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To my mom, the source of everything good in my life
No other area of the national health probably is as abused by deception and misinformation as nutrition. Many travesties cheat the public of enormous sums of money, and of good health as well. —WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON FOOD, NUTRITION, AND HEALTH5
The nutrition field has been dealing with bald-faced lies since back in the pre-post-truth era, and diet books can be the worst offenders. “Often the loudest, most extreme voices drown out the well informed,” wrote two noted nutrition professors on the subject of diet books. “There is also money to be made.”6
When it comes to obesity, the power of your genes is nothing compared to the power of your fork.
Genes may load the gun, but diet pulls the trigger.
Survival of the Fattest It’s been said: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”74
Similarly, a propensity to pack on the pounds may have been a plus in prehistoric times but can turn into a liability when our scarcity-sculpted biology is plopped down into the land of plenty. So the prime cause for the obesity epidemic is neither gluttony nor sloth. Obesity may simply be a normal response to an abnormal environment.78
What you’re left with is CRAP, an acronym conceived by one of my favorite dietitians, Jeff Novick, for calorie-rich and processed foods.
I can’t stress enough that becoming overweight is a normal, natural response to the abnormal, unnatural ubiquity of calorie-dense, sugary, and fatty foods.
the average child may be blasted with ten thousand food commercials a year. Or maybe I should say pseudo-food commercials, as 95 percent of the ads were found to be for candy, liquid candy (soft drinks), breakfast candy (sugary cereals), and fast food.108
Since all the eggs in an infant daughter’s ovaries are already preformed before birth,121 a mother’s weight status during pregnancy could potentially affect the obesity risk of her grandchildren too.122
By the year 2000, after taking exports into account, the United States was producing 3,900 calories a day for every man, woman, and child, nearly twice as much as many people need.128
U.S. taxpayers unwittingly give billions in subsidies to prop up the likes of the sugar industry, the corn industry and its high-fructose syrup, and
the soybean industry, which processes about half of its crop into vegetable oil and the other half into cheap animal feed to help make Dollar Menu meat.141 When was the last time you sat down to some sorghum? Exactly. Why then do taxpayers give nearly a quarter billion dollars a year to the sorghum industry?142 It’s almost all fed to livestock.143 We’ve created a pricing structure that favors the production of sugars, oils, and animal products.144
Subsidies are one of the reasons chicken is so cheap. After one of the farm bills, corn and soy were subsidized below the cost of production for cheap animal fodder, effectively handing the poultry
and pork industries around $10 billion each.150 That’s not chicken feed. Or rather, it is!
You’d have to eat a wheelbarrow full of cabbage before you’d ever need to begin worrying about overindulging.
Dr. David L. Katz may have said it best in Harvard Health Policy Review: Those who contend that parental or personal responsibility should carry the day despite these environmental temptations might consider the implications of generalizing the principle. Perhaps children should be encouraged, but not required, to attend school and tempted each morning by alternatives, such as buses to the circus, zoo, or beach.
“The interests of the public must be prioritized over those of corporations.”253
public company’s primary responsibility is to reap returns for investors. Consider the fact that the tobacco industry produces products that kill one in two of its most loyal customers.260 It’s not about customer satisfaction but shareholder satisfaction. The customer always comes second.
Rarely discussed is the fact that nearly one in two hundred knee replacement patients dies within ninety days of surgery.
despite skyrocketing obesity, the percentage of adults who describe themselves as overweight has remained essentially unchanged over the past few decades.
Bringing a Butter Knife to a Gunfight
Like quitting smoking, it helps to think of losing excess weight as just something that has to be done. As the chair of the Association for the Study of Obesity put it, it doesn’t take willpower to do essential tasks like getting up at night to feed a baby—it’s just something that has to be done.517
A body gaining weight when excess calories are available for consumption is behaving as it should.
Tobacco is one of our great public health victories. The share of adults who smoke declined from 42 percent in 1965754 down to just 15 percent today.
In the United States, every $1 spent taxing processed foods or milk might net an estimated $2 in health-care cost savings.
In a Senate hearing on nutrition education, he said, “Properly speaking, they ought to be called cereal-flavored candy, rather than sugar-covered cereals.”823
We used to think fatty tissue was just a passive depot for the storage of excess fat,971 but we now know it actively secretes inflammatory chemicals. Fatty
single meal high in saturated fat (equivalent to a quarter-pound cheeseburger and large fries) has been shown to increase whole-body insulin resistance by 25 percent.1019
One clue that pollutants may be playing some role is that our pets are also getting fatter.1044
Compared to serving soup prepared with fresh ingredients, five days of a daily serving of canned soup led to a 1,000 percent rise in BPA levels in the urine.1097 It
Take-Home Tip: BPA is why I specify in The How Not to Die Cookbook to choose beans and tomato products in jars, aseptic packaging (Tetra Paks), or BPA-free cans. Eden Foods, for example, has a line of BPA-free canned beans. You can also BYOB: Boil Your Own Beans. It’s cheaper, and they end up with a better texture. My favorite way is to use an electric pressure cooker (like an Instant Pot).
I know as parents there’s a concern that if our kids eat snacks, it might spoil their dinners, but when the snacks are fruit and the meal is “pepperoni and 3 cheese pizza,”1322 perhaps the more we can ruin their appetites, the better.
The impact of carbs on the body depends on their source. Kidney beans and jelly beans are both rich in carbs but can have diametrically different impacts on our bodies.
A systematic comparison of different foods and their low-fat versions found that items with reduced-fat claims tend to have more sugar.1370 Instead, we can dismount the processed food industry’s sugar-fat seesaw by opting for whole, natural foods.
Food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit in nutrition.1379 The source of fat is likely more important than the amount of fat. And let’s not forget that the healthiest foods don’t have any nutrition labeling on them at all. In the grocery store, you’re more likely to see “healthy” claims adorn Apple Jacks than apples.1380
In a remarkable study out of Hawaii that I detail further here and here, subjects achieved seventeen pounds of weight loss in twenty-one days eating unlimited quantities of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans.1413 That diet was 7 percent fat, similar to the traditional Okinawan diet. But
Cholesterol-raising saturated fats like those found in beef tallow make up the bulk of coconut oil.1492
I was delighted to discover that cooking without oil is surprisingly easy. To keep foods from sticking in the pan, you can sauté in wine, sherry, broth, vinegar, or just plain water. The trick is to just use a little liquid at a time. I use dried mushrooms a lot and always make it a habit to save the soaking liquid. I find porcini mushrooms produce an especially rich, dark, savory broth that’s perfect for my garlic and onions, and the added umami flavor makes it even easier to leave the salt out completely.
This has led sugar industry spokespersons, like the head of the World Sugar Research Organisation, to say things like “overconsumption of anything is harmful, including of water and air.”1507 Yes, he compared the overconsumption of sugar to breathing too much. This is a throwback to the well-worn tobacco industry script: They’re simply providing choices; they don’t condone the overuse of their products; and, if people fall ill after consuming it, the victims can only blame themselves.
The excess body weight of the U.S. population corresponds to about 350–500 excess daily calories on average,1522 which just so happens to be how many calories, on average, Americans failing to stay under the suggested sugar limits of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines get in added sugars every day.1523 Maybe that’s a good place to start cutting calories?
In the group who drank the aspartame-sweetened beverage, even though their blood sugars didn’t rise at the time, they shot up higher an hour later in response to lunch, as if they had just consumed a bottle of soda.1555
Narcan itself reduces the consumption of chocolate cookies, but not an unprocessed, whole-food source of sugar (orange fruit segments).1621 Given over a period of days, opiate blockers can decrease the calories consumed at all-you-can-eat meals by obese individuals by 30 percent.1622
In nature, while there are foods that contain sugar (like fruit) and foods that contain fat (like nuts), sugar and fat rarely occur in the same food naturally.1635 There is one, and it’s the most natural food of all. Can you think of it? Breast milk. Maybe that’s why high-fat, high-sugar foods are so addictive. We wouldn’t last long as a species if babies didn’t crave breast milk. Some have speculated that much of the success of both low-fat and low-carb diets may be from the elimination of these high-fat, high-sugar mixtures that we’re programmed to crave.1636
The eating habits of Americans have been described as “eat[ing] breakfast in their cars, lunch at their desks and chicken from a bucket.”1646 Most of us eat out at least three times a week1647 and average an extra two hundred or so calories on the days we do, all while taking in less nutrition.
You won’t believe it until you try it out for yourself: Cut out processed foods for a few weeks, and you’ll be amazed how good healthy can taste.
Overeating may be less about consuming an abnormal amount of food and more about consuming an abnormal type of food: meals that are unnaturally dense in calories.
Fast food averages about 1,200 calories per pound,1709 whereas traditional African diets, which more closely represent the likely diet of our ancient ancestors, average fewer than 500 calories per pound.1710 So the biological mechanisms our bodies use to regulate our weight likely evolved in the context of eating at least four or five pounds of food a day. That may be the more natural amount of food to eat. If your body is counting on eating five pounds of food but you max out with the same number of calories eating just two pounds of modern convenience food, what do you think happens? It’s no
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Researchers in Hawaii tried putting people on a traditional, pre-SPAM, Hawaiian diet with all the plant foods they could eat.1723 The study subjects lost an average of seventeen pounds in just twenty-one days. Caloric intake dropped by 40 percent, but not because they were eating less food. The subjects lost seventeen pounds in three weeks eating more food, in excess of four pounds of food a day.
