Kirsten plotkin Author
Thirty years ago the majority of people were slim. If they wanted to lose weight, they made sure it was an at home weight lose. Today the majority of people are overweight. Chances are they are either on a diet, about to go on a diet or they have just finishes a diet. In thirty years, diets have gone from being almost ignored to being a way of life.
Back the, when Nutritionist arrived on the scene they had some serious news about cholesterol. Tests had shown that just about everybody had very high cholesterol. The way to correct that was to follow a diet they had designed for that purpose. Nobody had thought much about diets and even less about nutritionists, but what they heard was a little scary. So a large number of the population, people who were not overweight, went on the diet to avoid heart attacks and strokes.
What they did not know, and perhaps the Nutritionist did not know either, was that
to correctly measure cholesterol, there are two separate readings. One is for the healthy cholesterol, and the other for the bad. The correct reading is when you deduct the count of the bad cholesterol from the good. The labs did not do that. They added the two counts together. This meant that just about everybody on the planet needed a diet to reduce their cholesterol.
Because nutritionists grabbed the opportunity to report on cholesterol, they became identified as having discovered it. That gave their profession a lot of undue credibility. When they launched their first major diet, it was said to reduce cholesterol. People who were slim and had never dieted in their life rushed to use a diet that would lower what was termed a dangerous level of cholesterol.
It has only recently become general knowledge that the reading for cholesterol had been incorrectly performed for almost thirty years. Even today you will find a few labs and institutions that continue to cling to the old way.
The diet was launched with a poster depicting a Pyramid. The base of the pyramid was filled with grains, cereals pasta and pulses. It filled around two thirds of the pyramid.
Then there was a layer of greens; fruits and vegetables. This was followed by small amounts of meat and fish. This diet, we were told, was a direct response to the newly discovered cholesterol problem caused by the bad diets in the past.
You may wonder why that was suddenly a problem and why it was publicized by nutritionists rather than scientists, but nobody asked, not even the medical profession who happily went along.
Clinics all over the world began to measure everyone’s cholesterol. They did it by adding both readings together to come up with a guaranteed high reading for just about everybody.
Thirty years ago the vast majority of people still had their normal weight. Think of the hundreds of diets people have used since then. Yet today, the average person is grossly overweight. If just one of those diets had proved to work, we would all know about it, we would all have used it, and nobody would be fat today.
What has changed between the average person thirty years ago and the average person today? The weight has certainly changed and so has the diet. If you were to turn the food groups on that pyramid upside down you would almost have the diet people ate for centuries, right up till the sixties and seventies.
Before you think it, let me point out that people had just as much available food on offer than they do now, including fast food. Shops had plenty of produce and nobody went hungry.
Obesity is now at epidemic levels. People with obesity seem to lapse into type2 diabetes. This is a life threatening condition. Food addiction is proving to be as overlooked or ignored as tobacco addiction used to be. It is every bit as dangerous, possibly more so. That is because despite the efforts of cigarette makers, they were never going to turn everybody into a smoker and in any case, not everybody who smoked got lung cancer.
Food addiction is different. We all eat food, every day. Most of us are addicted to it. We eat too much, we eat too often and we eat the wrong food. Most people eat food the body was never designed to process. If we continue on our present path, we will all end up obese, we will see our children grow up obese and soon our children’s children may be born obese. We have already seen that happen.
Our survival may no longer be all that certain.
