Kirsten Plotkin Author
The growing weight problems made Fast food an obvious target for competitors who were already established as the pre packaged cereal and snack food industry. More and more people, who had relied on their own body to provide diet free weight loss began to gain weight. It did not take long for the new fast food industry to receive sole blame for the new trend towards weight gain.
It was around this time a new profession was born. Not out of a university but out of a few people’s kitchens where self proclaimed experts were hard at work carving out a living by developing a niche market they called nutrition. They planned to launch a diet which almost everybody would need. You see, luck had fallen into their lap. By chance they had learned about something new called cholesterol. It was bad news for most people because early tests had shown that even slim and healthy people showed high cholesterol readings.
There was a reason for that. The tests were done incorrectly. There should be two readings; one for the good cholesterol and one for the bad. The true reading is the difference between the two. Instead, by accident or by design, the two readings were added together. This meant just about everyone in the western world showed a high reading. Why? because they had been accustomed to a diet which for centuries had changed very little. Only in very recent times have labs corrected the error.
The nutritionists had seen an opportunity and decided to invent a diet that everyone would need in order to correct their cholesterol problem. No research, in fact no science at all was involved in what they called a healthy diet for everyone. No human trials were conducted to show that the diet had any affect whatsoever on cholesterol readings. It was a diet of homemade theories and pet philosophies. It was launched backed only by guesswork and wishful thinking. What was worse is that most people who followed this diet thought the nutritionists were genuine scientists and believed they were following scientific recommendations. It wasn’t long before we wondered; when did America get so fat?
How could it have happened? It’s the old story. When you put unqualified people in charge of important matters concerning other people’s welfare, bad things are likely to happen. Unfortunately, the medical profession was delighted to let the whole bothersome area of food and diets and weight gain be hijacked by unqualified, unsupervised people who turned it into their private playground.
Not even when nutritionist’
You are probably asking yourself: What was the diet? Many people will still remember it as the pyramid diet. It was launched with a poster of a pyramid. It depicted the food groups according to priority. Heavy carbohydrates were at the bottom. It filled one third. Then there was fruit and vegetables, which were at least twenty percent. That meant a diet of at least fifty percent carbohydrates.
When the diet was launched most people were not overweight, but the diet was targeted at people with high cholesterol. The massive media campaign induced enough fear to force thousands of perfectly normal healthy people to start dieting. Even doctors would recommend a diet when a lab result showed a high cholesterol count. There was only one diet for that.
This was the diet that laid the foundation for today’s epidemic weight problems, including the suspected generational concerns with obesity. It is also what has enable obesity in children rates to reach alarming figures. The diet never proved to have a single positive effect on cholesterol. To stop this madness, we must eliminate diets and return to what used to be a diet free weight loss. If we don’t, our future will face some very grave health problems.
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
