Showing posts with label High-fructose corn syrup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label High-fructose corn syrup. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

How the USDA Can Make or Break Public Health, and Why It Has Chosen the Latter

Nutrition Assistance for Puerto Rico is a fede...
Nutrition Assistance for Puerto Rico is a federal aid program of the US Department of Agriculture. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) was formed in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln. It is responsible for developing and executing federal policies relating to farming, agriculture, forestry, and food.
Since its inception, the USDA has been granted powers by both Congress and presidential executive orders that, progressively and collectively, have made it the policy-setter for both agricultural policies and nutritional guidelines.
This is an obvious and serious conflict of interest that has led to an epidemic of chronic disease. It's also why federal guidelines relating to diet are so grossly divergent from nutritional science.
Historically, USDA policies have been heavily—and in some instances, exclusively—influenced by farmers and the food industry, and for the last 100 years, its nutrition "guidelines" have been a direct result of an effort to boost farm economics.
In short, federal dietary recommendations have very little to do with actual nutrition science, and everything to do with promoting foods that serve the food industry's bottom line, not the public health.
Through its power to set and enforce both agricultural policy and dietary standards, the USDA has much to answer for when it comes to the current state of health of Americans...

Nutrition Guidelines Set to Boost Farm Economics, Not to Promote Health

Ever since 1933, every five to seven years the US Congress passes a set of legislative acts commonly referred to as "the Farm Bill," which includes agricultural subsidies to growers of certain types of food.
These subsidies are in large part responsible for promoting and worsening the US obesity epidemic—a fact highlighted in a 2013 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.1 According to the authors, the root of the problem is that:
"Government-issued payments have skewed agricultural markets toward the overproduction of commodities that are the basic ingredients of processed, energy-dense foods."
This includes corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice, which are the top four most heavily subsidized foods.
By subsidizing these, particularly corn and soy, the US government is actively supporting a diet that consists of these processed grains, namely high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), soybean oil, and grain-fed cattle – all of which are now well-known contributors to obesity and chronic disease.
The Farm Bill essentially creates a negative feedback loop that perpetuates the highly profitable but health-harming processed food diet that the United States has become infamous for.
The US government is actively promoting obesity and chronic disease through these subsidies, while simultaneously creating flawed and ineffective anti-obesity campaigns and programs to combat the very problems rooted in its agricultural policies!

The Evolution of USDA's Role in Farm Economics

A USDA document titled, "History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Programs, 1933-84, Background for 1985 Farm Legislation"2 describes the evolution of the USDA's role in farm economics.
Historically, American farmers had tried to self-regulate supply and demand for farm commodities, but it just didn't work. They'd either plant too much or too little, and between the weather and the market, prices would fluctuate wildly.  
In 1929, in an effort to provide balance to the equation, the Federal Farm Board was established by the Agricultural Marketing Act to help the USDA solve the problems of a) surplus food products, and b) low farm prices.
This effort also met with failure, at which point Congress enacted additional legislation designed to help farmers make more money.
The Great Depression of the 1930s produced a variety of legislation giving the USDA new powers intended to boost failing agricultural markets while helping to feed the poor, and with each successive act thereafter, the USDA became increasingly more powerful.
One way to control produce prices is to pay farmers to destroy already-planted crops and/or limit production by not planting certain crops. This strategy was initiated in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 into law. By limiting supply, prices automatically go up.
Crops covered by these acts included tobacco, various grains, cotton, and livestock such as pigs/hogs. Peanuts, wheat, rice, milk, a number of fruits and vegetables, and corn also became price control/subsidy crops during the '30s.
In 1937, the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act3 gave the USDA the authority to control milk, fruits, vegetables, and specialty crops markets through price controls and surplus stockpiling. The law's purpose was to bolster Depression-era failing agriculture prices by allowing USDA to fix minimum prices on these products.
An addendum was added to Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act in 1949, forming the Raisin Administrative Committee, which is still in existence today. This committee is currently in the news4, 5 for its archaic rules that farmers cannot pack and market their own raisins. Instead, they must turn over up to 50 percent of their crop to the USDA, which then purportedly “markets” the raisins for the farmers.
A lawsuit6 on this matter claimed that USDA isn’t paying farmers for the raisins, and is instead holding them in reserve in order to artificially jack up prices. Remarkably, these archaic regulations were recently upheld by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals. As reported by JimBovard.com,7 “the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the US Department of Agriculture taking 47 percent of a farmer’s harvest does not violate the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause as long as the government aims to drive up crop prices.” Basically, what this means is that your tax dollars are spent on a government program that results in higher prices at the grocery checkout line...

USDA Also Supports GMOs—Even in Organics

Last year, Congress passed, and Obama signed into law, the "Monsanto Protection Act," which grants enormous powers to the USDA to approve genetically engineered seeds, and allow them to be used even when the approval is challenged by a court ruling.
Interestingly enough, if you study the history of USDA secretaries and leadership, you'll see that one of the early secretaries who had incredible clout in structuring USDA—Henry Agard Wallace8 — actually helped develop hybrid corn, and continued to conduct genetics research until his death. Wallace served as secretary through the pivotal USDA years of 1933 to 1940, more or less laying the groundwork for the agency's stance on genetically engineered (GE) foods decades ago.
Today, it's quite clear that GE crops are at the top of the list of agricultural products that the chemical technology industry wants to protect at all costs. GE seeds are FAR more lucrative than conventional seeds, since they're covered by patents, and farmers are forced to purchase new seed and pay royalties each year.
When you consider the USDA's long history of playing a central role in protecting farm economics, it's hard to imagine the agency taking responsible actions for the environment and human health when it comes to GMOs... If it benefits the food industry, the USDA will side with the food industry, even if human health suffers. This likelihood becomes even more evident when you consider the USDA's involvement in setting nutritional standards and dietary guidelines. The USDA is even exercising its political muscle to allow synthetic, non-organic, and even GE ingredients in organic agriculture—a development that has drawn harsh criticism,9 and rightfully so.

USDA's Involvement with Nutrition Standards, and the Role of the School Lunch Program

When and why did the USDA get involved in setting nutrition standards,10 and how does the School Lunch Program figure into it? Historically, the school lunch program has always been tied to the setting of nutrition guidelines, which makes it virtually impossible to talk about one without including the other.
The National School Lunch Program became part of the USDA during the Great Depression as a subsection of the Surplus Disposal Programs, beginning in 1933. The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, later called the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, used federal funds assigned to USDA to purchase and distribute surplus food to unemployed families. Schools were added when it became apparent that individual states' and communities' efforts lacked in uniformity. 
States had haphazardly run school lunch programs up to this point, but when the Great Depression began and USDA took over in 1933, the agency used this as an opportunity to solve hunger while simultaneously creating a market for farmers' products—all with the use of federal funds granted to USDA.
Today, the National School Lunch Program operates in over 100,000 private and public schools, as well as residential child care institutions. Congress expanded the program to include snacks in 1998.11 The so-called Smart Snacks in School program12encourages "healthy choices." But if you look at this Smart Snacks Infographic,13 you can see that the "smarter, healthier" choices promoted are actually processed foods, includingjunk foods like tortilla chips, and flavored "diet" water...

Food Distribution Programs Are More About 'Creating Markets' Than Optimizing Nutrition for the Underprivileged

The USDA asserted its authority to set nutrition policy when it publicly declared that the purpose of the surplus food program was to "dispose of surplus food and simultaneously raise the nutritional level of low-income consumers."14  The actual law putting USDA in charge of educating people on nutrition was the Smith-Lever Act of 1914,15 which established Cooperative Extensions in each state. These are still active today. One job of the extensions is to educate the public on nutrition under the "guidance" of the USDA.
Besides the School Lunch Program, the USDA has been, or still is, involved with more than a dozen different food distribution programs (see below). Again, such programs are basically designed to create a market for whatever foods farmers are growing a surplus of—NOT necessarily to distribute the healthiest foods to those who need it most...
A variety of Child Nutrition Programs16Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program17Nutrition Program for the Elderly (now known as the Nutrition Incentives Program)
School Breakfast ProgramSpecial Milk ProgramSoup Kitchen/Food Banks Program
Summer Food Service ProgramWomen, Infants and Children (WIC) programFood Distribution Program on Indian Reservations
Child and Adult Care Food ProgramCommodity Supplemental Food Program for low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women (a predecessor to the WIC program)Emergency Food Assistance Program

A Brief History of USDA's Flawed Nutritional Guidance

From the very beginning, USDA dietary guidelines have been based on what farmers have to sell, not what your body actually requires to stay healthy.  ChooseMyPlate.gov has a flyer summarizing the history of USDA food guides and nutritional guidance,18which began nearly 100 years ago in 191619 with guidelines for "how to select foods," with a focus on "protective foods." This included 20 percent of daily calories from fatty foods, and only 10 percent of daily calories from sugars. The bulk of your diet was fresh fruits and vegetables.
This was perhaps the first and last time the USDA even came close to promoting a relatively nutritionally sound diet. As mentioned earlier, the agency didn't begin to frame its dietary guidelines around the farm economy until the 1930s Great Depression.
In the 1940s, the USDA came out with daily serving recommendations for seven different food groups, but it lacked specific serving sizes. Still, it wasn't too flawed, as the focus for its nutritional guidance centered on reaching "nutritional adequacy" by eating a little bit of everything. Then, in 1956, guidelines were altered to reflect only four food groups: milk, meat, fruits/vegetables, and breads/cereals. Fat and sugar were excluded from the guidelines, as was caloric intake suggestions. These guidelines were promoted as the "foundation diet approach," and the four food groups mentioned were considered "food for fitness."
In hindsight, this is particularly ironic since sugar and fat are two of the most important factors of a foundational diet for fitness! Sugars (along with breads and cereals) need to be restricted, and any beneficial food guidance need to make that clear, while healthy non-processed fats are a crucial component of a healthy diet.
As I've discussed in previous articles, Dr. Ancel Keys published a paper that served as the basis for nearly all of the initial scientific support for the Cholesterol Theory in 1953—three years before the USDA cut fat from its dietary guidelines. Trans fat-containing margarine took the place of healthy butter and lard, and the low-fat era was born. The consequences of this have been dire, as rates of heart disease began rising right along with the shunning of saturated fats...
In 1979, the basic four food groups were expanded with a fifth group, which recommended a moderate intake of fat, sugar, and alcohol. These five food groups then served as the basis for the creation of what became the 1992 Food Pyramid.
Some of you may be old enough to recall the original Food Pyramid, which had grains as the largest bottom block of the pyramid, encouraging you to eat 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta each day. This excess of carbohydrates, most of them refined, is precisely the opposite of what most people need to stay healthy. At the very top of the pyramid was fats and sugar, and while sugar clearly belongs there, fats do not. In fact, most people would benefit from getting anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of their total daily calories from healthy fats until their body regains the ability to burn fat as a primary fuel!
The Food Pyramid was replaced by the more nebulous MyPyramid Food Guidance System in 2005, followed by "MyPlate" in 2011. MyPlate slightly downplays grains as the most important dietary ingredient, making vegetables the largest "slice," but it stillhas a long way to go before it will offer a meal plan that will truly support your optimal health.
One of its most glaring faults is that MyPlate has again removed virtually all fats from the equation—despite advances in nutritional science confirming previous suspicions that non-processed healthy fats are crucial for good health, while processed carbs and sugars are the main drivers of disease! Again, the real reason why grains are promoted as a major cornerstone of your diet is because that's what farmers are paid to grow in the US. There's a lot of it, and it's inexpensive compared to healthier foods like vegetables and nuts...

Blatant Conflicts of Interest Between USDA and the Food Industry Revealed

According to former USDA director of dietary guidance, Luise Light,20 blatant conflicts of interest between the USDA and the food industry occurred during the 1980s while the original Food Pyramid was being designed. She was hired during this time to develop the new food guide for USDA, and she recounts her disillusionment with this work in her book, What to Eat; The Ten Things You Really Need to Know to Eat Well and Be Healthy. According to Light, the USDA secretary himself changed healthier guidelines to less healthy ones, just to suit the demands of certain segments of the food industry. She writes:
"Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits andvegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings... Ourrecommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed toa whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to theprocessed wheat and corn industries.
Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed bakedgoods made with white flour... at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they beeaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the 'revised' Food Guide, they were now made part ofthe Pyramid's base. And, in yet one more assault on dietary logic, changes were made tothe wording of the dietary guidelines from 'eat less' to 'avoid too much,' giving a nod tothe processed-food industry interests by not limiting highly profitable 'fun foods' (junkfoods by any other name) that might affect the bottom line of food companies...
I vehemently protested that the changes, if followed, could lead to an epidemic of obesityand diabetes — and couldn't be justified on either health or nutritional grounds. To myamazement, I was a lone voice on this issue... Over my objections, the Food Guide Pyramid was finalized,although it only saw the light of day 12 years later, in 1992. Yet it appears my warninghas come to pass."
The agriculture secretary who did this was John Rusling Block,21 who served as head of the USDA from January 1981 to February 1986. When Block left the USDA, he became president of the National Wholesale Grocers' Association, which later became Food Distributors International, which is now known as the National Grocers Association.
Block has also served as a senior policy adviser at a Washington lobbying firm, Olsson and Frank PC, which represents special interest groups before the USDA. (Incidentally, Olsson was deputy assistant secretary at USDA from 1971 to 1973.) Today, Block serves on the board of directors at Hormel Foods, along with other positions,22 including being a non-resident senior fellow with the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy.
Not surprisingly, the school lunch program is equally rife with conflicts of interest with the food industry. For example, the School Nutrition Association (SNA)23 is an association of food professionals who describe themselves as "providing high-quality, low-cost meals to students across the country." So who are these "food professionals" exactly? Would it surprise you to learn that SNA's members include some of the largest junk food manufacturers? This includes:
  • Coca-Cola
  • Domino's Pizza
  • General Mills
  • Pizza Hut
  • Sara Lee and others

Trust Government-Issued Nutrition Guidelines at Your Own Risk...

In 2004, Luise Light complained24 that the latest dietary guidelines being considered as a replacement for the Food Pyramid were again being dictated by the food industry. And then she made this whistleblowing statement, citing the USDA's "long and cozy relationship with the food industry:"
"As I learned from my days as aUSDA nutritionist, nutrition for the government is primarily a marketing tool to fuelgrowth in consumer food expenditures and demand for major food commodities... It's an economics lesson that has very little to do with our health andnutrition and everything to do with making sure that food expenditures continue to risefor all interests involved in the food industry… It's evident that the government can't be relied on to provide objective, health-promoting food and nutrition advice."
The 2011 MyPlate guideline encourages you to replace saturated fats (meat, lard, cream, butter, whole-milk cheese, and coconut oil) with monounsaturated- and polyunsaturated fats (primarily vegetable oils such as canola, corn, soybean, and safflower). But this time, industry influence didn't get a free pass. In September 2011, nutrition experts at Harvard School of Public Health announced their dissatisfaction with USDA's guideline by creating their own Healthy Eating Plate,25 which they said was designed specifically "to address deficiencies" in USDA's MyPlate.
Harvard professor Walter Willett also made this no-holds-barred statement26 as to why he and his colleagues had created their own food guide: "Unfortunately, like the earlier U.S. Department of Agriculture Pyramids, MyPlate mixes science with the influence of powerful agricultural interests, which is not the recipe for healthy eating."

What a Food Pyramid Based on Nutritional Science Really Looks Like

While Harvard's Healthy Eating Plate is definitely better than the USDA's guidelines, I still believe it can be further improved upon. For example, it still recommends harmful canola oil over healthy butter fat, and promotes eating a variety of grains, albeit whole grains rather than refined grains like white bread.
I recommend minimal to no consumption of grains and sugars in my Food Pyramid for Optimal Health (see below), which summarizes the nutritional guidelines espoused in my Nutrition Plan. My pyramid, which is based on nutritional science, is almost the inverse of the original USDA food pyramid, featuring healthy fats and vegetables on the bottom. Again, most people would benefit from getting at least 50 percent of your daily calories from healthy fats such as avocadoscoconut oil, nuts, and raw butter until they are able to burn fats as their primary fuel and have no evidence of insulin/leptin resistance.
In terms of bulk or quantity, vegetables would be the most prominent feature on your plate. They provide countless critical nutrients, while being sparse on calories. Next comes high-quality proteins, followed by a moderate amount of fruits, and lastly, at the very top, you'll find grains and sugars. This last top tier of sugars and grains can be eliminated entirely.
While this may sound impossible to some, I can attest to the fact that quitting carbs is doable. In fact, once your body has successfully switched over from burning carbs to burning fat as its primary fuel, carb cravings actually disappear, as if by magic. There are two primary ways to achieve this metabolic switch, and these strategies support each other when combined:
  • Intermittent fasting: I prefer daily intermittent fasting, but you could also fast a couple of days a week if you prefer, or every other day. There are many different variations. To be effective, in the case of daily intermittent fasting, the length of your fast must be at least eight hours long. This means eating only between the hours of 11am until 7pm, as an example. Essentially, this equates to simply skipping breakfast, and making lunch your first meal of the day instead
  • A ketogenic diet: This type of diet, in which you replace carbs with low to moderate amounts of high-quality protein and high amounts of beneficial fat, is what I recommend for everyone, and is exactly what you get if you focus on the bottom three tiers of my food pyramid. This eating is very helpful to normalize weight and resolve insulin/leptin resistance. It is not something one eats the rest of their life but only until the insulin/leptin resistance resolves
 

Rays of Hope

While the overall situation remains bleak, there are a few rays of hope here and there. The main problem is that these positive developments are not widely applied, so the vast majority of people, including school children, are still being harmed rather than helped by our federal food policies. That said, some of the more encouraging developments include the following:
  • In 2011, the New York Times27 publicized the "movement" to make school lunches fresh from scratch once again, instead of basing most or all of the menus on processed, pre-packaged foods. As recently as April, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $25 million in grants to help schools purchase the kitchen equipment necessary for cooking healthier school meals.28 The agency has given out $160 million in kitchen equipment grants since 2009.
  • The Department of Defense has also been working with USDA since the mid-1990s to supply fresh fruit and vegetables to schools along with their deliveries to military installations.29, 30 The partnership gives schools a wider variety of fresh produce than would normally be available through the USDA. Noteworthy is the fact that this program's rules specify that it does NOT allow processed or preserved fruits and vegetables, dips, processed fruit strips, trail mix, smoothies, carbonated fruit, or fruit with added flavorings injected into it.
  • The USDA also operates a Farm to School Program,31 which promotes the use of locally-grown fruits, vegetables, and milk. In 2011-2012, schools participating in this program served over $350 million-worth of local food. Additionally, last year the USDA awarded 71 grants to schools for local farmers' produce, and to partner with farms to teach horticulture skills.32
As I said, all of these are steps in the right direction. But we need them to be implemented on a much larger scale! These programs need to be the rule, not the exception.

Help Support Small Farms with a Farm Bill That Works

If you don't like the idea of your tax dollars lining the pockets of wealthy corporations that flood the market with sugary sodas, soybean oil, and corn chips, remember that you can make a difference by voting with your wallet, each and every day of the week. Support small family farms in your area, even if it means buying just one or two items at your local farmers market, instead of the big box store. All those little purchases add up.
If you want optimal health, you need to return to a diet of real, whole foods—fresh organic produce, meats from animals raised sustainably on pasture, and raw organic milk and eggs. Say no to junk food producers by not buying their products. Eating this way will earn you a long, healthy life—whereas the typical American diet may set you on the path toward obesity and chronic disease.

 http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/06/18/usda-nutritional-guidelines.aspx

Friday, February 28, 2014

11 Charts That Show Everything Wrong with Our Modern Diet

This image shows various dry fruits.
This image shows various dry fruits. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Three decades ago, the food available was mostly fresh and grown locally. Today, the majority of foods served, whether at home, in school or in restaurants, are highly processed foods, filled with sugars, harmful processed fats, and chemical additives.
During that same time, obesity rates have skyrocketed, and one in five American deaths are now associated with obesity. Obesity-related deaths include those from type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, liver disease, cancer, dementia, and depression, as nearly all have metabolic dysfunction as a common underlying factor.
The featured1 article contains 11 telling charts and graphs, illustrating how the modern diet has led to an avalanche of chronic disease. As its author, Kris Gunnars says:
"The modern diet is the main reason why people all over the world are fatter and sicker than ever before. Everywhere modern processed foods go, chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease soon follow."

Sugar Consumption, Especially Soda and Juices, Drives Disease Rates

Of all the dietary culprits out there, refined sugar in general, and processed fructose in particular, win top billing as the greatest destroyers of health. The amount of refined sugar in the modern diet has ballooned, with the average American now getting about 350 calories a day (equivalent to about 22 teaspoons of sugar and 25 percent of their daily calories) from added sugar.
This level of sugar consumption has definitive health consequences. One recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine,2 which examined the associations between added sugar consumption and cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths, found that:
  • Among American adults, the mean percentage of daily calories from added sugar was 14.9 percent in 2005-2010
  • Most adults (just over 71 percent) get 10 percent or more of their daily calories from added sugar
  • Approximately 10 percent of American adults got 25 percent or more of their daily calories from added sugar in 2005-2010
  • The most common sources of added sugar are sugar-sweetened beverages, grain-based desserts, fruit drinks, dairy desserts, and candy
According to this study, those who consume 21 percent or more of their daily calories in the form of sugar are TWICE as likely to die from heart disease compared to those who get seven percent or less or their daily calories from added sugar.
Needless to say, with all this added sugar in the diet, average calorie consumption has skyrocketed as well, having increased by about 20 percent since 1970.
A primary source of all this added sugar is soda, fruit juices, and other sweetened drinks. Multiple studies have confirmed that these kinds of beverages dramatically increase your risk of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and mortality. Diet sodas or artificially sweetened foods and beverages are no better, as research reveals they appear to do even MORE harm than refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), including causing greater weight gain.

Abandoning Traditional Fats for Processed Vegetable Oils Has Led to Declining Health

Fats help your body absorb important vitamins, including vitamins A, D, and E, and fats are especially important for infants and toddlers for proper growth and development. Moreover, when your body burns non-vegetable carbohydrates like grains and sugars, powerful adverse hormonal changes typically occur. These detrimental changes do not occur when you consume healthy fats or fibrous vegetables.
As explained by Dr. Robert Lustig, fructose in particular is "isocaloric but not isometabolic," which means you can have the same amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different despite the identical calorie count. Furthermore, saturated fats, although supplying more calories, will NOT actually cause you to get fat, nor will it promote heart disease.
Unfortunately, the healthiest fats, including animal fats and coconut oil, both of which are saturated, have been long portrayed as a heart attack waiting to happen. Meanwhile, harmful hydrogenated vegetable oils such as corn and canola oil have been touted as "healthful" alternatives. Ditto for margarine.
Boy, did they get this wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The hydrogenation process creates incredibly harmfultrans fats, which the US Food and Drug Administration is now finally considering banning altogether. (I'll review the health hazards of trans fats in further detail below.) Clearly, switching from lard and grass-fed butter—which contains heart-protective nutrients—to margarine and other trans-fat rich hydrogenated oils was a public health experiment that has not ended well.

Low-Fat Fad Has Done Unfathomable Harm

Conventional recommendations have also called for dramatically decreasing the overall amount of fat in your diet, and this fat aversion is yet another driving factor of metabolic disease and chronic ill health. As I and other nutritional experts have warned, most people (especially if you're insulin or leptin resistant, which encompasses about 80 percent of Americans) probably need upwards of 50-85 percent of daily calories from healthful fats. This is a FAR cry from the less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fats recommended by the US Department of Agriculture.3 As stated in the featured article:
"The first dietary guidelines for Americans were published in the year 1977, almost at the exact same time the obesity epidemic started. Of course, this doesn't prove anything (correlation does not equal causation), but it makes sense that this could be more than just a mere coincidence.
The anti-fat message essentially put the blame on saturated fat and cholesterol (harmless), while giving sugar and refined carbs (very unhealthy) a free pass. Since the guidelines were published, many massive studies have been conducted on the low-fat diet. It is no better at preventing heart disease, obesity or cancer than the standard Western diet, which is as unhealthy as a diet can get."
There's no telling how many have been prematurely killed by following these flawed low-fat guidelines, yet despite mounting research refuting the value of cutting out fats, such recommendations are still being pushed.

Increased Vegetable Oil Consumption Has Altered Americans' Fatty Acid Composition

The increased consumption of processed vegetable oils has also led to a severely lopsided fatty acid composition, as these oils provide high amounts of omega-6 fats. The ideal ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats is 1:1, but the typical Western diet is between 1:20 and 1:50. Eating too much damaged omega-6 fat and too little omega-3 sets the stage for the very health problems you seek to avoid, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression and Alzheimer's, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes, just to name a few. To correct this imbalance, you typically need to do two things:
  1. Significantly decrease omega-6 by avoiding processed foods and foods cooked at high temperatures using vegetable oils
  2. Increase your intake of heart-healthy animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil

The Dangers of Hydrogenated Soybean Oil

About 95 percent of soy is genetically engineered to have resistance to glyphosate and is loaded with this highly toxic herbicide. But even if you have organic soy, most of it is hydrogenated. Hydrogenated soybean oil has, like sugar, become a major source of calories in the US diet. Americans consume more than 28 billion pounds of edible oils annually, and soybean oil accounts for about 65 percent of it. About half of it is hydrogenated, as soybean oil is too unstable otherwise to be used in food manufacturing. In 1999, soybean oil accounted for seven percent of consumed daily calories in the US.  
Part of the problem with partially hydrogenated soybean oil is the trans fat it contains. The other part relates to the health hazards of soy itself. An added hazard factor is the fact that the majority of soybeans are genetically engineered. The completely unnatural fats created through the partial hydrogenation process cause dysfunction and chaos in your body on a cellular level, and studies have linked trans-fats to:
Cancer, by interfering with enzymes your body uses to fight cancerChronic health problems such as obesity, asthma, auto-immune disease, cancer, and bone degeneration
Diabetes, by interfering with the insulin receptors in your cell membranesHeart disease, by clogging your arteries (Among women with underlying coronary heart disease, eating trans-fats increased the risk of sudden cardiac arrest three-fold!)
Decreased immune function, by reducing your immune responseIncrease blood levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL), or "bad" cholesterol, while lowering levels of high density lipoprotein (HDL), or "good" cholesterol
Reproductive problems, by interfering with enzymes needed to produce sex hormonesInterfering with your body's use of beneficial omega-3 fats

Besides the health hazards related to the trans fats, soybean oil is, in and of itself, NOT a healthy oil. Add to that the fact that the majority of soybeans grown in the US are genetically engineered, which may have additional health consequences. When taken together, partially hydrogenated GE soybean oil becomes one of the absolute worst types of oils you can consume. Unfortunately, as stated in the featured article:4
"[M]ost people don't have a clue they're eating this much soybean oil. They're actually getting most of it from processed foods, which often have soybean oil added to them because it is cheap. The best way to avoid soybean oil (and other nasty ingredients) is to avoid processed foods."

Wheat - A Bane of the Modern Diet

Modern wheat is not the same kind of wheat your grandparents ate. The nutritional content of this staple grain has been dramatically altered over the years and is now far less nutritious than the varieties of generations past. As Gunnars states:5
"Modern dwarf wheat was introduced around the year 1960, which contains 19-28 percent less of important minerals like Magnesium, Iron, Zinc, and Copper. There is also evidence that modern wheat is much more harmful to celiac patients and people with gluten sensitivity, compared to older breeds like Einkorn wheat. Whereas wheat may have been relatively healthy back in the day, the same is not true of modern dwarf wheat."
Wheat lectin, or "wheat germ agglutinin" (WGA), is largely responsible for many of wheat's pervasive ill effects. WGA is highest in whole wheat, especially sprouted whole wheat, but wheat isn't the only grain with significant lectin. All seeds of the grass family (rice, wheat, spelt, rye, etc.) are high in lectins. WGA has the potential to damage your health by the following mechanisms (list is not all-inclusive):
Pro-Inflammatory: WGA lectin stimulates the synthesis of pro-inflammatory chemical messengers, even at very small concentrationsNeurotoxic: WGA lectin can pass through your blood-brain barrier and attach to the protective coating on your nerves, known as the myelin sheath. It is also capable of inhibiting nerve growth factor, which is important for the growth, maintenance, and survival of certain neurons
Immunotoxic: WGA lectin may bind to and activate white blood cellsCardiotoxic: WGA lectin induces platelet aggregation and has a potent disruptive effect on tissue regeneration and removal of neutrophils from your blood vessels
Cytotoxic (toxic to cells): WGA lectin may induce programmed cell death (apoptosis)Research also shows that WGA maydisrupt endocrine and gastrointestinal function, interfere with genetic expression, and share similarities with certain viruses

Flawed Assumptions About Eggs Have Worsened Health

According to USDA data, Americans ate more than 375 eggs per person per year, on average, in 1950. Egg consumption dipped to just over 225 eggs per capita between 1995 and 2000, and as of 2007, it was just over 250 eggs per capita per year—a 33 percent decline since 1950.
Like saturated fats, many naturally cholesterol-rich foods have also been wrongfully vilified. Eggs, which are actually among the most nutritious foods you can eat (provided they come from organically raised, pastured hens) have long been accused of causing heart disease simply because they're high in cholesterol. But dietary cholesterol has little to do with the cholesterol level in your body, and numerous studies have confirmed that eating eggs does NOT raise potentially adverse LDL cholesterol in your blood. Studies have also failed to find any evidence that eggs contribute to heart disease.
Testing6 has confirmed that true free-range eggs are far more nutritious than commercially raised eggs. The dramatically superior nutrient levels are most likely the result of the differences in diet between free-ranging, pastured hens and commercially farmed hens. In a 2007 egg-testing project, Mother Earth News compared the official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient data for commercial eggs with eggs from hens raised on pasture, and found that the latter typically contains:
  • 2/3 more vitamin A
  • Two times more omega-3 fatty acids
  • Three times more vitamin E
  • Seven times more beta-carotene
Barring organic certification, which is cost-prohibitive for many small farmers, you could just make sure the farmer raises his chickens according to organic, free-range standards, allowing his flock to forage freely for their natural diet, and aren't fed antibiotics, corn, and soy.
You can tell the eggs are free range or pastured by the color of the egg yolk. Foraged hens produce eggs with bright orange yolks. Dull, pale yellow yolks are a sure sign you're getting eggs from caged hens that are not allowed to forage for their natural diet. Cornucopia.org offers a helpful organic egg scorecard that rates egg manufacturers based on 22 criteria that are important for organic consumers. According to Cornucopia, their report "showcases ethical family farms, and their brands, and exposes factory farm producers and brands in grocery store coolers that threaten to take over organic livestock agriculture."

People Eat More Processed Food Than Ever Before

Overall, about 90 percent of the money Americans spend on food is spent on processed foods.7 This includes restaurant foods (i.e. food away from home) and processed grocery foods that require little or no preparation time before consuming at home.
When looking at the ratio of money spent on store-bought groceries only, Americans spend nearly a fourth of their grocery money on processed foods and sweets—twice as much as they did in 1982—according to Department of Labor statistics.8 Pricing of meats, sugar, and flour has had a great influence our spending habits. These items have actually seen a decrease in price per pound, which has had an inverse effect on Americans' spending habits, in that cheaper prices encourage people to buy more.
The result is obvious. Compared with shoppers 30 years ago, American adults today are twice as likely to be obese, and children and adolescent three times as likely to be overweight. Pediatric type 2 diabetes—which used to be very rare—has markedly increased along with the rise in early childhood obesity. According to previous research, early onset type 2 diabetes appears to be a more aggressive disease from a cardiovascular standpoint.9

Take Control of Your Health

Research coming out of some of America's most respected institutions now confirms that sugar is a primary dietary factor driving chronic disease development. Sugar, and fructose in particular, has been implicated as a culprit in the development of both heart disease and cancer, and having this information puts you in the driver's seat when it comes to prevention. A diet that promotes health is high in healthful fats and very, very low in sugar and non-vegetable carbohydrates.
Understand that excessive sugar/fructose consumption leads to insulin resistance, and insulin resistance appears to be the root of many if not most chronic disease. So far, scientific studies have linked excessive fructose consumption to about 78 different diseases and health problems,10 including heart disease and cancer.  
Many also eat far too little healthy fat, and the combination of too much sugar and too little fat is driving disease rates through the roof. If you're still unsure about what constitutes a healthy diet, please review my free optimized nutrition plan, which starts at the beginner level and goes all the way up to advanced.
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