Obesity and Diabetes. It’s obvious where we have gone wrong.

10 February 2012

Around 188,000 years ago our species left Neanderthal man behind to become Homo Sapien. Since that time our genetic make up has changed by only half of 1%. For 187,900 of the years since then, our diet was essentially the same. However, in just the last 100 years the food that we eat has changed beyond all recognition and when you plot this change against the human evolutionary timeline and the explosion of obesity and diabetes it becomes glaringly obvious where the problem lies.

Kate Walker of BeNiceToYou.com told us “You have to ask if we are genetically so different today than we were 75 years ago, for example, from when margarine was invented in an attempt to overcome the social unease being caused by butter rationing. Until then butter had been what everyone used, we have been using it for many thousands of years and our bodies know what to do with it. The government even went so far as to tell us that margarine was better for us than butter anyway and as a nation, we believed them, so much so that margarines and spreads still outsell butter today by a considerable margin. Yet manufactured fats are so completely alien to our bodies that we cannot properly process them, our bodies simply don’t know how to.” Kate continued, “Many of the oils and fats we use in cooking, processed foods, manufactured foods, fast foods and diet or light foods are the manufactured fats that our bodies struggle to process. The consequence is that these fats are not being properly used by our bodies, they are being stored, in ever increasing quantities. It’s the same story with sugar and manufactured sweeteners. Sugar appears totally naturally in many nourishing foods, manufactured sweeteners do not. For millennia our bodies have processed sugars such as fructose in fruit and glucose in root vegetables, but our bodies have little concept of what to do with massive quantities of

Aspartame and Saccharin.”

The more we process and artificially change our food, the further away from the original raw ingredients it becomes, the less nourishing it is and the more alien it becomes to our bodies. We need to look again at the food manufacturing industry and start regarding what it produces for human consumption with a new perspective. The manufacturing process reduces the goodness in food whilst increasing the profits for the manufacturers. "Re-educating people to eat closer to nature is key to the battle against obesity and diabetes." If you want to eat more of what our bodies are designed to eat, the best advice is to do 90% your shopping in the produce and butchery aisles, eat natural sugars and natural fats and only venture into the rest of the supermarket for the very occasional treat.

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