Americans in all 50 states, except for one (Oregon), have become more obese, according to this latest report.
WELL DUH!!
Americans continue to eat low-fat, carb heavy diets of processed food products. (How can you tell the difference between food and food products?)
While the fast food industry has to accept some blame, how about the AMA, USDA, AHA and even the American Diabetic Association for their decades of pushing these supposed healthy diets of low-fat and high-carbs? (ie. skim milk, and lean chicken with pasta and potatoes.)
But sugar -- and foods that rapidly convert to sugar -- are the real cause of the obesity epidemic.
How does the body deal with sugar? It produces insulin. The job of insulin is to take sugar OUT of the blood stream and convert it into fat. Therefore, body fat comes from high amounts of sugar, NOT from fat! Sugar has to go somewhere. The body stores it as fat. The low-fat, high carb diets are actually what make you FAT!!
As I say in Chapter 11 of my book, when farmers want to fatten up livestock, they feed them grains, NOT FAT!
If you keep up the low-fat, high-carb diet, the body's cells start to lock up in response to the massive amount of insulin that the pancreas has to pump out to combat the sugar overload. (The same is true for sugar substitutes, NutraSweet, Splenda, etc. found in Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, etc.) Eventually, you will end up with insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity.
Basically, these agencies have been teaching everyone the wrong things for years. And the food industry is marketing the "approved" message very successfully! Beverages with artificial sweeteners will soon carry the American Diabetes Association seal of approval, even though these beverages are culprits in the obesity epidemic. Read how Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages joins the American Diabetes Association in the fight against diabetes and obesity. How ironic for a product that causes diabetes to actually help the fight against diabetes!
Long before sugar and refined grains became staples, people ate large amounts of animal proteins, vegetables and fruits. Our ancestors ate foods high in saturated fats and low-carb foods, and they weren't troubled with insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity. The Weston A. Price Foundation is an excellent resource of information on traditional diets and how they have morphed dramatically in the last 100 years.
The writers at my company have also written an excellent piece on healthy diet. I'm very proud to have them on the team as we put a BIG emphasis on helping you learn what really makes up a healthy diet. I believe that a truly healthy diet is the first step to conquering nearly all chronic health conditions!
You may ask, "What about exercise? No one exercises any more!" Granted, the human race has been much less active in the last 100 years thanks to technological advances. Our ancestors were much more active pre-Industrial revolution through the necessity of hunting, farming, etc. So while I am a big proponent of getting out there and sweating, lack of exercise plays only a very minor role in the obesity epidemic.
UPDATE 8/30: Here's an interesting article by Dani Veracity at NewsTarget that is very relevant to the original post about how "Big Sugar" works as hard as "Big Tobacco" to hide the truth about sugar.
Marion Nestle in Food Politics describes how vulnerable dietary guidelines are to the sugar industry's political maneuverings. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) 2005 Guidelines were recently rephrased from "limit your intake of added sugars" -- a guideline that has been in place for the past five years -- to "moderate your intake of sugars."
While this change appears harmless at first, a closer look at the definitions of the words "limit" and "moderate" explains why Big Sugar invested so much money into the USDA amendment. "Moderate" denotatively means "not excessive or extreme" or "of medium quality." The revised wording suggests that we should eat some sugar -- that a medium amount of sugar is good for you -- but beware of over-indulgence. "Limit," on the other hand, is a much more decisive word. To limit sugar intake implies that we're already eating too much and we need to cut it out of our diet. These slight rhetorical nuances aren't a mistake. Big Sugar poured big money into masking the dangers of American sugar intake.
