A Plague in the USA – Obesity
As all the news channels tell us, and as all the TV doctors tell us, Americans are much too heavy. Pictures of overweight Americans are everywhere Medical reports attribute a dramatic rise in diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and illness as diverse as cancer and heart attacks to this plague of obesity.
The Main Cause of Obesity
According to many specialists, this plague is directly attributable to the rise in sugar consumption. Nature makes us fond of sugar. Sugar is sweet. It tastes good. It makes us crave more. When sugar is consumed, the body converts sugar to sucrose, fructose and glucose and then stores this sugar in our cells. The sugar (energy) stored in our cells is supposedly to be used for future needs. As soon as you eat sugar or fructose, the pancreas responds by secreting insulin, which converts dietary sugar into glycogen, a fuel tissues can use.
In our evolution, our species experienced periods of great scarcity of food and periods of overabundance, whether these periods be short, or extended. Nature’s way of preserving our species is too store energy as body fat when it is available, in order that in periods of scarcity, this is a reserve store of energy to sustain us.
This is a really good design for humans, except that we no longer have periods of scarcity. McDonalds and fast foods are available to us always – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So we store fat every day, and never, ever, use it. We just get more food when we are hungry.
Where does all this sugar that we consume, come from? From soft drinks. From every meal at every fast food restaurant who use lots of sugar in their foods to make their foods taste better. From Starbucks in their wonderfully refreshing summer drinks. From every box of prepared foods that we buy in every supermarket. From every ‘regular’ coffee that we drink. Our food industry is quite adept at making foods taste good.
How Much Sugar do We Consume?
Dr. Mehmet Oz answered: The average person consumes 150 pounds of sugar per year–compared to just 7 pounds consumed on average in the year 1700. That’s 20 times as much! When typical slightly overweight people eat sugar, they on average store 5 percent as ready energy to use later, metabolize 60 percent and store a whopping 35 percent as fat that can be converted to energy later.
Interestingly, 50 percent of the sugar we consume today comes from high-fructose corn syrup in fat-free foods like salad dressings and regular soft drinks.
What is the Effect of all this Sugar on our Weight?
Average adult Americans are about one inch taller, but nearly a whopping 25 pounds heavier than they were in 1960, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The bad news, says CDC is that average BMI (body mass index, a weight-for-height formula used to measure obesity) has increased among adults from approximately 25 in 1960 to 28 in 2002.
Suicide by sugar? Sweet tooth is killing us, many doctors say
By Marni Jameson, Orlando Sentinel, 6:48 p.m. EST, June 16, 2012
As mounting evidence leads to the tart truth that sugar is a toxic substance and fueling America’s biggest health problems, more medical experts are going sugar-free, and more policymakers are seeking ways to clamp down on its consumption.
In Chicago, delegates to the American Medical Association — a group that creates much of the country’s medical advice — will vote on whether taxing sugar-sweetened beverages would be an effective way to reduce their consumption.
The United States now spends three out of every four health-care dollars treating these diseases, according to the authors of a recent article in Nature, which said that because of sugar’s potential for abuse — coupled with its toxicity and pervasiveness in the Western diet — it should be controlled like alcohol and tobacco.
“I agree with all of it,” said Dr. Phil Wood, a scientist at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in Lake Nona, where he’s a professor of metabolic disease. “All these diseases could be largely avoided or prevented if Americans consumed less sugar.”
Wood, 55, got serious about kicking his sugar habit 10 years ago. He hasn’t had a soft drink since. “I’m disgusted by the whole industry.” Four years ago, his frustration with the food industry’s unwillingness to cut sugar in its products led him to walk away from his role as a paid consultant for a large cereal company. “The company executives refused to listen to my advice,” Wood said. “They tried to gloss over the harmful effects of sugar. The food industry is in denial because it will cost them to change their ways.”
The association between America’s sugar habit and its skyrocketing rate of metabolic diseases already has caught the attention of policymakers.
Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted a plan to ban supersized soft drinks in restaurants and movie theaters, citing the sugary drinks’ ill effects on health — and wallets.
That same week, the Food and Drug Administration quashed a petition from the Corn Refiners Association asking permission to change the much-maligned name of high-fructose corn syrup to the more innocuous “corn sugar.”
The Disguises of Sugar
If you listen to Dr Steven Gundry, author of the Diet Revolution, a noted heart surgeon and expert on diet and nutrition, many common beliefs promoted by our food industry, are faulty. For example, juicers promoted as an aid to help us eat more fruit, are really helping us to convert more good food to sugar. Similar comments for Florida Orange Juice. Essentially drinking juices, makes the job of the body to convert food to usable substances much easier. All fiber, all fats, all protein is removed, and the job of converting the food is already mostly done before the body starts its digestion. All the body has to do, is convert the remaining sugar to body fat. Fascinating isn’t it? We are drinking sugar.
Eating low fat foods creates the illusion that we are being good and watching our diet. In fact, the opposite is the truth. Most supposedly low fat foods are instead loaded with sugar to make them taste better. So the consumption of sugar, which is the real culprit is far higher than it would otherwise be if you eat low fat foods. Further, reducing fat by cutting away obvious fat in the food reduces fat consumption. But removing fat by processing the food, makes the food much easier for the body to digest as many of the harder to digest parts of the food have been removed. Hence, rather than the body consuming the food over several hours in a normal fashion, digestion is much quicker, resulting in more energy and fuel being produced by the digestion process, than can be used by the body. So the body stores the excess as fat. Counter Intuitive isn’t it?
Consuming carbohydrates. Generally most carbohydrates that we consume are in the form of grains that have been processed. This includes breads, sweets, cakes, biscuits, and includes foods that are eaten in most meals. We try to eat whole grains, and seed filled breads. We try to eat healthy breads. We try to eat crackers made with healthy oils. It is all a bunch of NONSENSE. The truth is that every one of these products is a type of processed food. The truth is that processed food is already partially converted before the body starts digesting them. So the digestive process works too quickly, too much fuel for the body is produced too quickly, and the excess is stored as fat.
Sugar substitutes. This is a fraud of classic proportions. People consume diet drinks in mass, thinking that somehow the artificial sweeteners reduce weight gain. People use these artificial sweeteners in coffee, in baking, in many uses. However, what really happens is two main effects. Firstly, these sweeteners are mostly addictive. When you consume some, you normally want more. Since you are led to believe that they are good for you, you don’t mind consuming more.
But have you ever seen anyone lose weight consuming these sweeteners. I don’t think so. Instead you gain weight. Artificial sweeteners trick the body into believing that sugar in one form or another is being consumed. So the body secrets more insulin, and attempts to store more fat and energy, and a vicious cycle is perpetrated.
The Answer
Eat natural foods. Avoid processed foods. Avoid artificial anything. Never eat anything that has been converted in any way from the natural state in which it was grown, or created.
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