When we do a quick Google image search and compare our bodies today to those of people in the 1950s, especially in beach photos, we realize that people were in fact thinner back then. Men had waists of around 80 cm and women normally had waists of 38. Waists measuring 105 cm were barely visible.
Seeing a teenager weighing 200 pounds was almost unheard of. Few people were overweight at that time. Today we carry an extra 25, 30 or even 90 kg.
In centuries past, a prominent belly was a sign of privilege, a symbol of prosperity and success. Today, obesity has become democratic; Anyone can easily become overweight or obese. However, not everyone stores fat in the same places; some store it more easily in the buttocks and thighs, but most store it in the waist, especially in men.
Unlike fat stored in other parts of the body, this central or visceral fat alters the insulin response, triggers inflammatory processes and sends abnormal metabolic signals throughout the body. Today we know that being overweight is not just a question of acceptance – there are risks and the data shows it. The number of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, type 2 diabetes, strokes and others is increasing with obesity.
According to the World Health Organization, obesity tripled between 1975 and 2016. Today, two in three people are overweight and one in five is obese. What is happening and why do we carry so much more body fat today than people did in the middle of the last century?
Ask anyone, even a doctor, and the answer will probably be something like this: "Today we are fatter because we consume more calories and are more sedentary. " According to Dr William Davis in his book 'Wheat Belly', this may be true, but it is far from the whole truth. If we research the causes of obesity, we will find that most blogs and even doctors claim that the main cause is overeating and lack of physical activity.
But if we dig deeper and research more, we will discover that we have been indoctrinated with this calorie balance theory. Gary Taubes, researcher, writer and journalist for The New York Times, talks extensively about this. We turned the century with increasing weight gain, but contrary to what many people think, the main cause of the obesity epidemic is not the lack of physical activity and excessive eating, as stated by Dr José Carlos Souto in his blog.
The problem is confusing correlation with causation. A person who is always eating and always hungry, continually gaining weight, may be accused of being greedy or greedy, among other impolite words. However, what this person may not know is that, for example, they may have high insulin resistance and an imbalance in the hunger and satiety hormones, ghrelin and leptin.
What about physical activity? Some blog posts insist that we move less today than people did in the last century. We walk less, we have remote controls, we have Uber and we do less manual work, and all of this is true, but it is not the cause of the increase in obesity.
Dr Jason Fung once said, 'Exercise is like brushing your teeth; It's good for you and should be done every day, just don't expect it to cause weight loss. Dr David Perlmutter also made an interesting observation: “Calories lost through moderate physical exercise are negligible for weight loss. ” To say that people have gained weight and continue to do so simply because they eat more and exercise less is to ignore three fundamental points of view: hormonal, enzymatic and metabolic.
This simplistic, calorie-limited view also ignores the fact that not all calories are created equal; In other words, the quality factor is much more important than quantity. Quantity is not everything. 100 calories of eggs is very different than 100 calories of pasta.
Likewise , 1 kg of $100 bills is very different from 1 kg of $1 bills. The weight is the same, but the value of each package is very different. Another thing is to ignore all the primary factors and accuse someone who can't lose weight of not being able to eat less and being too lazy to do it.
exercises. We are getting the wrong advice. Today, we consume many more foods that affect our insulin and foods designed to make us addicted.
Obesity rates will continue to rise until health authorities change their advice. We cannot reduce weight gain or loss to a simple calorie count. Today we have more body fat compared to people in the 1950s, but the main reason is not just eating more and moving less.
The foods we eat today are very different, which means they are of lower nutritional quality. Some of the calories we have on the market today are not just empty calories; These are calories that literally steal nutrients from our body, especially calcium, iron and B vitamins. Most of the calories we ingest today are those that constantly trigger our insulin, which is the hormone responsible for storing body fat.
When we understand that some calories impact our insulin at abnormal levels and others do not, or that some calories contain important nutrients while others steal nutrients from our body, we begin to disregard the calorie quantity factor and focus on quality. With a minimal understanding of this, many people would probably increasingly avoid certain types of processed foods, and this is bad for the food industry because it can compromise their revenues. That's why it's so interesting for the market to maintain this old culture of caloric balance or energy balance, and the industry knows what to do.
Of course, millions in revenue are at stake. The soft drink industry, for example, has tried to link the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and vascular disease to fat consumption and lack of physical activity, thus exempting sugar. To achieve this, it was necessary for scientists and politicians to be bought and, as a result, the industry is washing its hands, placing the blame on consumers for their control or lack of control over consumption, even though the product contains a combination of chemicals that can make the consumer addicted.
It is not in the industry's interest for consumers to know how to distinguish between calories; The industry wants consumers to continue to think that the body responds to all calories in the same way. And today we know that, unfortunately, this theory has placed us not only in an obesity epidemic, but also in a situation of related diseases. But what was the diet like in the middle of the last century?
In the 1950s, most people didn't need to worry about the calorie factor. The food was more nutritious and the supply of ultra-processed products was smaller. Fast food was not as common as it is today.
Meals were prepared at home and were sacred moments, rarely exchanged, for example, for a snack accompanied by soft drinks, very common today mainly for convenience. Our lives are busier. Meals were higher in protein, healthy fats and vegetables and were lower carbohydrate dishes compared to today.
Carbohydrate intake in the 1950s was about 40% among macronutrients; Today our consumption is around 60%. Nowadays it is very common to consume snacks based on refined carbohydrates. At that time, people didn't eat every three hours, which is what we do today following recommendations, and this keeps our insulin always high.
The treats were generally made at home with more natural ingredients and consumed in spare time, free from the preservatives and colorings that we find in everything today. Today, we have light, diet or zero products that claim to be healthy, but are full of chemicals that didn't exist back then. And sugar?
We have increased our consumption by 40%, a third of which is just sugary drinks. It's also important to understand that people started to gain weight more quickly just when certain institutions started telling us what we should eat. In 1992, the United States Department of Agriculture created the food pyramid.
The goal was to educate people about what is more or less healthy and, incredibly, many people don't know that this pyramid was created by politicians and not by scientists. Many countries followed the pyramid's advice and Brazil was no exception. Note that at the base of the pyramid are precisely the least nutritious and most fatty foods: processed and industrialized carbohydrates that increase blood sugar.
It's not by chance. Let's think about who would benefit from placing natural foods that cannot be patented at the base of the food pyramid. The food pyramid, which advises us to eat more white bread than vegetables or natural sources of protein, also does not show the difference between good and bad fats.
The truth is that the form that the food pyramid took was much more influenced by agribusiness than by health agencies. Modern, refined wheat, with a high concentration of gluten, along with sugar, are two of the substances that make people most fat in modern civilization, bringing along with high rates of obesity an increasing number of cases of heart disease, type 2 diabetes , some types of cancer, metabolic syndrome and others. The situation of industries that include wheat in their products has improved greatly with the support of the American government, which encouraged the consumption of whole grains through the creation of this food pyramid.
From the perspective of food sellers, wheat is the perfect ingredient: the more you eat, the more you want. Let's analyze the situation from another point of view, just to better understand how much we can be manipulated. Since the first studies that showed the relationship between smoking and cancer, it took 50 years for public restriction policies to be implemented.
The tobacco industry has done everything it can to deny the link between cancer and cigarettes, including buying the consciences of corrupt scientists and politicians. But despite this, there was a reduction in the number of smokers and, consequently, the prevention of many deaths from cancer. But what does smoking have to do with the fattening edible substances of modern society?
The sugar industry, for example, used and continues to use the same manipulation tactics as the tobacco industry. Sugar is in everything, and leave aside the fact that sugar puts us in a state of storing body fat, with high insulin spikes. Sugar, as well as other types of processed and refined carbohydrates, is responsible for several modern diseases that previously existed at much lower rates, for example, cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's and others.
The obesity epidemic is not a matter of willpower or weakness of character; in fact, we were following the wrong advice all along.
