Toxic Diets, Lifetime Customers: Obesity and the Crime of the 20th Century
“Back in those days, the obese people stood out. Now, if you’re slim, you stand out.”
Those who were born in the 60s and 70s may remember the days when obesity was the exception, not the rule.
But today the BMI of Americans is way, way up from just a couple of generations ago.
As of July 2022, the average BMI for American men is 29.1 and 29.6 for women. That is a 15% and 18.4% increase from 1976 to 1980.
So what the heck happened?
Dr. Richard Amerling, an esteemed nephrologist and former professor at St. George’s University, explains that we are living in a “very toxic food environment.”
So I grew up in the 50s and 60s before these [government dietary] guidelines were put out, which was the end of the 70s — and everybody was slim. Back in those days, the obese people stood out. Now, if you’re slim, you stand out.
So what changed? Well, our genetic makeup didn’t change. No. The dietary guidelines came out, and they pushed everybody to give up animal fat and go with these polyunsaturated, industrially-produced vegetable oils like canola oil and soybean oil. Because they took a lot of the healthy fat out of food, it didn’t taste good anymore. So they amplified everything with sugar and high fructose corn syrup. And they created a very toxic food environment that is very hard to avoid!
If you go to a supermarket, 95% of what you see there is toxic; it’s sugar-filled and canola oil-filled. You can’t even find a pretzel that doesn’t have canola oil anymore — except maybe one or two. So you have to work very hard to eat a healthy diet in America today. The vast majority don’t, and they gain weight. And eventually, they get the metabolic syndrome — type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and it’s all diet related, for the most part.
Also reversible, except the model that we have adopted now is to not reverse the disease but to rather treat those diseases with pharmaceutical products. It’s a fabulous business plan.
Well, now I am getting a little more insight into why the keto diet that I like to use actually works well because it seems like it basically prevents you from eating a lot of these things that you describe as toxic — which feels like a strong word, actually. Isn’t unhealthy a more appropriate word?
It’s not like they are just not that good for you; they’re actually bad for you. The polyunsaturated fats, canola oil, high linoleic acid, canola oil, and soybean oil are pro-inflammatory — they lead to the metabolic syndrome and atherosclerosis. Sugar, which is half glucose, which is relatively less toxic, but the other half is fructose, which is highly toxic!
Fructose is metabolized in the liver exclusively into mostly triglycerides, and fat, which end up depositing in the liver, causes fatty liver, causes the metabolic syndrome, which is an insulin resistance, high insulin level state. Which then doctors look at, “Ah! Their sugar is high; we have to give them more insulin.” No, their insulin is already very high. Now just take them off all the sugar. Stop the sugar; stop the carbs, and the insulin goes back down, and you reverse the disease.