I’ve found these books to be of tremendous help in understanding:
- how we arrived at the obesity epidemic and
- what to eat
The ideas are definitely not mainstream!
“From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back.
In the spring of 1999 the heads of the world’s largest processed food companies—from Coca-Cola to Nabisco—gathered at Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to do about it.
Increasingly, the salt-, sugar-, and fat-laden foods these companies produced were being linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of reckoning unless changes were made. This executive then launched into a damning PowerPoint presentation—114 slides in all—making the case that processed food companies could not afford to sit by, idle, as children grew sick and class-action lawyers lurked. To deny the problem, he said, is to court disaster.”
“Robert Lustig’s 90-minute YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”, has been viewed more than three million times. Now, in this much anticipated book, he documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last 30 years.
In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control.
To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress; and societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial, and completely based in science, Fat Chance debunks the widely held notion to prove “a calorie is NOT a calorie”, and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide.”
A Personal Note
The information in these books makes sense to me and I’m following a low-sugar (essentially none when compared to the SAD), high protein and high fat diet – and it works. You’ll have to examine your own situation, absorb as much information as you can and then make your own decision(s) on what to eat.
About my high-fat diet – we are bombarded daily with references to “artery-clogging fat” – and even having found plenty of research that indicates otherwise, a niggling doubt remained – am I setting myself up for coronary problems?
This winter, I went in for a routine annual eye exam. I was expecting the pupil-dialating-flashy-thing, but instead got to experience a new instrument that performs fundus photography.
It was over in moments, and when I sat down with Dr. to go over the results, he actually asked me if I were a vegetarian – he said he rarely saw such a clean vascular system.
I now feel completely confident in my dietary choices.
Please do your own research and come to your own conclusions…