Posts Tagged ‘carboydrates’

Why the Obesity Epidemic? My 3-Part EXPRESS Explanation

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Many have been puzzled over this.  Well, it is becoming clear.  Here is my express explanation, in three easy steps.

These three things came together:

  1. A guy at the University of Minnesota (the inventor of the K-Ration) made a persuasive–but incorrect!–argument: the cholesterol clogging our arteries is caused by eating cholesterol.  Seems reasonable.  Instead of meat–and particularly animal fats–he told us we should eat carbohydrates. If we must have butter, have margarine instead. If we want lard, have Crisco instead.  Turns out this was all very wrong.  Large quantities of refined starches, and particularly refined sugar, are very bad for us.
  2. President Nixon and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz changed US agricultural policy to encourage grain production, particularly corn production.
  3. Industrialization reached its logical conclusion. This aspect is two part:

First, industrial food was invented. (“Industrial food”, isn’t that an oxymoron?) Clever people looked for something to do with all that cheap corn.  We don’t prepare our own food anymore so we don’t what we are eating.  Notably, high fructose corn sugar was invented, and was cheap.

Second, we don’t labor anymore, electric motors and internal combustion engines do our physical work, and most of us are now sedentary. But we are a species designed to move; getting a lot of exercise will forgive a lot of sins.  For example, a bike messenger is not going to become obese and get type 2 diabetes, no matter what s/he eats.  Heart disease, maybe, but not obese.  Unfortunately very few of us are bike messengers.  Some of us go to the gym, but we drive to the gym, when we get around to it.

That’s it.  Yes, there are other factors (for example, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle set us up to want to believe the worst about meat, and particularly lard), but those three factors were sufficient.  Don’t believe me (as you reach for your non-fat, fructose sweetened yogurt). Start investigating, maybe Google some of the tags attached to this post.

-kb, the Kent who resents that he was lied to when assured that a big plate of pasta is a healthful meal.