Carbohydrates Are A Menace!

Friday 8 June, 2012 6:21 pm | The carbohydrate addict's diet | Kirsten Plotkin

To say carbohydrates are a menace, maybe strong words!

But to put it in perspective, look at the map showing obesity trends from 1985 to 2008.

Today, four years later, the numbers are even greater. So what does carbohydrates have to do with obesity? The answer is ‘everything’! There is a big campaign of deception going on, about what exactly makes us all get fat. It’s a campaign driven by cereal, snack food, diet food and low fat food corporations. It is promoted by nutritionists and other self-nominated diet experts. Manufactured foods are not among the foods our body has been designed to process.

But our body will always adapt – right? Wrong! The human body does not adapt – it evolves. Evolution takes eons, not decades. It is unlikely our body will ever learn to process the carbohydrates we eat. Certainly not in our lifetime.

Nobody wants to publicise this. There is concern for the big corporations who have built their businesses on carbohydrates. They expect carbohydrate addiction to continue to be passed on to future generations.

Obesity Campaign Poster (Photo credit: Pressbound)

What makes carbohydrates a menace? Let me explain;

All carbohydrates you eat are converted to glucose. Glucose is liquid sugar. It is our body‘s preferred fuel. But just like a motor vehicle, our body can only use the fuel we spend on driving it. If we don’t use much energy we won’t spend much fuel. Our body is not equipped to store the excess fuel. It has only one option and that’s to convert it to body fat. That’s the fat that ends up on our body. In other words; it’s the excess carbohydrates we eat, that make us fat.

Just forty years ago, most people were slim and healthy. There was no obesity epidemic on the radar and type2 diabetes was unheard of. Forty years ago, we had a far lower incidence for heart disease, colon and bowel cancer. So what did we do forty years ago to cause the calamities that followed?

We changed to a carbohydrates diet.

But we did much more than change our diet, we reversed it. Our traditional diet was simply flipped upside down. The result was an opposite set of food groups and an opposite percentage of content in each of those groups. Nobody considered what this might do to our body. Who made this happen? it was a group of people who aspired to a niche on the fringe of medicine. They needed a product and a new modern diet seemed a good start. They figured the best way to get a completely new diet was to reverse the old one. The new diet became known as the Pyramid Diet. From the day it began, so did weight problems, which have led to an obesity epidemic and finally, type2 diabetes and morbid obesity.

Two mice; the mouse on the left has more fat stores than the mouse on the right. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After each diet, our body works hard to restore the fat. That’s its job. In the process it creates storage space. Each time we diet the storage space expands. In effect; the more we diet the fatter we get.

So what made people give up the traditional protein diet and so readily accept the pyramid diet, based on carbohydrates?

It was the great cholesterol bungle. It caused a media scare campaign. The new diet experts were quick to announce that the new modern diet was the only proven remedy for high cholesterol. It took thirty years to expose that lie.

As to how this could even happen? For the past forty years we have been encouraged to distance ourselves from our internal body. We are told it’s best left to diet experts. Most of those experts can tell you everything there is to know about our food. How much to eat, the ratio of food groups, the texture and taste of the food. They just can’t tell us what happens inside, after we eat it.

We spend hours every day on our external appearance. But we rarely give a thought to how our body will feel about the food we put into it. Yet, it is the health and happiness of our internal body that determines how we look, how we feel, how soon we’ll age and how old we will get.

If you want to get slim and healthy for good, you need to learn what your body wants to eat as opposed to what YOU want to eat. Chances are, it won’t be the same thing. That’s because today, most of us are not in tune with our own body.