carbohydrates radically increase the body ' s production of insulin, and insulin is the best single index of adiposity. That final word is medical jargon for fat.
Sugar, you see, activates certain metabolic processes that are both harmful to your health and folly for your waistline. Sugar is a metabolic poison. You could, of course, ignore this fact and attempt to control your weight by calorie counting and deprivation. That is, you could direct yourself to the quantity instead of the quality of your diet. That ' s pretty much what conventional diets advise. However, the likelihood that you ' ll permanently lose weight by controlling your caloric intake is almost nil.
The whole problem of sugar was compounded by the low fat messages we were wrongly bombarded with during the 1980s and 1990s. To make a low-fat product taste good, manufacturers add lots of sugar. Now, in the United States, the aisles in the supermarket are crammed with low-fat or diet cookies and crackers, ice cream, frozen cakes and pies, soft drinks and white bread filled with sugar. The United States has " low-fatted " and " dieted " itself to a raging epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
This is not real food; it ' s invented, fake food. It ' s filled with sugar and highly refined carbohydrates and with chemically altered trans fats( they are listed as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil on food labels), not to mention plenty of other chemical additives. For thousands of years, human beings were in luck-none of this food existed. Now we ' re stuck with it. Because it ' s incredibly profitable, it ' s also widely distributed. But there isn ' t a person on this planet who should be eating it.
===================================================================== Vive la Difference!
A look at another Western culture is instructive. Only a few decades ago, the Frenchman with his butter-, cheese- and goose-liver-pate-laden diet had a heart disease rate sixty percent lower than his American peers.( The Frenchwoman did even better-she had the lowest heart disease rate in the western world.) The French also have far lower rates of obesity than Americans do, despite the fact that their diet is higher in fat. They eat comparable amounts of meat and fish, four times the butter and twice as much cheese as Americans. What does it all mean? Could it by any chance have anything to do with the fact that the per capita consumption of sugar in the United States was five times that of France? By the way, the reason it ' s more helpful to compare American and French diets of a few decades ago is that the French have now discovered fast food. As their diets become closer to American ones, they are losing some of their health advantage.
What Are We to Do?
If you want to be slim and vigorous, you can ' t eat as I ' ve described. But you can eat the natural, healthy unrefined animal and vegetable foods that people ate and grew robust on in centuries past. Nor do you have to eat like a rabbit; you can eat like a human being. You can enjoy fish, lamb, steak and lobster, nuts and berries, cheese, eggs and butter along with a wonderful variety of salad greens and other vegetables.
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