Low fat foods and high fructose corn syrup cause obesity!

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Taking action

Found this great article by Jonny Bowden and thought I would add some to it and share it with you folks as it is a problem that affects us all! So much so that the first Lady, Michelle Obama, is now taking on childhood obesity as her cause from the white house! Maybe we can help her out! This post touches on the diet problems of our obesity epidemic but doesn’t get into the physical aspects, will write a post about that later so be sure to check back!

Our diet issues

When you have something as massive and as scary as the obesity epidemic, it’s hard to point the finger at one single element and say, “that is why it happened.” But however you slice it, the low-fat movement played a part in the epidemic.

After World War II, heart disease rates began to rise precipitously. In the 1970s, a committee led by Senator McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of hear disease by eating less fat. This recommendation was based on evidence that linked diet to heard disease. Unfortunately, the report wrongly singled out saturated fat as the wicked element in our diet responsible for all our problems.

This was the beginning of the low-fat movement, and the obesity epidemic. It’s more than a coincidence that they happened at the same time, and here’s why.

Once upon a time…..

Once dietary fat was “identified” as the chief culprit in heard disease (a huge case of mistaken identity in my opinion) food manufacturers sprang in to action. The race was on to produce low-fat & no-fat foods, and to engineer saturated fat out of everything.

This led to a slew of “Food-like” products, manufactured and processed edible substances bearing little resemblance to whole foods, and to idiotic experiments like margarine. Add to this witches’ brew the invention of high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil (to replace saturated fat) and you had the perfect dietary storm.

You see, if you’re the food manufacturer and you’re removing the fat from some food, you need to replace it with something else if won’t taste very good. So , we would up with  a slew of low-fat products loaded with sugar. And since high-fructose corn syrup was now available cheaply, adding sweetness was an easy thing to do!

So easy, in fact, that high-fructose corn syrup started showing up I hundreds – if not thousands- of food products.

As the same time as all of this was happening, Americans started eating more of everything. This, too, is no coincidence. Here’s why: If I give you a carton of Domino’s sugar and tell you to eat till your heart’s content, you won’t consume very much. Same thing with butter. But if I put them together something magical happens. Combine sugar and fat and every one of your evolutionary buttons are pushed. Manufacturers know this. Cravings get activated, brain chemistry starts firing, and you can literally eat this stuff until you bust. And we did!

The whole low-fat movement coincided with a huge spike in food processing  and those who precess and manufacture food products for a living have one goal-getting people to eat more of their products. That’s easy to do, just engineer combinations of sugar and a bit of fat, which work really well with the whole “low-fat” philosophy.

As long as it didn’t have to much fat, you could eat it right? Not really! Meanwhile, fat-the one macro-nutrient that keeps you full and satisfied- was lacking from most of what we were eating. Sugar, the one element that keeps cravings going, was plentiful. Portion sizes in general collectively took a shot of steroids, as the whole country decided that super sizing was its birthright.

Low fat has a lot to answer for. It may not be the only reason we are experiencing one of the worst health epidemics in modern times, but it sure is one of the biggest!

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