-related chronic conditions—while at the same time, it gives patients the dietary self-care tools they need to be proactive players in turning around a plethora of ailments through optimal dietary care and other lifestyle changes.19,20

In this way, it is a timely, efficient, and state-of-the-art intervention that provides optimum dietary care with evidence of safety and effectiveness as well as time- and science-tested procedures and strategies. At the same time, it informs and involves patients in optimal dietary self-management; relates and adapts to diverse populations; provides a proactive, coaching-based model for behavioral change based on patients’ cultural beliefs and food preferences; and integrates the biological, psychological, spiritual, and social facets of nutritional science.

References:

  1. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes, https://quotefancy.com/barbara-grizzuti-harrison-quotes, com, #31 (accessed March 19,2022).
  2. Deborah Kesten, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul: Essentials of Eating for Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Well-Being (Amherst, MA: White River Press, 2019).
  3. Deborah Kesten and Larry Scherwitz, “Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Program for Treating Overeating, Overweight, and Obesity,” Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal 14, no. 5 (October/November 2015): 42–50.
  4. Larry Scherwitz and Deborah Kesten, “Seven Eating Styles Linked to Overeating, Overweight, and Obesity,” Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing 1, no. 5 (2005): 342–59.
  5. Deborah Kesten and Larry Scherwitz, Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Breakthrough Dietary Lifestyle to Treat the Root Causes of Overeating, Overweight, and Obesity (Amherst, MA: White River Press, 2020).
  6. Lakeshia Cousin, Laura Redwine, Christina Bricker, Kevin Kip & Harleah Buck (2021) “Effect of gratitude on cardiovascular health outcomes: a state-of-the-science review,” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 16:3, 348-355.
  7. Ryan Bradley, “Eating habits and diabetes: how we eat may be more important than what we eat,” Diabetes Action website, June 2011, www.diabetesaction.org/article-eating -habits?rq=ryan%20bradley%202011.
  8. John Berardi, et al, “No, no food is NOT fuel. And, thankfully, you’re not a Ferrari.” https://www.precisionnutrition.com/food-is-not-fuel, PrecisionNutrition.com (accessed March 16, 2022)
  9. Morse and M. Furst, “Meditation: An In-depth Study,” Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine 29, no. 5 (1982): 1–96.
  10. Jean Kristeller, “An Exploratory Study of a Meditation-Based Intervention for Binge Eating Disorder,” Journal of Health Psychology 4, no. 3 (1999): 357–63.
  11. Daubenmier, G. Weidner, M. Sumner, N. Mendell, et al., “The Contribution of Chang- es in Diet, Exercise, and Stress Management to Changes in Coronary Risk in Women and Men in the Multisite Cardiac Lifestyle Intervention Program,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 33 (January 2007) 57–68.
  12. org, “An Appreciative Heart is Good Medicine,” July 2, 2009, https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-development/an-appreciative-heart-is-good-medicine/(accessed March 20, 2022).
  13. Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). “Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377.
  14. Emmons, R. A., McCullough, M. E., & Solomon, R. C. (2004). “The psychology of gratitude.” In R. A. Emmons & M. E. McCullough (Eds.), The psychology of gratitude (pp. 3– 16). Oxford University Press.
  15. Nerem, J. Murina, J. Levesque, and J. Fredrick Cornhill, “Social Environment as a Factor in Diet-Induced Atherosclerosis,” Science New Series 208, no. 4451 (1980): 1475–76.
  16. Larry Scherwitz, “Type A behavior, self-involvement, and coronary atherosclerosis,” Psychosomatic Medicine 45, no.1[