Fact or fiction
It is startling how often widespread popular belief
turns out to be, not only wrong, but surprisingly, the complete
opposite of what the truth turns out to be.. Nowhere is
this more true than in the snobbery that pervades the weight loss
industry. It is always wise to remember that, in todays commercial
world, popular belief, particularly when profit or loss is involved, is
a commodity. It is a bought and paid for commodity just like a sack of
beans.
The general belief is that being overweight is a
sign of self indulgence and lack of will power. Sometimes we hear,
particularly from the overweight group, the comforting pronouncement
that obesity is genetic and thus not really anyone’s fault. These are
traditional beliefs that are carryovers from the days when our food
supply was intact and self indulgence adequately explained the low
incidence of obesity. Today our food chain is so dominated by the
profit motive that good clean natural food is very difficult to find
and overweight problems, not coincidentally, are rampant. To understand
this we must look beyond self indulgence for an explanation.
Certainly the population of self indulgent people
who so lack willpower that they cannot, or will not, stop
overeating while living the life of a couch potato remains. We have
always had this minority. For them, this article will likely not do
much good at all.
This association of overweight with weak will
however, while it might make the lean amongst us feel superior as they
look down their nose at fat people, does nothing at all to explain why
two thirds of the entire American population is overweight and half of
these are grossly obese.
A short review of how the body works
When we eat more calories than we burn the body
stores the difference either as glycogen in the liver or as fat in our
fat cells. Thus the first important concept is to keep the number of
calories we eat relatively close to the number of calories that we
burn. This might be a healthy approach for the consumer but it is bad
business for the supermarket with a vested interest in selling as much
food as they can as often as they are able. It is not a
very good idea for the restaurant either; his vested interest is to
super size everything to justify inflated restaurant pricing.
The appestat is an automatic control function
performed by our hypothalamus that regulates our appetite. It warns us
to eat when we need food by making us hungry; it produces a sense of
satiation when we have eaten what we need. As long as this appestat
works properly, our body weight will remain stable in the normal
range. So to understand the basis of obesity we must understand
that the function of the appestat is to, indirectly but quite
accurately, regulate body weight.
Although the function of the appestat is automatic
and does not depend upon the exercise of willpower, we can over-rule it
and make conscious decisions to overeat. We can even allow these
decisions to become habits. It is in this way that the self indulgent
become fat. This phenomenon occurs in a statistically predictable part
of the population, and it always has. It has, traditionally, been known
to be associated with the poorer people who must depend upon the
poor quality food that they can afford. It is also associated with
various psychological stress pathologies that induce both overeating
and a poor choice of food. These pathologies are often reinforced by
sales practices amongst our food purveyors. A classic example of this
is the idea the “
you deserve a break
today” being used to promote the sale of food.
Calories are not only abundant in our
food supply but huge amounts of calories are added by the doping of
virtually all of our food with sugar, corn syrup and the like.
This is done in order to appeal to our sweet tooth and sell product. It
is part of the subliminal promotion of brand loyalty.
Nutrition is not at all abundant. Essential
minerals, vitamins, enzymes, amino acids, phytonutrients, complex
sugars, fatty acids and many more important nutritional factors are
simply missing from the food we eat. Our appestat, noting this, keeps
us hungry until the missing nutrition magically appears in the
digestive tract. Of course, with todays adulterated food supply, it
never does.
While we are overeating and looking for the
essential nutrition that isn’t there, the body is prudently saving all
the extra calories as fat and glycogen. The burden of storing and
metabolizing all these extra calories distorts the endocrine system. We
soon develop elevated levels of insulin, cortisol, glucocorticoids,
depressed levels of T4 and many distortions in the entire metabolic
process. At some point we get diagnosed as Insulin Resistant or
Diabetic. This is usually long after most of our our endocrine
system has been thoroughly trashed.
Thus the malnutrition caused by a poorly engineered
food supply is what keeps many of us eating far beyond what we need.
The extra calories we consume as a direct consequence causes both the
overweight epidemic and the diabetes epidemic into which the nation has
descended.
The typical American reaction to this is to
(a)
diet,
(b) use nutritional
supplements
(c) exercise and
nutritious food,
and
(d) see the physician.
Diet
When we diet the body perceives itself to be
undergoing a famine. All of its self-protective responses kick in. It’s
metabolism slows down; we become ravenously hungry, we become sluggish
and have lowered energy levels.Our digestive efficiency increases and
we extract more calories from our food and excrete fewer calories. We
increase the storage of fat in our adipose cells until the diet is
severe enough to limit this process. Always eventually we abandon the
diet, at the increasingly intense urging of our appestat. However when
we do, the increased digestive efficiency remains and we gain back the
weight even more quickly than we lost it.
Nutritional Supplements
These are sometimes called isolates. They are called
that because they are either manufactured in synthetic form or isolated
from their original food sources by advanced chemical synthesis and
separation processes. There are numerous problems with the use of
nutritional supplements, although successful use of them can be
very helpful.
In nutritious food, all of the vitamins,
minerals amino acids, etc that we know about, as well as many that we
have yet to discover, appear in an easy to assimilate synergistic form.
In this form they interact with each other, just like drugs do, to
produce effects that are difficult to predict or to replicate. Vitamin
C, for example, requires a host of bioflavonoids with it in order to be
effective. Vitamin E in nature, is really a complex mix of a variety of
tocopherols; in an isolate this is reduced to one or two or three of
the most prominent tocopherols. The same can be said for all
of the vitamins. Minerals in natural food are always complexed
with protein to make them easier to assimilate. Frequently in isolates,
the protein is missing or the one used is the very cheapest and least
useful one available.
Using nutritional supplements when suffering from
this sort of generalized malnutrition is like using a crutch when
the leg is broken or wearing eyeglasses when vision is impaired. It is
a useful and necessary thing to do. As our knowledge of nutrition
grows, the use of supplements becomes more effective. It is
highly doubtful, however, if our knowledge of what is good for us will
ever approach the accuracy that mother nature brings to the
issue. This would then suggest that we know all that there is to know
and nothing is left to learn.
Exercise
Exercise is one of the most vitally important steps
we can take to preserve our health in this environment. To maximally
benefit, we should exercise to the point of perspiration, approximately
15 minutes for many, about 45 minutes after consuming a meal containing
carbohydrates. This will open up a non-insulin dependent pathway to
enable the body to transport blood sugar from the blood stream to the
interior of the cells that need it.
See the physician
If you are among the fortunate minority that
has a physician that actually will work with you to restore healthy
body function, by all means work with him and strive to keep him in
business. Certainly, the drug interests in America that dominate
the orthodox medical community, are trying to put him out of business.
If you do not have such a physician, either try to find such a one or
focus on alternative methodologies practiced by naturopathic,
alternative or other doctors. Strive to get results and become
impatient when, after the money is spent, the healing results are not
clearly apparent. Remember that arrogance is not an appropriate
attitude for a physician to have toward a patient who pays the bills.
Fooling mother nature
There are numerous additional problems with getting
a decent meal in America in addition to the ones we have
discussed. Typically a number of purely economic factors define the
sort of food we find in the market place to a much greater degree than
a concern for the nations health..
Alien chemistry, deliberately placed in our food,
for commercial purposes is known to specifically interrupt and
distort the normal functioning of our Appestat and to
damage cellular functioning. Both genetically and chemically altered
food is widely used to extend shelf life, to improve tolerance to
pests, to reduce the cost of raw materials, to reduce the need for
refrigeration, to encourage brand loyalty by creating addictions,
to modify texture, color, taste, aroma and for many other
commercial reasons. The scope of this assault on the nations health is
breathtaking; it is the result of over a hundred years of
engineering food for profit without effective oversight from any
government regulating agencies.
Much of the overweight and diabetic problems in
America can be traced back to the war on fat of the early 1970’s.
Actually what happened then is that coconut oil was removed from the
diet and soy, cottonseed and rape seed (canola) oils were substituted.
These cheap worthless oils now appear in all of our processed food.they
are known to precipitate diabetes. If you want to win the war on fat,
refuse to eat anything that contains any of these three oils.
MSG, with over 100 different alias’, now appears in
all of our food. The effect is to create addiction to the food and to
make people obese. The fattening addiction is so powerful that the line
of lab rats scientists use to study obesity is called MSG rats. They
are deliberately made obese, in order to study obesity, by
feeding them MSG. MSG is by no means the only addictive substance
added to our food supply for the purpose of subliminally forcing us to
prefer a particular brand of food. Thus our usual American ingenuity
and drive for profit, coupled with a clear immoral intent on the
part of food manufacturers
carry the concept of brand loyalty to ridiculous extremes. If you
find yourself eating something more than four or five times a week take
a look at the label to discover how you are being chemically
manipulated.
What to do
The war on fat, like the war on poverty, the war on
disease and the other mind numbing phony wars that America has been
fighting, was never intended to be won. It was intended to misdirect
and cloak a new and massive assault on the health of a nation by those
who profit greatly by doing so.
The effective way to man the trenches and restore
our faltering health is to refuse to be misled by popular mysticism and
learn how things really work. Refuse to buy cheap and corrupt fats and
oils and the processed food that contains them. Use supplements to
provide minimum essential needs and set up a plan to burn off the
excess calories that is so difficult to avoid consuming if you
buy your food in an American supermarket.
Weight loss rainmakers
An important part of the weight loss industry is the
diet book. One of the first was published in 1864 and advocated a
daily alcohol intake. Actually our body systems are now known to
convert some of our alcohol intake to body fat and store it. Not
only was this an ineffective weight control technique but it actually
promoted the storage of body fat.
“Outsmarting the female fat cell”, another more
recent pseudo scientific weight loss guide, asserts that calories do
not count. The only thing that counts is how you eat them; not how many
you eat.
In the 1930’s an insecticide, Dinitrophenol, was
widely promoted as a weight loss medication. Before it was ordered off
the market a number of dieters lost their eyesight as a direct
consequence of its use. Another high risk theory was promoted in the
Cambridge diet. This one killed a number of people before it too was
ordered off the market.
We have all lived through the more recent era
that saw the Jack LeLane program, Stillman’s quick weight loss
program, the Beverly Hills diet, the Phen-Fen program, the low
carbohydrate diet, the Atkins diet and many, many others. Each of
them took a guess at the cause of overweight and each of them in turn
failed miserably to resolve the weight loss problem for the large
majority of us. Millions of us suffered along with Oprah as she, very
publicly, strove to preserve her figure and her health.
Although this sort of pseudo science abounds and
fills a huge market share, real science also exists and it has made
important recent strides in the understanding and reversal of the
overweight syndrome.
Nathaniel Pritkin, an engineer, came a little
closer to a genuinely sound weight loss program than most with his no
fat diet. When he started to study the problem he weighed 300 lbs
and suffered from severe arterial occlusion and had already had a heart
attack. When he died at the age of sixty of unrelated causes, he had a
trim figure and the arteries of a thirty year old. It’s unfortunate
that the role of the essential fatty acid was not understood in the
1960’s or he would have been much more successful. Unbeknownst to
Nathaniel, the type of fats and oils that are eaten is far more
important than the quantity of them. However, this was not learned
until much later.
Thomas Smith is a reluctant medical
investigator having been forced into curing his own Diabetes
because it was obvious that his doctor would not or could not not cure
it. He has published the results of his successful Diabetes
investigation in his special report entitled “Insulin: Our Silent
Killer” written for the layman but also widely valued by the medical
practitioner. The book may be purchased by sending $25.00 US to him at
PO Box 7685, Loveland, Colorado 80537. He has also posted a great deal
of useful information about this disease on his web page
www.Healingmatters.com
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