When I was in college I had a roommate who was obsessed with her weight. She kept a fastidious cataloguing of her daily calories attempting to consume no more than 500-1000 calories per day. She had an iron-will determination and was somehow able to stick with it, at least during the years I knew her. You might ask how she looked with so few calories coming in. Remember, we were in college – studying, reading, writing papers, taking exams, and all that being in school entailed, aka brain overload. In truth, she was the vision of the walking dead, with terrible acne, low energy, string-bean figure, and zero muscle tone. In a word, she was starving - and exhausted all the time.
I share this little bit of background because she was fighting her own demons related to fear of fat and aging and believed controlling her weight in such a severe way would help her in the long run. She once said to me, “I’m dreading growing old, and will do anything in my power to avoid it.” Bear in mind that we were only 21, and never hearing anyone our age lament the aging process replied, “I’m actually looking forward to it. It’ll be a challenge!” I don’t know why I said that – surely it was my bullet-proof youth talking – but what I said at the time has stayed with me ever since.
Whether I realized it consciously or not, I would soon be on a quest of sorts – wondering how I could prevent the aging things my roommate feared so much: becoming fat, and/or sick and/or decrepit before my time. Sure, I wasn’t skinny like her, but for a college co-ed I thought I was doing ok. But I wondered if to avert the things she feared, I would have to ultimately starve myself too. After all, I was eating low fat foods, whole grains/starches, using vegetable and seed oils, eating fruits and vegetables, and avoiding most meat; all with the idea that a calorie is a calorie, move more, eat less, and above all use portion control.
But that advice has not worked for most people, including me, and there is a direct correlation from the 1960s when food guidelines were proposed, to the 1970s when the Food Pyramid was adopted leading to the out-of-control rise in obesity and diabetes epidemic (Shanahan, 2107; Fung, 2016; Teicholz, 2014).
Briefly…
When the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet was first officially recommended to the public by the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1961, roughly one in seven adult Americans was obese. Forty years later, that number was one in three…. During these decades, we’ve also seen rates of diabetes rise drastically from less than 1 percent of the adult population to more than 11 percent, while heart disease remains the leading cause of death for both men and women. In all, it’s a tragic picture for a nation that has, according to the government, faithfully been following all the official dietary guidelines for so many years. If we’ve been so good, we might fairly ask, why is our health report card so bad?
Teicholz, 2014 (p. 5)
But…
Medical school teaches us to believe that we’re living longer now, and so today’s diet must beat the diets of the past, hands down. This argument had me so convinced that I never considered questioning the dietary dogma I’d absorbed throughout my schooling. But we need to take into account the fact that today’s eighty-year-olds grew up on an entirely different, more natural diet. They were also the first generation to benefit from antibiotics, and many have been kept alive thanks only to technology. Today’s generation has yet to prove its longevity, but given that many forty-year-olds already have joint and cardiovascular problems that their parents didn’t get until much later in life (as I found in my practice), I don’t think we can assume they have the same life expectancy. And the millennium generation’s lifespan may be ten to twenty years shorter.
Shanahan, 2107 (p. 11)
Due to…
Our own disastrous, misguided dietary changes since the 1970s have created the diabesity debacle. We have seen the enemy, and it is ourselves. Eat more carbohydrates. Eat more often. Eat breakfast. Eat more. Ironically, these dietary changes were prescribed to reduce heart disease, but instead, we’ve encouraged it since diabesity is one of the strongest risk factors for heart disease and stroke. We’ve been trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Fung, 2016 (p. 135)
Sadly, America’s most obese (and diabetic) people are growing by leaps and bounds.
An annual obesity report shows that 68.7% of U.S. adults are now considered overweight or obese -- and that's not even the scariest finding….Between 1976 and 1980, the number of extremely obese adults -- quantified as those with a body mass index over 40 -- totaled 1.4% of the population. According to the latest study figures, the number of extremely obese adults has climbed 350% to 6.3%! (Williams, 2013)
Since then I’ve learned of the cascade of diseases that may be directly and indirectly affected by elevated insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia) and excessive polyunsaturated vegetable and seed oils (found in virtually all commercially packaged foods and restaurants) consumed as a result of excessive and prolonged intake over the past 40 years. In other words, could diets laden with too much of these processed foods overwhelm our bodies and lead to Type II Diabetes, Alzheimer’s (now referred to as Type III Diabetes), obesity, heart disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, certain types of cancer, and/or a myriad of other metabolic related conditions? Or is our health just the luck of the draw? Does bad (s***) just happen to us no matter what we do?
Consider this 2017 obesity map…it’s something to contemplate.
I contend that the overarching root cause for the escalation of illness and disease is due to INFLAMMATION; as this seemingly innocuous, insidious condition is at the heart of all metabolic diseases. From what I understand, obesity, diabetes, brain, respiratory, autoimmune, skin, oral health and bowel/digestive issues, diseases and illnesses have their foundations with inflammation, and as such, can be reversed, or at minimum, mitigated to stack the deck in our favor as we age. To do that, with respect to not only our Epigenetics (body/mind/spirit lifestyle choices), it may be especially critical to consider what we are putting in our mouths in terms of how those foods contribute or not to inflammation and the downstream ramifications in our bodies.