Diabetes and obesity linked to the consumption of high fruct
A long list of nutritionists and naturopaths (myself included) have been telling the public about this correlation for years. It's nice to see additional epidemiological research to back up the trend. So what does it all mean? For starters, it means that the low-fat diet crazy of the 1980's was all wrong. When doctors and the American Heart Association told people to avoid fat, people consumed massive quantities of refined sugars, causing an acceleration of chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes (which, of course, have terrible implications for heart health as well).
It also means that the current efforts by the Bush Administration and the sugar industry to claim that carbohydrates don't promote disease are, of course, hogwash. Due to business interests, the Bush Administration has been pressuring the World Health Organization to avoid recommending that people around the world eat less refined sugar. You see, the United States is the world's largest exporter of high-sugar, disease-promoting foods and drinks such as soft drinks and candy bars. If the world is told to eat less sugar, that will not only make everyone healthier and save billions of dollars in annual health care costs, it will also hurt the profits of a few influential companies and organizations in the United States. So, of course, they can't allow the world to be told to eat less sugar, which is why Big Sugar has harshly criticized anyone who explains that refined white sugar is bad for you. That's food politics at work.
Lastly, it also means that the #1 cause of disease and death in the United States is, in fact, our national food supply. It is our foods that are killing us, and the studies prove it. If we weren't eating such high quantities of high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, aspartame, sodium nitrite, MSG and other metabolic disruptors, we'd all be far healthier today. In fact, if we ate what previous generations ate, our levels of chronic disease would plummet to the levels observed in the 1940's and 1950's.
And yet, today we have the opportunity to be far healthier than our grandparents simply because we have access to miracle-class sources of outstanding nutrition. These "superfoods" include chlorella, spirulina, flax oil, wheat grass, quinoa and many others. We have access to these today at affordable prices, allowing us to enhance our health in ways our grandparents never could have imagined.
It is sad, indeed, that the American public is now experiencing more chronic disease than at any time in recorded human history. We've done it to ourselves, and we've done it by allowing soft drink vendors to invade our schools, by allowing the sugar industry to control the White House, by allowing food companies to sell milled grains (like white flour) that lack any notable nutrition, by falling for the bad nutritional science promoted by the AHA, ADA and FDA, and by subsidizing both the corn and sugar industries with hundreds of millions of dollars that ultimately have the effect of making junk foods far cheaper than healthy foods.
We've done all this to ourselves, folks, and the vast majority of it has been done in order to protect the profits of a few influential organizations. But the ultimate cost is widespread chronic disease and billions of dollars in associated health care costs.
It's time to do something different. Join the Consumer Wellness Research Center and become part of the growing effort to ban soft drinks in our nations schools, end taxpayer subsidies to sugar companies, create an internal affairs department at the FDA, and hold food companies responsible for the diseases their products directly cause. And, of course, don't eat refined carbohydrates or processed foods if you want to avoid chronic disease.