myths and marketing

 

[The Food Guide] Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground…[and] has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe…[it] ignores the [scientific] evidence that has been carefully assembled over the past forty years. – researcher Willett, Harvard School of Public Health

“…there is a lot of money being made…feeding both oversized stomachs and feeding those enterprises selling fixes for oversized stomachs…And both industries—those selling junk food and those selling fat cures—depend for their future on the prevalence of obesity.” – researcher Weis, in the Academy of Health Care Management Journal

Getting to the bottom of all this calorie-quantity confusion, let’s start from the beginning. Let’s review the history of eating. The easiest way to do this is to think about human evolution like one day. Say 12:00am last night was the dawn of our first ancestors and 11:59pm is right now. Basically all day (from 12:00am last night till about three minutes ago) people stayed healthy and fit eating only what could be hunted or gathered—vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, and seeds. Three minutes ago people started farming, became “civilized,” and began eating starch and a small amount of sweets. Three seconds ago, people started eating processed starches and sweets. One second ago, people starting getting most of their calories from manufactured starch- and sweetener-based food-ish products.

That means the diet recommended by the government’s Dietary Guidelines, pyramid graphic, and plate graphics, and manufactured by food-ish product companies was not possible—forget about healthy or helpful for burning body fat—for at least 99.8% of our history. Our ancestors did not hunt or gather pasta, rice, cereal, and bread. They did not eat whole grains. They ate no grains. They did not cut back on added sweeteners. They did not know what added sweeteners are. Emory University researcher S.B. Eaton tells us: “…during the late Paleolithic [during the vast majority of human history], the great majority of carbohydrate was derived from vegetables and fruit, very little from cereal grains and none from refined flours.”

And while this natural way of eating is terrible for food-ish manufacturers and blasphemy according to the government’s Dietary Guidelines and graphics, it is interesting to think about when it comes to our hotness and health. There is a reason obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease are called “diseases of civilization.” They did not become issues until agriculture enabled production of starches and sweets about 12,000 years ago.  And they did not reach epidemic status until bureaucrats started playing biologist and corporations started stuffing us with food-ish products.

But before I start implying we are “designed” to eat the way our ancestors ate for 99.8% of our history, and that is how we avoid obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease, I need some data to defend against this reasonable objection: “Over 12,000 years ago is a long time ago. Back then, people did not live as long as we do now, so this whole their-health-versus-ours comparison is suspect.”

That is an excellent point. I thought the exact same thing until I read research revealing three facts about starch-, sweetener-, and processing-free hunter-gatherers:

 

  • They are few and far between today, but hunter-gatherer tribes are still around, and scientists have studied the heck out of them. These studies show them free from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease, and confirm the next two points.

 

  • While their average age is lower than our average age, many ancient hunter-gatherers lived beyond the age of sixty and stayed free from the diseases of civilization.  Emory University researcher S. Boyd tells us: “Occasionally one hears the claim that primitive people all died too young to get degenerative diseases. This claim is simply false—many lived well into and through the age of vulnerability for such disorders, yet didn’t get them.”

 

  • Taking old age out of the equation entirely, obese and Type 2 Diabetic “civilized” children are running around all over the place while hunter-gatherer children were obesity and diabetes free.

 

Could it be the lowering in the quality of our diet and the lowering in the quality of our health are not coincidences? Could it be possible we are not designed to digest the quality of calories making up the majority of the modern diet? And could this “square diet peg in a round fat metabolism system hole” issue be the source of our clog and raised set-points?

Yes.

From the Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, “…the USDA Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground…[and] has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe…at best, [it] offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice.”  From the Journal of the American College of Cardiovascular exerciselogy: “The low-fat-high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated [publicized] vigorously by the…food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity…diabetes, and metabolic syndromes.”  And from the Co-Founder of Center for Science in the Public Interest: “…good advice about nutrition conflicts with the interests of many big industries, each of which has more lobbying power than all the public-interests groups combined.”

We are not getting bigger and sicker because we are putting too much fuel into our fat metabolism systems. We are getting bigger and sicker because we are getting clogged from putting the wrong quality of fuel into our fat metabolism system. The further the quality of our calories has gotten from the high-quality SANE non-starchy vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, fruits, nuts, and seeds we ate for 99.8% of our evolutionary history, the bigger and sicker we have gotten.

The deteriorating quality of our calories is the cause of the deteriorating quality of health and waistlines. And the source of this caloric corruption is politicians playing physicians—why recommend so much low-quality starch?—and big businesses boosting bottom lines—do we really need added sweeteners in everything?

Decades of advanced dietary research have taken place alongside spiking obesity and disease rates. This research recommends a diet much different than any version of the government’s Dietary Guidelines and graphics while proving big business’ government-guideline-friendly food-ish products addictive and deadly. Why don’t the government’s guidelines and graphics reflect this research? Why hasn’t big business been required to stop infusing everything with low-quality?

Well, who needs all this science when there is a constant barrage of food, fitness, and pharmaceutical industry marketing bullying us into believing that the government’s low-fat-low-protein-high-starch diet and resulting food-ish products are healthy? It is pretty amazing how much money is made, how much nutritional confusion is created, and how clogged we become when bureaucrats and big businesses are allowed to define healthy.

But no need to fear. Bureaucrats and big business also used to say smoking is harmless, and look how that turned out once we got access to the science of smoking.
 

Get the Book

 


 

Sampling of sources

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