Diet And A Diet

In the past I have sought answers from doctors on how to manage my body's desire to put on weight. I have always been taught that being overweight is unhealthy, but my body just didn't seem to want to comply with that rule. I didn't really know what I was doing wrong. I ate from the food groups that I was supposed to eat from, making sure to have my meat and dairy portions every day as I was taught in school. I would even make sure we had cooked corn, carrots, peas, or green beans with dinner. I just didn't know what else to do for myself so I sought the advice of a medical doctor. He recommended a few different diet plans to me, all of which were too expensive for my pocket book. I couldn't afford to buy specialty meals that would make me loose weight. Why did maintaining a healthy weight have to be so expensive? Is that the only option for me? Isn't there anything else my doctor could recommend? But if there was something else, wouldn't my doctor know about it?

Doctors spend years in medical school learning how to treat a sick and diseased body through the use of modern medical procedures and drugs, but are woefully lacking in knowledge pertaining to the maintenance of health through consuming a proper diet. This is not entirely their fault. In school we are taught what we should know, and medical school is no exception to these teachings. Dr. T. Colin Campbell has researched this issue and shared his knowledge and discoveries in his book The China Study. Here are some excerpts of what he has had to say:

In 1985 the United States National Research Council funded an expert panel report that investigated the quantity and quality of nutrition education in U.S. medical schools. The committee's findings were clear: "The committee concluded that nutrition education programs in U.S. medical schools are largely inadequate to meet the present and future demands of the medical profession." But this finding was nothing new. The committee noted that in 1961 the "American Medical Association Council on Foods and Nutrition reported that nutrition in the U.S. medical schools received 'inadequate recognition, support and attention.'" In other words, over forty years ago, the doctors themselves said that their nutrition training was inadequate. Nothing had changed by 1985, and up to the present time, articles continue to be written documenting the lack of nutrition training in medical schools.

In conjunction with the 1985 government report, the president of the American Medical Students Association, William Kassler, writes:

Most nutrition in the formal curriculum is incorporated into other courses. Biochemistry, physiology and pharmacology are the courses most often alleged to contain some nutritioninstrucition. Too often in such courses, nutrition is touched on briefly, with the primary emphasis on the major discipline. It is quite possible to finish such a course and not even realize that nutrition was covered [my emphasis]. Nutrition taught by those whose interest and expertise lie elsewhere simply doesn't work.

It gets even worse! When nutrition education is provided in relation to public health problems, guess who is supplying the "educational" material? The Dannon Institute, Egg Nutrition Board, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Dairy Council, Nestlé Clinical Nutrition, Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Baxter Healthcare Corporation and others have all joined forces to produce a Nutrition in Medicine program and the Medical Nutrition Curriculum Initiative. Do you think that this all-star team of animal foods and drug industries representatives is going to objectively judge and promote optimal nutrition, which science has shown to be a whole foods, plant-based diet that minimizes the need for drugs? Or might they try to protect the meat-centered, Western diet where everyone expects to pop a pill for every sickness?

- T. Colin Campbell, The China Study, pg. 327, 327-328, 328.

How often do people, especially women, go to a doctor for the magic diet pill or for advice on which diet plan they should follow? Our diet directly and immediately affects the functions of our bodies, both short and long term. If we want to be healthy we need to give our bodies only healthy foods beginning today and continuing for as long as we want to be healthy. Our diet should be a lifestyle, not a fad. The fat, funny cat we all know named Garfield once said "Diet is 'die' with a 't.'" I think he should have said "A diet is 'die' with a 't.'" Dr Joel Fuhrman, M.D., a board-certified family physician who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods, has this to say about diets:

What is wrong with every single commercial weight-loss program? They are all too high in fat and toolow in fiber because they cater to the American love affair with rich, high-fat food.

Weight Watchers brand foods contain 24 percent of calories from fat. Lean cuisine contains 25 percent of calories from fat. The Jenny Craig program requires the purchase of packaged meals with entrees such as cheese souffle and Salisbury steak, meals that are almost as bad as what most Americans eat at home. These commercial diet plans, since they are not very low in fat, must restrict portion sizes to offer "low calorie" meals. These "skimpy" portions represent an obsolete approach with a dismal track record. [...]

You can't eat out of boxes and consume powdered drinks forever, either. If you do lose some weight, you will always gain it back. Instead, permanent changes in your eating habits must be made. Learning new recipes and adopting different ways of eating that you can live with will maintain your weight loss and protect your health for the rest of your life.[...]

The result of denying yourself food is that when you go back to eating normally, fat accumulates even more easily than before because of a low metabolic rate. This leads to the familiar yo-yo phenomenon in which dieters lose weight, only to rebound to a heavier weight than when they started.[...]

So, instead of searching for weight-loss gimmicks and tricks, try to adopt a resolution to be healthy first. Focusing on your health, and not your weight, will eventually result in achieving successful long-term weight loss. Eating a healthy diet, one that is rich in an assortment of natural plant fibers, will help you crave less and feel satisfied without overeating. All diet plans fail because they cater to modern American tasters, which include too much processed foods or animal products to be healthy.

Stop measuring portions and trying to follow complicated formulas. Instead, eat as many vegetables, beans, and fresh fruits as possible, and less of everything else. Any other program is an insult to your intelligence.

- Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Eat To Live, pg. 114-115.

Our dietary habits should be those that keep our bodies at a healthy weight without extreme intervention, consisting of food that we can consume our entire lives without detrimental effects to our bodies and instead help them to thrive and function. If we are treating our bodies right they will adjust and maintain their weight within healthy parameters. This not only holds true for those who are overweight, but for those who are very thin as well. Every person's body is different and each person's body has its optimal weight. People should be realistic about what their optimal weight is, but not justify an unhealthy body as being their norm.

We only get one body in this lifetime. Why do we treat it so badly? Our bodies are one of a kind, they are irreplaceable. Once a person's body has worn out there is no going back for another. Our bodies give us what we give them. We truly are what we eat. If all we eat is unhealthy food then all we will get out of our bodies will be disease and illness. It is up to us individually to care for ourselves through proper dietary habits. Our bodies were made to consume natural foods, not packages ones. It also makes sense to me that the foods that are easily replaced through the seasons should be the ones we consume the most of. An animal takes months or years to reach the maturity necessary in order to consume it or its by-products; plants continuously grow and produce food throughout the warm months and some plant foods can store well for the duration of the cold months. Perhaps those are the portions in which we were meant to consume such foods in our diets.

Eating right doesn't have to be expensive, confusing, difficult, and filled with time consuming methods to determine if we have reached our maximum levels of fat, calories, sugars, etc. Following a dietary lifestyle that is based largely on fresh plant foods can help us avoid excess weight, disease ,and illness and grant us a long, high-quality life.

Teach A Man To Fish

A few months ago I read an article in the news that talked about a university that has developed a way to fortify tortillas with iron and zinc so that the poorer people in Mexico, and other tortilla eating nations, can consume the "recommended" amounts of these minerals. These researchers have been working on this particular problem for many years and have spent a lot of money trying to find a solution. I'm sure the people involved with this research have the desire to help all those they can by giving them a product that could possibly enhance their health. The method and equipment will be affordable for small mill owners and, in fact, some are already producing fortified tortillas. Of course, they made sure to preserve the color, texture and flavor in order to appear as if it were the natural tortilla. In time they hope these fortified tortillas will be consumed by millions. They are receiving financial help from a non-profit group that believes in using technology to help improve nutrition in poorer, developing nations. This sounds like a wonderful product, but I see some flaws.

Our bodies have been designed to thrive on natural foods, not processed look-a-likes. Our bodies have the amazing ability to extract the right amounts of vitamins, minerals, and protein from the food we can grow in our own backyards (yes protein is found in plant foods). Anything that is made in a laboratory or factory is far from natural and may have dire consequences when introduced into a system that requires natural foods. Dr. T. Colin Campbell has spent most of his lifetime researching health and nutrition and has come to some amazing discoveries through that research. Here are some of the facts he has found in his line of work concerning unnaturally altered foods and synthetic supplements:

"Our bodies have evolved with this infinitely complex network of reactions in order to derive maximal benefit from whole foods, as they appear in nature. The misguided may trumpet the virtues of one specific nutrient or chemical, but this thinking is too simplistic. Our bodies have learned how to benefit from the chemicals in food as they are packaged together, discarding some and using others as they see fit. I cannot stress this enough, as it is the foundation of understanding what good nutrition means.
Supplements will not lead to long-lasting health and may cause unforeseen side effects. Furthermore, for those relying on supplements, beneficial and sustained diet change is postponed. The dangers of a Western diet cannot be overcome by consuming nutrient pills."

"It is not that these nutrients aren't important. They are - but only when consumed as food, not as supplements. Isolating nutrients and trying to get benefits equal to those of whole foods reveals an ignorance of how nutrition operates in the body. A recent special article in the New York Times documents this failure of nutrient supplements to provide any proven health benefit. As time passes, I am confident that we will continue to 'discover' that relying on the use of isolated nutrient supplements to maintain health, while consuming the usual Western diet, is not only a waste of money but is also potentially dangerous."

"Our food choices have an incredible impact not only on our metabolism, but also on the initiation, promotion and even reversal of disease, on our energy, on our physical activity, on our emotional and mental well-being and on our world environment. All of these seemingly separate spheres are intimately interconnected."

"How many billions of dollars must be spent before we understand the limitations of reductionist research? Scientific investigations of the effects of single nutrients on complex diseases have little or no meaning when the main dietary effect is due to the consumption of an extraordinary collection of nutrients and other substances found in whole foods."

- T. Colin Campbell, PhD, The China Study, Pg. 228; 229; 240; 288.

Artificially supplying our bodies with synthetic nutrients, or natural nutrients unnaturally added to other foods, will not give us the health benefits that would come by consuming necessary nutrients in their natural state. However, this is not the only problem I see. I also see the opportunity for a few to capitalize from the needs of many. To me this seems morally wrong and is in direct opposition to what these researchers are trying to do, which is to help people in need. The poor people will become dependent on a bad product under the false impression that that product is good for them and a small minority will make a profit from that dependence and falsehood. This seems to be counter productive to helping the poor and malnourished. They will remain poor, in bad health and on top of that will then become dependent on others. They will then need to find more ways of making money, which they already don't have much of, in order to buy a product that doesn't help them. Aidan Mackey has this to say in the book Beyond Capitalism and Socialism:

"Most emphatically, we must first restore the family and its values. After that, in natrual progression, must come the family trade or craft, and the small organic family farm. Upon these must any sane and healthy society be built, and we must destroy the grotesque combines and cartels, many of which are strong enough to dictate to governments. It is clear they exist not to produce food or furniture, but profit. We all know the euphemism "diversification," which means that in pursuit of the money-god, they will readily switch from one field to others not remotely connected, providing there is money to be harvested."
- Aidan Mackey, Beyond Capitalism and Socialism, pg. 4

Instead, I propose taking the money and time away from research and using it to send knowledgeable people to these nations and teach people how to garden, build homes of their own, build their own furniture and other needs, make their own clothing, etc. Teach these people how to fill their own needs with the help of others in their own small communities. Don't worry about their reading, writing and math skills, that kind of knowledge will not feed starving children. Stop making them dependent on capitalists who only care about their pocket books, not the lives they are affecting. Stop making them dependent on groups because they will never learn to be self-sufficient that way. Make them dependent upon themselves and what they can produce through the work of their own hands. Do this and you will have made an independent people that are no longer poor and needy.

Stop giving out fish and start teaching people how to fish for themselves.