Eliminate diet cravings

If not for a group of people who called themselves nutritionists, and their chance encounter with something called cholesterol, it is unlikely the average person today would suffer from diet cravings and they would probably look a lot slimmer.

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