Diet And Exercise
What Is The Root Cause Of Obesity?
Are The Chemicals In The Food We Eat Contributing To Obesity?
Fat liquefying cream, weight loss pills, fat burning foods, fad diets, weight loss programs, and home exercise equipment are some of the most searched terms on Google. There is a good reason for this, there is an obesity epidemic gripping this country. By some estimates 20% or more of the population has an obesity problem, and this percentage appears to be increasing.
The Chemicals In Our Diet
Go to your kitchen cabinet and just grab a can of something at random. Look at the label carefully and you will find that there is more listed there than the food product that is supposed to be in the can. I don't know what that stuff is, I guess some of it is preservatives, some of it is dyes to make the stuff more colorful, who knows? My point is that we are consuming all kinds of chemicals, and we have no idea what effect they have on our body. The food and drug administration has supposedly determined that this stuff isn't hazardous to our health.
Have Our Diets Become Worse?
The fast food industry has become the latest whipping boy in the bad diet catagory. Stop and think about it, what has a fast food hamburger got in it that we don't consume at home? It has beef, (At least some), vegatables, bread, and mayonnaise or mustard. Of course it may be cooked in hydrogenated vegatable oil. Hey, we eat all that stuff at home.
An Example Of Some Really Bad Diets
I have been thinking about this for a long time. I am an old guy, and diets have changed a lot over the course of my life. When I was a kid growing up in a small country town we knew most of the people in town, or saw them all from time to time. In our little town (3500 people or so), there were only a couple of people who could be considered obese, and they weren't really that obese by todays standards.
My wife and I kicked this idea around a bit and she said that people worked harder back then. That isn't true though, there were clerks, salesmen, radio announcers, school teachers and every other occupation you would see today.
Our diets were really bad back then, at least by todays standards. Most people kicked off their day with a truck driver breakfast, two eggs, hashbrowns, ham or bacon, toast with real butter and maybe a glass of whole milk. For dinner (The mid day meal), we might have something like a chicken fried steak fried in crisco grease, (Pure lard), fried okra, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, with a slice of pie for desert. If we were in town we might have a hamburger and wash it down with a milkshake. Supper was probably something similar. Enough to drive a dietician nuts.
In a nutshell, we ate a lot of stuff fried in hog lard, used real butter and sugar, drank whole milk, and we didn't get fat. We did pay a price for that diet. Most of the people we knew died of heart attacks. Our diet did clog our arteries, but it didn't make us fat. It wasn't the Atkins diet. We ate a lot of carbs. too.
Diets And Dieting Of Yesteryear In Small Town America
In our small town the only people on diets were sick. They had diabetes, or they had had a heart attack and the doctor had put them on a diet. We all thought that was sad because they couldn't eat what they wanted to. Of course some of the people in our town were over weight, but not many were obese. Today most people are on some kind of diet, even if it is just watching how many calories they consume. The wife and I kicked that around a bit too, and we have been on some kind of diet for twenty or 30 years. We still gain weight unless we exercise.
Few diets designed only to control weight provide all of the nutrition we need, so not only are these diets in-effective at controlling weight, they make us feel bad and contribute to poor health. Bookmark this page and read this article: Diet and exercise, Let the post diet era begin.
Is Diet And Exercise Our Only Hope?
I don't know what has changed, but I suspect that the chemicals we are ingesting in our daily food has tricked our body into a fat conserving mode. Hormones in our body control how much fat is stored, and the amount of stored fat that should be made available as fuel. Real research on hormones controlling weight.
We are continuing our own program, and we are also trying to eliminate as many dietary chemicals as possible from our own diet. My wife has a heart condition and we try to eat foods that don't contribute to coronary artery diesease. We certainly don't recommend going back to lard, butter, and all fried food. We do think all of us should question the chemicals in our diet, and work hard to eliminate them as much as possible.
Think about this topic. Talk About it. Perhaps more research in this area can be generated.
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