obesity america 2008

According to obesity america 2008, in 1991, no US state had an obesity rate above 20 percent.  Today more than sixty percent of people are overweight, not necessarily obese, but the figure for obesity for 2008 was 25%.  It will be well above that today because the obesity numbers grow exponentially. The fact is that today, almost 2 thirds of the population is overweight, and they are all heading towards obesity and type2 diabetes. You have ice in your veins if that doesn’t scare you.

What we are experiencing is another form of human intervention. While skeptics debate how we can stop the climate change we have caused, we are already destroying ourselves from within.  No, it is not our fault. We have all become victims of the adage: If you make any statement long enough, loud enough and often enough, people start to believe it and after a while it grows to become a fact.

People who are involved in the area of diet and exercise, have always talked very loud and very often about their ideas and hunches for health and nutrition.  In the very late seventies, they spoke long and loud about their new healthy diet. It was based on three serves of carbohydrate to one serve of protein.  It was designed for everybody to combat a new threat called cholesterol and it came with a poster of a pyramid. No one dared question it. Those who should have spoken remained silent.

It wasn’t long before all that reckless theory became fact. Today it is still an unchallenged dogma. Not because it is true but because no one, not even the people promoting it remembers where the dogma came from. Yet, it is the foundation of hundreds of diets devised by many dozens of ‘expert’ and the numbers of victims run into millions.

So how did it all begin? Since the Pyramid diet was devised in the late seventies, right up till today, that diet has never been tested in a lab. Neither has any of the hundreds of diet that followed. They did not go through human trials and the people who came up with those diets were not scientists.  These were diets that some clever people devised with great enthusiasm because the stuff they were suggesting to one another sounded healthy, wholesome and irresistible.

There is no doubt they believed their own voodoo, but it was not science. The words Green and Natural became an ear piercing catch cry by every wannabe food expert in the world.  It sounds so good and it is natural right?  Well arsenic is natural, so are opium poppies, poisoned mushrooms and hundreds of other substances that are natural.

No one, including me, spoke up at the time and asked for some clarification. Some proof that it was safe to change a diet we had all been accustomed to for generations and which had kept most of us slim and healthy without giving it a thought. Why did no one speak up? Frankly, nobody wanted to.  We all loved the idea of a modern diet, something we, unlike our stodgy parents, could finally understand and call our own.

We didn’t check anything because we wanted it to be true.  Most of us didn’t realize that no science had been involved, but I doubt we would have cared. We rushed in and adopted a diet that was basically the ideas of a few self proclaimed expert’s on what foods were healthy and how we should eat them.

To this day, despite ever growing weight problems, obesity and type2 diabetes, no one dares question the dogma of what is a healthy diet.  Not even the medical or scientific professions. The medical profession will deal with the problem when diabetes threatens and science is too busy with far more glamorous, revenue raising projects.

So before there is no one left to remember how all this began, I thought I had better write it all down and put it on record. I would like to see obesity america 2008 have no reason at all to produce new figures for 2018. What I have learned can make that possible. For the past five years, it has solved my weight problem. Perhaps it can do the same for you. We have to begin somewhere right?