Does it REALLY Matter What I Eat?

There are many reasons for being complacent about one's eating habits:

• I enjoy my comfort food, so I really have no impetus to eat healthier.
• Diabetes [or heart disease, or Alzheimer's, or Crohn's or...fill in the blank] runs in the family, and there's not much I can do about it.
• I find as long as I exercise, I can pretty much eat whatever I want.
• Nutrition nerds are way too extreme. I believe in moderation.
• It takes too much time [or money] to eat healthy; I just can't put that much into it.
• I would cook healthier, but my family wouldn't eat it.
• I hate cooking. I hate dishes. Just give it to me in a disposable wrapper.

Does one of these justifications sound familiar?  Underlying all of these excuses is the assumption that what we eat really doesn't matter that much.

It might come as a shock, then, that no more than 25 percent of health is actually hard-wired into the genes, according to Professor Jose M. Ordovas, Ph.D, director of the Nutrition and Genomics program at Tufts University, home of the Human Genome Project.

Further, of all the lifestyle habits that we employ either to our well-being or our detriment, diet is at the top of the list of risk factors. In a publication of the World Health Organization, titled "Chronic Diseases and Their Chronic Risk Factors," we are told that "the causes of chronic diseases are well established and well known. A small set of common risk factors are responsible for most of the main chronic diseases," in both men and women, regardless of geographical location. The first of these risk factors is diet. (The next two are sedentary lifestyle and tobacco smoke.)

So does it matter whether you eat healthy? I guess that depends on whether you want to be healthy.
If you are satisfied with your current level of health or worse, you don't need to read this blog. If you are hoping to improve your health, you can't expect to just take a pill and keep eating fast food and convenience snacks. Over the next 10 years, if you do nothing to change your dietary habits, your risk of disease will increase by roughly 20%, according to the World Health Organization. It does matter.