Perhaps you’ve noticed how every few years a new ‘fad’ hits the media. In the 50’s protein diets were thought to be the healthiest, by the 90’s consumers were told fats were the culprit and now are told that complex carbohydrate diets are the way to go. Along with all this advice, TV commercials are peppered with advertisements claiming that cholesterol drugs are the answer to growing obesity and health management problems.
North America now has an entire food and medicine industry focused on testing for high cholesterol and on selling everyone on the latest treatment. According to the British Medical Journal (BMJ, May 22, 1993) the number of prescriptions for cholesterol-lowering drugs increased six-fold in the UK between 1986 and 1992. The problem is that not a single drug has been shown effective in lowering overall mortality, but deaths by other illness directly related to these drugs have increased.
Big Business Says Obesity is the Consumers Fault but Research Shows Otherwise
The first most obvious problem with the current model for keeping people healthy is the piecemeal approach. While humans are beings of enormous complexity and our food supply was intended to be balanced by nature in a way that is compatible with a digestive system evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, the medical community or as many people feel is closer to the truth, the pharmaceuticals together with the chemical production arms of their enterprises, attempt to keep people focused on isolated facets of their nutrition to the detriment of their overall health.
The unsatisfactory result of isolating any aspect of the human diet is that doing so ignores the importance of synergy in keeping people not only healthy, but at peak performance. In primitive cultures where the reliance is on nature’s ability to balance nutrients, degenerative diseases are practically unheard of (Schmid 1994). Western culture however, overwhelmed by the influence of Big Business on the food supply, have been convinced and/or tricked into eating bizarre, genetically modified organisms, chemical additives numbering in the thousands and processed foods that have little or no nutritional value.
Add to that the fact that little to nothing is mentioned in mainstream media about the wholesale nutritional depletion of farm land by current agricultural methods. Few consumers are aware that much of their food has little nutritional value, let alone enough to keep them able to exercise and participate actively in life.
The Role of Government in Keeping Us Overweight
Despite the mountains of research linking refined sugars, flours, fats and processed foods to obesity and catastrophic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, the government refuses to mandate the labeling of food products in a way that would assist the consumer to avoid genetically modified foods, chemical additives and refined sugars and salts.
How Unhealthy Food Makes Consumers Fat
Consumers need to keep in mind that what is sold as foodstuff more often then not has more in common with chemicals found in hardware stores then with real food. The dictionary definition of ‘food’ is ‘material that provides living things with the nutrients they need for energy and growth’. Can it be argued that the more modernized the food supply system, the greater the incidence of catastrophic illness and obesity and the less nutritious it is?
Food processors replace good healthy food with chemical flavorings and additives that are designed to make it difficult to avoid their products. Everyone knows just how addictive sugar is; yet it seems it has been added to every product sold in grocery stores, schools and restaurants. Once grain is processed, it is depleted of nutritional value, thus food manufacturers add a few nutrients and call it ‘enriched’ white flour, instead of what it is, enriched empty calories.
Modern farming practices result in stressed-out farm animals raised in tight quarters on growth hormones, steroids, tranquilizers, antibiotics and other chemicals, naturally ingested when consumers eat the meat. The meat has much reduced nutritional value due to the toxicity of chemicals and stress hormones stored in the meat and lack of nutritional value of the ‘food’ the animals are fed. Once again, empty calories.
While the body’s craving for fuel and energy never ends because we rarely provide the needed nutrients, food processors have added ingredients that supply empty and damaging calories. The less the human body gets the nutrition it requires to maintain health, the more it becomes impossible for its systems to do anything beyond basic maintenance of organs. Exercise, learning, development of proper muscle and tissue and so on becomes virtually impossible as the body repeatedly tries to satisfy cravings for real nutrients with health-damaging nutrient-deficient foods.
The desire to exercise comes from feeling healthy and vibrant. To exercise a body that is getting insufficient nutrition is to further stress it. Exercise and activity are the natural results of a body well fueled. Would your car run well or very long on bad gas?
How To Stop Starving and Manage Weight Successfully
The consumer need only go the extra mile to learn about just what they are eating. Most people do not realize that they are paying a premium for genetically modified and processed/refined food that provides little or nothing of benefit to their bodies, but in fact depletes its already taxed stores. Buying organic, non-processed, whole foods, and organic fruits and vegetables will be far less expensive in the long run; the better the quality, the more satisfied the body, sooner. Satisfied, the body will become active, exercise will be welcomed and the cycle of wellness will replace the cycle of weight gain and health loss.
Other Interesting Articles:
You May be Monsanto's GM Foods Involuntary Guinea Pig
PLU Codes and How They can Help You Avoid GM Foods
Sources
Eaton & Konner, Paleolithic Nutrition New England Journal of Medicine
McTaggart, L., (1995), ‘The Better Diet’ pg. 6-10
Schmid, R.S., (1994), “Native Nutrition: Eating According to Ancestral Wisdom’
Grace Joubarne - Welcome! I'm a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist practicing from a main office located in Ottawa, Ontario Canada and satellite offices ...
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