The human body runs on food. Once food shortage was the major concern. Technological advances have led to a new era that is characterized by an overabundance of inexpensive food, and relatively little physical activity. Other socio-cultural shifts continued to contribute to the changing way we ate.
The processed food industry have started to capitalize on our need for fast convenient food. Fewer meals are being cooked at home, and since convenient foods are generally higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average persons caloric intake has also increased.
The changes in the way, we, as a society eat, has led to the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease with well defined health consequences, and medical recommendations are made to try and address this growing health crisis. In recent years a lot of attention was focused on reducing saturated fat, and total fat in our diets. And the processed food industry responded by giving us what we wanted. But they still had vested interest in selling their product, so they found other ways to make the reduced fat products taste good. One way they did this was by adding significantly more sugar, like corn syrup to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf life. So the food industry had a huge incentive to add corn syrup, and other sweeteners to packaged foods. The resulting increase in our intake of simple sugar fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. These shifts in our food consumption pattern has led us to a point in history where our physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat, has become maladaptive. The balance between food consumption and energy expenditure has been disrupted, and has left us with an exponential increase in the incidence of obesity over the past 60 years. An epidemic that World Health Organization has labeled a worldwide public health crisis.
The processed food industry have started to capitalize on our need for fast convenient food. Fewer meals are being cooked at home, and since convenient foods are generally higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average persons caloric intake has also increased.
The changes in the way, we, as a society eat, has led to the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease with well defined health consequences, and medical recommendations are made to try and address this growing health crisis. In recent years a lot of attention was focused on reducing saturated fat, and total fat in our diets. And the processed food industry responded by giving us what we wanted. But they still had vested interest in selling their product, so they found other ways to make the reduced fat products taste good. One way they did this was by adding significantly more sugar, like corn syrup to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf life. So the food industry had a huge incentive to add corn syrup, and other sweeteners to packaged foods. The resulting increase in our intake of simple sugar fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. These shifts in our food consumption pattern has led us to a point in history where our physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat, has become maladaptive. The balance between food consumption and energy expenditure has been disrupted, and has left us with an exponential increase in the incidence of obesity over the past 60 years. An epidemic that World Health Organization has labeled a worldwide public health crisis.
No comments:
Post a Comment