As a nutrition coach, when guiding clients towards a healthier diet, you run into a sometimes almost unsolvable problem, namely the unhealthy temptation in our obesogenic environment.
Obesogenic environment
As a result, your client needs to be very strong in his or her own mind to maintain a balanced healthy diet in the long run. This requires sufficient focus, motivation and discipline.
If there were no supermarkets and you had to survive in nature, as it were, the chances of getting overweight and the typical diseases of affluence are very low. This is partly due to the fact that there is no abundance and that hunger, satiety and energy consumption are very much in tune with each other in this setting. In today's age where you as a human being food in the supermarket buys there is something very different going on. Eating behaviour is hardly regulated by hunger and satiety any more, but mainly by mental eating behaviour, either 'eating without hunger'. After all, the supermarket is full of ultra-processed snacks which have been put together to arrive at a 'bliss-point' or 'delight point' to come. In the process, temporary all lucky dust released in your brain. Many people reach for these products full of sugar, fat and salt because they want to numb a negative feeling such as loneliness or stress, but also to reinforce a positive feeling when you want to celebrate life.
Emotional eating
One person tends more towards emotion-eating than the other. This is partly due to a relationship you have built from a young age with food and copycat behaviour, but also the hormonal balance can enhance 'eating without hunger'. Happiness substances in your brain can be lowered by a slow thyroid, low melatonin (poor sleep), insulin resistance (in blood sugar dips), declining oestrogen (just before menstruation and menopause), low testosterone (in men) and in adrenal exhaustion (burnout). With hormonal imbalance, it often becomes even harder to resist all those temptations.
As a nutrition coach, you know that lack of knowledge is rarely the biggest problem with a client, but difficulty in coming to lasting behavioural change is. For example, people who go to a snack bar really don't think that what they are doing at that moment is healthy. The same is also the case in much of the supermarket such as in the snack and candy department.
Psychological war of seduction
There is only one really big problem in the supermarket and that is the psychological war of temptation waged against you. Everything is thought out with the aim that you will put as much as possible in your basket or trolley. It starts with slowing down with the aim of exposing you to this temptation for as long as possible. The gate opens slowly, the music is often slow and on top of that, the frequently bought products are in strategic places. As a result, you have to walk all over the supermarket so that as many enticing packages of unhealthy products as possible can excite your brain. And as if this does not make the chances of impulse and emo purchases high enough, there is also a Mars or Snickers looking at you very sweetly when you want to checkout at the self-scanning checkout.
When the government, supermarket and food industry really wanted the Netherlands to become healthier, rock-hard rules would be put in place to reduce temptation and weaken our health-undermining obesogenic environment. However, this is patently not the case. There are much more weighty other (financial) interests at play than the health of the Netherlands, making it more convenient to leave the situation as it is.
Nutri-Score nonsense
Well what do you do in that case to distract the public and pretend to have a pure intention? Then you devise something like a Nutri-Score, which would help consumers choose the 'healthiest product' in a product group, which in practice often means 'the least unhealthy product'.
In this way, government, food industry and supermarket wipe their alley clean and they seem to be proud of it too. "See how easy we make it for the client? If they choose the unhealthiest products then it's their own fault. Many people just have a weak character and we can't do anything about that."
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