Thirty years ago the majority of people were slim. It was a time when diet cravings were rare. People would handle their own weight problems, if and when they put on a few pounds. They would simply exercise more and cut down on snacks for a few weeks. Today the majority of people are overweight. Chances are they are either on a diet, about to go on a diet or they have just finishes a diet. In thirty years, diets have gone from being almost ignored to being a way of life.

Back when Nutritionist first arrived on the scene they had some serious news about cholesterol.  Tests had shown that just about everybody had very high cholesterol.  The way to correct that was to follow a diet they had designed for that purpose.

Nobody had thought much about diets and even less about nutritionists, but what they heard was a little scary. So a large number of people, most of them not even overweight, went on the diet to avoid what they were told would be a heart attack or a strokes.

What they did not know, and perhaps the Nutritionists did not know either, was that to correctly measure cholesterol, there are two separate readings. One is for the healthy cholesterol, and the other for the bad. The correct reading is when you deduct the count of the bad cholesterol from the good.  The labs did not do that. They added the two counts together. This is how suddenly just about everybody needed a diet to reduce their cholesterol.

Because nutritionists grabbed the opportunity to report on cholesterol, they became identified as having discovered it.  That gave their mostly ignored profession a lot of undue credibility.

When they launched their first major diet, it was to promote cholesterol and it’s evils.  People who were slim and had never dieted in their life rushed to use a diet that would lower what was termed a dangerous level of cholesterol.

It has only recently become general knowledge that the reading for cholesterol had been incorrectly performed for almost thirty years. Even today you will find a few labs and institutions that continue to cling to the old way.

The diet was launched with a poster depicting a Pyramid. The base of the pyramid was filled with grains, cereals pasta and pulses.  It filled more than two thirds of the pyramid.

Then there was a layer of greens; fruits and vegetables. This was followed by small amounts of meat and fish. This diet, we were told, was a direct response to the newly discovered cholesterol problem caused by the bad diets in the past.  In reality, the diet laid the foundation for the food addiction we see today.

What is so puzzling in hindsight, is that nobody, not even scientists or doctors, ever asked how a diet people had followed for eons, without much change,  had suddenly begun to increase our cholesterol to such dangerous levels.

Thirty years ago the vast majority of people still had their normal weight. Think of the hundreds of diets people have used since then. Yet today, the average person is grossly overweight. If just one of those diets had proved to work, we would all know about it, we would all have used it, and nobody would be fat today.  As it stands, we would be far better off today, had we used no diets at all.

What has changed between the average person thirty years ago and the average person today? The average weight has changed massively. But what is just as amazing is that today’s diet is almost opposite to the diet we ate in the past.

In fact, if you turn the content of the Pyramid upside down you will have something fairly close to the diet people ate for centuries. The food we eat today is not the food that made us who we are. Our metabolism appears to have difficulty adjusting to the new reality.

Before you think it, let me point out that thirty years ago people had just as much available food on offer than they do today and that includes fast food. The shops had plenty of produce and nobody went hungry. The only thing that has changed is that people have become obsessed with diets.

Obesity is now at epidemic levels. It has become clear that people with obesity, tend to lapse into type2 diabetes.  This is a life threatening condition. Food addiction is proving to be as overlooked or ignored as tobacco addiction used to be. It is every bit as dangerous, possibly more so. That is because despite the efforts of cigarette makers, they were never going to turn everybody into a smoker.

Food addiction on the other hand is different. We all eat food, every day. Most of us are addicted to it. We eat too much, we eat too often and we eat the wrong food. We eat food the body was never designed to process. If we continue on our present path, we will all end up obese, we will see our children grow up obese and soon our children’s children may be born obese. We have already seen it happen. It would seem diet cravings are a sign of addiction.

Our long term survival may no longer be all that certain, and not just because of climate change.

http://www.my-own-plan.com/cap/index4.html

Kirsten Plotkin Author

For More information read also these articles

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http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/244/

http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/diet-free-weight-loss-what-does-that-mean-to-you/

The Big Diet Fraud That Started Obesity

This was the age of broad experimentation, a lot of it non-scientific. A lot of it was centered around food and eating. There had never been a need for either medicine or science to look at changing a food regime which people had followed pretty much unchanged for centuries.

The medical profession seemed quite content to let unqualified people cut themselves a niche in a market they named Nutrition.  They did not see that area as medicine. So unqualified people went ahead to design what type of diet might improve people’s health.

They examined the foods that looked healthy and tasted good. The old adage: An apple a day, clearly encouraged lots of fruit. They looked at calories and decided precisely how many a person should eat daily. They looked at grains and pulses and decided it screamed health and energy. At that point, had they attempted to launch a diet it would have been a dismal failure. But you know what they say: Timing is everything.

So what happened to so radically change the average human body in a mere thirty years?

At that time, few people would have seriously considered a diet just to improve their health.  Those who cared already felt healthy, many exercised and jogging was popular. Type2 diabetes had yet to appear. Health was simply not an issue.

The magic Bullet for Nutritionists, which gave them almost instant recognition and credibility, was the word cholesterol. Nutritionists were the people who brought it to public attention. It appeared as if they had made the discovery. People actually thought this was a new science.

Nutritionists achieved even more credibility when they revealed that just about everybody’s cholesterol was dangerously high. Everyone with high cholesterol were in danger of heart attacks and strokes. No one thought to ask why there had not been an epidemic of those two serious conditions till then, given that the diet had never changed much for eons. You could say people were panicked into action.

It was in this climate that the nutritionists revealed their new diet, The Pyramid. Many will remember the poster. It was the diet you had to have to cure your cholesterol problem. It contained well over two thirds carbohydrate and it laid the foundation for food addiction and digestive and intestinal problems for all the years to come.  People with perfectly normal weight began to diet. After all, this was science…Right?

Even doctors jumped on the bandwagon. They sent their patients for cholesterol tests and when the test came back too high they usually referred them to a Nutritionist or Dietician.  Honestly! It makes you want to cry!

You see the Nutritionists and lab technicians were too excited about their windfall to get all the facts. They had no clue that cholesterol requires two readings, one for the good cholesterol and one for the bad. The reading for the bad cholesterol is supposed to be deducted from the good cholesterol. That is how you get a correct reading. Instead the two readings were taken as one, in other words, added together.

Had science been in charge, the tests would have been done correctly from the start. Then the majority of people would have been found to have a normal cholesterol count. Nutritionists would have had nothing to take credit for. We would not have been bombarded with a massive publicity campaign about the evils of cholesterol and the benefits of the Pyramid diet so cleverly devised by Nutritionists would never have raised public interest.

Without cholesterol, Nutritionists would have had a hard time to convince people with perfectly normal weight to go on a diet. Chances are, Nutrition would have gone the way of most other pseudo sciences and simply disappeared.

It took many years to discredit that diet. It took just about as many years for the labs to learn how to test for cholesterol. By then it had ruined many people’s lives. Make no mistake it still does to this day. Just look at your shelves in the food mart. The Pyramid did not go in a blaze of publicity, it snug away with a whimper.

It was not long before the Nutritionist were ready with a brand new, fat free diet. It preached that the fats you eat are the fats that stick to the body. Thankfully, that diet has also recently been discredited.  This time many food manufacturers have chosen to ignore the facts.

There is no doubt that the majority of people would be better off had the old system of weight loss with no diet remained the norm. It would also be a very different world today if the discovery of cholesterol had not fallen into the grateful lap of Nutritionists.

Chances are we would be a much slimmer and healthier nation today.

http://www.my-own-plan.com/cap/index4.html

Kirsten Plotkin Author

For More information read also these articles

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http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/244/

http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/diet-free-weight-loss-what-does-that-mean-to-you/

There seems to be a reluctance to face the growing problem of weight and obesity in the adult population today. But can we continue to ignore American obesity in children? We talk about more activity in the playground and healthier foods at the school cafeteria. But is not the real problem in the home?

I am sure all parents worry about the food they give their children.  They recognize that American obesity in children is caused first and foremost in the home and they do their best to follow the recommendations they get from experts like Nutritionists. The trouble is, those experts are not real experts and they are equipped with the wrong information.

Not a single diet…Ever, that has been promoted by Nutritionists, dieticians and diet guru’s has ever gone through genuine scientific research. No human trials have been conducted to test the validity of the claims. The diets are false and most of them are eventually unmasked as false. But there is always a newer and equally bad diet to take its place.

Bad diets, by pseudo experts have turned perfectly healthy people into victims of food addiction. Children eat what the adults eat. If mom is addicted, chances are the children are also addicted.

It is still possible to get back to where we were, but not until the right people get enough pressure from the everyday people to do something about it.  Until then, we each have to concentrate on fixing our own family.

It you are an overweight Parent of overweight children you should not blame yourself. Instead you should take action. Ignore the diets and make a few adjustments to the family menu. It will not involve calories and there are no restrictions on how much you eat, but you need to change some foods.

I know you find it difficult to think about, but that is your addiction influencing you. Letting go of an addiction is always hard. The hardest part is to acknowledge you have an addiction and decide to conquer it. Once it is gone, so are the cravings.  It is easy to follow a healthy food plan when you no longer constantly think about food. It is then you can look in the mirror and smile back. You will know your best reward will soon be there when you look at your children.

If you choose not to act, the children will grow up and be part of an even greater number of people with weight problems and obesity. By then, maybe the number will be three quarters or more. I dare not think how many children will be affected. If you really want to know where to lay the blame for this catastrophe, then let me tell you how it all began.

The late seventies was a time when a lot of wild theories were flying around, many became facts and were later discredited, but a few became dogma. Dogma is a difficult thing to combat.

Some myths have been exposed over the years, but at least one remains.  That is the notion that in order to be a healthy human being, you need to follow a well balanced diet, preferably one devised by a nutritionist or dietician.

If that was really true, humankind would not have survived for all the many eons till today.  Even with plagues and famines people survived.  We are almost indestructible. Had we not been healthy, most of that time, our specie would have become extinct. Instead, human beings thrived, mostly in good health, at least till the seventies.

That’s when Nutritionists found their market niche by pretending they had discovered cholesterol.  Suddenly they had a cure for everyone, including people who had never needed a diet.  They created the Pyramid diet. That’s the diet with more than two thirds carbohydrate. Since then there has been numerous other diets and theories. The one thing they all have in common is “They Don’t Work”.  People simply get fatter with each diet.

It seems the time has come for the chickens to come home to roost. We are threatened from without with climate change and economic voodoo. At the same time we are also threatened from within by the very food we are encouraged to eat.  We eat way more food than our body needs, it is more than our metabolism was meant to process.

In addition, we diet erratically. This confuses our brain which sends messages to our metabolism to start converting the carbohydrate to fat and store it for the famine. What does the body do in a famine? Instead of processing the carbohydrates you eat into glucose to give you energy to burn, it turns it into fat to be stored on your body.

And you wonder why you get fat when you finish a diet? A big step to overcoming an addiction is to acknowledge it exists. Once you do, the last thing you will want is pass it on to your children. Curing american obesity in children starts in your kitchen, therefore it starts with you.

Cure yourselves and you will cure your children.  The alternative is to force your children to face the same decision with your grandchildren and that may be too late.

http://www.my-own-plan.com/cap/index4.html

Kirsten Plotkin Author

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The Big Lie About Diets:

I am not sure precisely when I first wondered; when did america get so fat?  Like most people I was slow to notice. But unlike most people, I do remember when and how it began.

When self proclaimed experts try to create a truth out of false statements, all they have to do is repeat it often enough, to enough people to make it a fact. That is unless somebody speaks up and proves otherwise.  Sometimes, by then it can be too late.

If no one intervenes these same false statements move from facts to dogma.  Usually that means nobody dares to challenge it.  By that time, there is often no one left who can remember how the dogma came to be or, who started the myth in the first place.

The only thing that will expose false dogma is the courage to shine a bright light on it and demand the proof. Even then, that may not be enough. You see, such a challenge is usually up against overwhelming vested interests.

To give you an example: About eight years ago the CSIRO, the most respected science research facility in Australia, decided to do the first ever, serious, scientific study of diets and dieting.

Three years later, they published a paper which, amongst other things, made the excessive use of cereals and grains the reason why diets were making people fatter instead of slimmer. They said if you eat correctly, as people once did, by instinct, few people would need to diet. There was an immediate outcry of abuse from nutritionist.  It was supported by the cereal and diet food manufacturers.

The CSIRO retaliated by publishing their own diet book on how to get slim and to stay that way.  The nutritionists, who already had regular spots on TV and columns in newspapers, went on a massive publicity campaign to vilify the CSIRO and their evil, misguided results.  They claimed their own research proved that a healthy balance diet, as developed by their own research proved theirs was the only way for people to lose weight and become healthy.

It seems the CSIRO had finally had enough. A spokesman appeared to make a brief statement. I do not remember the words he used but it went something like this: We are a highly respected, scientific research facility. We have done three years intensive study on diets and dieting and our findings have been published in the appropriate journals.  If anyone has reason to dispute our findings and can show evidence, I suggest they publish their own findings.

This was a big reality check for nutritionists because they would have suddenly realized that the dogma on which they base their philosophy does not have a leg to stand on.  For thirty years, they have not had their diets put through a single scientific test nor has any diet ever been subjected to human trials. So the Nutritionists retreated and things calmed down.

At this point you may think that the public would prefer to accept the science instead of the hype, and that we had seen the last of the diet industry, but that is not how it went down.  Sure the entire diet industry was silenced for a while and the CSIRO sold a lot of books. But it didn’t take long for the diet industry to recover and regroup.

Nutritionists announced that they had been in intense study and had discovered that the true cause of the ever growing weight problems were due to fat. If you eat fat you get fat. To lose weight, all you have to do is to remove most of the fat from your diet. Fortunately they already had a diet ready for us.

It was a very seductive notion which made people throw away their old diet books for the new shiny fat free diet. Very soon, the carbohydrates were back to replace all that missing fat. The butchers trimmed their meat till it was almost tasteless and the diet food manufacturers launched a whole new range of fat free products.

The CSIRO did not bother to make an appearance to explain that the fat we eat is easily turned into glucose by the body and it is burned for energy, while carbohydrate has to be processed, with some difficulty, by our metabolism which tends to turn it into body fat.

I am sure you know the kind of fat I’m talking about? It sticks to your body and refuses to budge. That is to protect you against the famine. What famine you ask?  Each time you reduce your calorie intake for a diet your brain will alert your metabolism to guard against yet another famine.

Your brain does not know that you choose to deprive your body of food. It senses only a threat and it begins to convert all the carbohydrate you eat into body fat. That is precisely why diet do not work…Ever!

So next time you ask yourself when did america get so fat. Have another read of this article, or find even more information below.

http://www.my-own-plan.com/cap/index4.html

Kirsten Plotkin Author

For More information read also these articles

http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/my-personal-diet-free-weight-loss/

http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/is-diet-free-weight-loss-possible/

http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/244/

http://www.my-own-plan-blog.com/2009/12/diet-free-weight-loss-what-does-that-mean-to-you/