Natural Selection

Just finished watching the new FoodMatters film “Hungry for Change” which you can watch absolutely free for another 5 days. It is a must see for anyone who is overweight or has ever tried to lose weight by dieting. The film presents some radical ideas about the nature of the food and dieting industry and how both of them actually promote weight gain. The food industry via the use of nutrient poor and addictive ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, aspartame and flavor enhancers not only cause adverse effects on the body such neurological problems and bone demineralization but contribute to the addictive nature of these nutrient poor foods thereby causing weight gain.

The diet industry still promotes the idea of deprivation to the body which is never sustainable. In order to lose weight (and heal disease), the body truly needs nourishment and detoxification and a rebuilding of self love and self esteem. The film delivers some motivational interviews from experts in the field as well as everyday people who have healed themselves by nourishing themselves from the inside out.

So check out this gallery “Time” has published from the book “Hungry Beast”. It chronicles the amount and type of foods families from across the world purchase in one week. What I notice most is two things. The quantity of food varies significantly across countries (check out Chad versus Germany for example) and the more Western the family tends to be, the more processed the food choices become. The Americans, for example have very little fresh produce on their table whereas the family from Ecuador have nothing but fresh produce. It seems economic development comes with a price, more marketing, poor health and the environmental impact of all that packaging.

Check out the trailer from the documentary “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead”

This movie will absolutely change your life. Find out what happens in the cultivation and processing of food, how nutrient deficiencies lead to disease and how pharmaceuticals are NOT the answer to fixing what chronic malnutrition has destroyed.

You need to check out this movie

I recently read the comment that a major clothing brand aimed at teenage girls considered size 10 to be plus size. This is ludicrous, not only because they are lumbering girls with an unrealistic adult size system which they are never going to be able to comply with as they get older but they are being given the message early on that that normal and average sizes are grossly overweight (the average size of Australian women is 12-14).

What makes this scenario worse is that there seems to be competing pressure from the fast food industry, who directly market to this age group, to eat nutrient poor food which is laden with additives, saturated fat and sugar. Food which is inevitably going to make them put on weight and also leads to conditions such as anxiety and depression and may even affect their fertility in the future.

What are we producing? Girls who have unhealthy eating habits and who now have low self esteem because they do not fit into a now unattainable mould of what society considers to be beautiful.

On the other extreme you can now see how girls develop eating disorders (8.8% of adolescent girls). These girls typically have anxiety, depression and the extreme need for perfection and control. How do they get control in a world where we can’t even get the messages right. Society should be teaching girls to nourish their bodies (and their brains) and love their body not using competing marketing messages aimed at their fears about not fitting in.

An ice creamery in the United States has been given the dubious title of offering the most unhealthy milkshake. It contains a whopping 131 grams of fat, more than half of which is (the most unhealthy) saturated and the equivalent of more than 30 teaspoons of sugar. Reader comments on this news story have been mixed, some saying that this is ethically irresponsible whilst others saying that people should be allowed to do what they want.

The crux of the argument, for me, comes down to this. Are people doing what they want? This milkshake has the same saturated fat content as 25 rashers of bacon. I’m sure the average person wouldn’t sit down to a massive pile of bacon. These type of fast food drinks offer the most deceptive and easily absorbable form of calories, saturated fat and sugar. You don’t even have to chew them. Additionally diets based on fast food such as these deprive the body of essential nutrients, such as chromium which controls future sugar cravings. Lucky we don’t live in America hey, or are these types of drinks starting to creep in here too, think coffee house chains and the types of drinks on offer there. It’s a slippery slope to obesity and your milkshake will be soon bringing more than boys to the yard, but heart disease, stroke and diabetes too.