By now, you may have heard that diets of processed carbohydrates can lead to weight gain. The carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity (CIM) posits that processed carbohydrates like bread, bagels, pasta, crackers, chips, and pretzels promote fat storage in adipose tissue, leading to overeating and weight gain. This is one of those chicken-or-egg theories. In the CIM, the diet leads to a situation where the body first wants to store fat, leading to the spontaneous desire to eat more calories. Therefore, a diet high in processed carbohydrates, as recommended by MyPlate/My Food Pyramid, may inadvertently contribute to obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and other health issues by disrupting normal metabolic processes and promoting an imbalance in energy intake and storage. Furthermore, the effects linger after diet changes, as determined by a reanalysis of a feeding study I will discuss in this post today.
Read MoreThere are specific nutrients required to make melanin. Lacking them could lead to difficulty tanning. I had a period in my life when I lost the ability to tan, that I attributed to a poor diet. Once I added the nutrients I needed, I could tan again. This post covers the key ingredients needed to produce melanin, the pigment that causes us to look darker.
Read MoreJared Diamond wrote a famous essay in 1999 called The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. He was referring to the mistake of our transition to agriculture and the production of grain flour. By 1941, the Committee on Food and Nutrition recommended that flour be fortified with nutrients to help combat widespread malnutrition in areas where the American population relied on flour-rich foods. This led to white bread and flour, pasta, and rice being enriched with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and iron. Then, in the 1970s, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs made grains the basis of our diets. This post tells the story about our tragic switch to grains when agriculture was invented, the health costs, the realization of their poor quality in the 1930s, and, strangely, their illogical placement in the food pyramid as the basis of most of the calories in the American diet.
Read MoreMost Americans are not healthy. The reasons are numerous, but I want to focus on seven of them today. First, data published in the February 2019 issue of Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders found that only 12.2% of the population is optimally metabolically healthy. The percent of adults aged 20 and over that are overweight or obese is 73.6%. The percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity is 42.5%. In 2008, 107 million Americans—almost one out of every two adults aged 18 or older had at least 1 of 6 reported chronic illnesses: cardiovascular disease, arthritis, diabetes, asthma, cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Here are seven contributing factors.
Read MoreThe death rate from obesity for the world is 60.14 per 100,000-almost as bad as the worst region for Covid-19! The United States is even worse at 71.95 per 100,000. How come our politicians have not locked us all in a health clinic and created a healthy weight reduction program until nobody dies from obesity? When we get rid of the current Covid-19 epidemic, it would be a great idea to start on the obesity epidemic. We can do this ourselves, we don’t need our politicians forcing changes. What do they know anyway? Their track record on health recommendations for us is a big part of our obesity epidemic. Let me explain.
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