Our Food Habits are in Disarray
Sunday, 07.01.2007, 12:02pm (GMT)
The average American's diet is out of control.
Walk into any restaurant and you will see the kinds of food we love as
a nation – lots of pasta, red meat and sugary sweets. The American way
of eating is very self-indulgent and unhealthy.
This is a very unnatural method of food consumption. It's a culture of
extremes with extreme indulgence on one end and surprising starvation
on the other end. Walk into any bookstore and you will find the shelves
stacked with diet books. This is as good a sign is any that we as a
country want a quick fix solution and are ready to accept fat diets and
fat weight-loss schemes in the desperate hope to lose weight.
Something has to give.
The fact is, we need to pay more attention to the way we eat, what we
eat, and the amount we eat otherwise we will always retain the tag of
the fattest country in the world.
Everything begins and ends with diet. We have complete control over
diet and this is a tremendous opportunity to improve our lifestyle.
What you are about to learn will shock and surprise you because the way
we eat today is not the way we were meant to eat food. As Americans we
have done a phenomenal job to completely mess up our diet. It's time to
go back to the basics.
Research demonstrates that genetically we are not even meant to eat a
vast majority of the foods we now consider natural or healthy. Pasta,
for example, is considered a refined carbohydrate and too much of it
throws our insulin out of balance. In fact, many foods suggested to us
as part of a healthy, balanced diet are actually completely foreign to
our genetic makeup. Our diet today has changed so much over the past
few decades that many of the so-called ‘healthy, natural foods' may
have directly contributed to most of our ‘modern-day diseases'.
Case in point: Meat consumption in the United States coupled with inactivity.
Our ancestors were hunters and scavengers. From a physiological
(functional) and aesthetic (visual) point of view, we are almost the
same as our ancestors. We have the same bones muscles and internal
organs as our ancestors. However we have several chronic illnesses like
hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and cancer they never had.
Why? The most popular notion is that the vast majority of our existence
on this planet, man has lived as a hunter-gatherer. Nomadic people in
small groups lived and fed completely off their surrounding environment
and they were good at it. Fossil studies show our ancestors to be lean,
strong and muscular well into their 80s and 90s! They were very active,
robust people that covered hundreds of miles weekly for food. Hunting,
running, digging, climbing were habitual, daily activities. We survived
this way (as hunter-gatherers) through six ice ages. This was more than
a primitive existence. It was in fact a very sophisticated method of
survival, one we lack in today's times.
Basically, we have been eating meat a long time, but the difference
between us and our ancestors is that we barely move our behinds
compared to them and we eat a lot more processed meat filled with
saturated fat and cholesterol.
We are eating too much meat, exercising too little and storing too much fat.
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