Three Disasterous Diet Decisions That Have Led to Obesity

70% of American adults are either overweight or obese.

If you are young enough you might assume that it has always been this way. That, as a nation, we have always struggled with our diet, weight and health.

But if you were born in the fifties or earlier you might remember a time when nearly everyone was thin and relatively healthy. Growing up in this time, people weren’t aware of epi-pens and inhalers because very few kids had nut allergies or asthma. Now the school cinics are loaded with emergency medications. If you knew of anyone with heart disease or diabetes, they were older adults. Cancer was rare, and very few people ever heard of auto immune diseases.

The 1970s changed all that. Despite our long, realtively trouble-free eating and weight history, we suddenly made three radical changes in the way we had been eating for thousands of years. These three dietary changes have lined the path to food addiction, disease, and weight gain.

Here are the three disasterous dietary changes:

1. We made the fat switch. Traditional saturated fats were replaced with damaged and inflammatory vegetable oils.
2. We went high carbs. with new high fructose sugars and fake wheat flour products.
3. We went low protein. We reduced our intake of animal protein. These are the repair and building blocks of the body.

Oops!

In one decade we dismantled all three of humanity’s most fundamental eating practices. We did this because we were told that it was better for us. Now, nearly fifty years later we have more health problems, diseases, depression, and weight problems than ever in our history.

The changes of the 1970s have brought about endless dietary debates about what constitutes healthy and unhealthy eating.

Sorting through all this information is confusing in the day of marketing, social media and misleading headlines; it’s difficult for one to know where the information is coming from and who has something to gain from it.

How about we take a break from all these new-fangled diets and look at our own history. Our original diet gave us a great foundation for health. And it still does.