The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (Why Intermittent Fasting Is the Key to Controlling Your Weight)

by Jason Fung

Similarly, natives of the Japanese island of Okinawa eat a diet that is nearly 85 percent unrefined carbohydrates. The dietary staple is sweet potato. They eat three times as many green and yellow vegetables, but only 25 percent of the sugar consumed by residents of nearby Japan. Despite the high intake of carbohydrates, there is virtually no obesity, and the average body mass index is only 20.4. They are one of the longest-lived peoples in the world, with more than triple the rate (compared to nearby Japan) of people living past 100 years. Clearly, the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis is an incomplete theory, leading many to abandon it rather than try to reconcile it with the known facts. One possibility is that there is an important difference in eating rice versus wheat. Asians tend to eat rice, whereas Western societies tend to take their carbohydrate as refined wheat and corn products. It is also possible that changes in Western obesity rates are related to changes in the variety of wheat we are eating. Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, a New York Times bestseller, suggests that the dwarf wheat that we eat today may be far different from the original wheat. The Einkorn variety of wheat has been cultivated since 3300 BC. By the 1960s, as the world’s population grew larger, agricultural techniques aimed at increasing the yield of the wheat led to new varieties of wheat called dwarf and semi-dwarf wheat. Currently, 99 percent of commercially grown wheat is dwarf a...