Americans are Eating Themselves to Disease
Vision Magazine – August 2001
by Aleks Strande, N.D., Ph.D.

Overeating bad food and under-exercising have become as American as blueberry pie was before junk food replaced it. While we’ve been worrying about presidential pardons and Greenspan interest rate cuts, Americans have been dangerously fat. We’re in the full swing of an awful epidemic. And it’s fueled not by a strange new virus but by our very lifestyle. Eat badly, exercise little and you grow obese. One of the worst manifestations of the epidemic is its quick spread among children. High amounts of dietary sugar helps as well. I have seen children so hugely fat, they couldn’t jump or run. They just watched the other children that could play in motion. In October 1999, the Journal of the American Medical Association carried a piece about “The Spread of the Obesity Epidemic in the United States.” It found that in 1991, 12% of Americans were obese. In 1998, almost 18% were. The Agriculture Department sponsored a great nutrition debate in Washington a couple of years ago to see if the nation’s most popular weight loss experts could agree on anything. They agreed that Americans are too fat, exercise is good for you, and sugar isn’t, which of course we already know. We just don’t act on it. Eating bad food in huge quantities and moving around very little has become very American.

Why are we doing this?

Harper’s writer, Greg Critser, pointed out several villains: junk food corporations that super-size everything, a decline in physical activity among children; and interestingly, a change in attitudes.

The President’s Council on Youth Fitness, in its early days in the 1950’s, had slogans like, “There’s no such thing as stylishly stout.” That was before fat became a “feminist issue”, as a 1978 best seller put it. It was before the recognition of eating disorders that focused (justifiably, to be sure) our attention on the perils of equating beauty with thinness. And it was before the “fat acceptance” movement.

Now, the fellow who feels nervous about his girth can visit a web site called Belly Builders, “a place for guys with huge beer guts to hang out.” Not that America alone has this problem.

The Worldwatch Institute released a report that said for the first time in history, there might be as many people overweight as there are underfed. In developing nations like India, China and Brazil, the rich are growing fat, while the poor remain hungry. But in countries like our own, it is the wealthier and more educated who eat better and get more exercise. It is the poor who eat cheap and fatty fast foods and live more sedentary lives. As different as their profiles may be, the poor in both instances share one problem: malnutrition.

There are plenty of natural agents that help weight loss. Although in most instances it is a lifestyle problem, sometimes it can relate to hormonal problems or other pathology. Without addressing such underlying problems, obesity may become a long-term problem that can lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other autoimmune problems. Overweight people’s energy is often low, they develop aches, pain, low self-esteem, depression, anxieties and other secondary problems.

Alex Strande, N.D., Ph.D., is a naturopath and a microbiologist. His office is in Irvine, California. He can be contacted for questions and appointments at 949-553-1882.