Coming Soon: The Low-Stress Food Blog

It starts with an intuition that the food we eat may represent a significant, previously unrecognized, source of chronic stress. Food brings us not only calories but also information through “gut feeling”. Assimilating the stress of the food we eat into our own body is an evolutionary strategy designed to protect us during stressful times of resource scarcity such as winter. The tremendous stress we impart on animals and plants through the industrialized food infrastructure is coming full circle back to those who consume them in a deadly rendition of “you are what you eat”. Despite living in a time of unprecedented resource abundance, but modern humans who consume stressed food are stewing in inappropriate angst and “fattening up for winter” on a year-round basis.

Insight into the role of chronic stress embedded in the foods is the first step in recognizing how food can improve our mental and physical wellness. The consumption of “second hand stress” embedded in foods could play a role in virtually every stress-associated disease. Low-Stress Food (LSF) may be the unifying paradigm that mechanistically links virtually all the observed associations between food and health under a common umbrella, particularly those involving modern health food movements such as organic foods, local foods, “slow foods”, vegetarianism, raw foods, in-season foods, macrobiotics, unprocessed foods, natural foods and free-range meats. At the core of all mainstream belief systems is the “Golden Rule”—the idea that kindness and cruelty both return in kind. Low-Stress Food extends that notion to the food that we eat and espouses the broader holistic philosophy that good relationships, whether at the personal or systemic level, are the foundation to building a better world.

Low-Stress Food is a referendum on the modern food system and reveals the potential to change the world if we collectively make enlightened choices about food. Moral persuasion alone can only take progressive social movements so far; LSF can more effectively catalyze these important movements and stir the populist imagination by mobilizing enlightened self-interest.