The percentage of Americans that are either overweight or clinically obese has now reached 75%!
I know that diet and exercise have been shown REPEATEDLY to be a sound and effective why to combat body fat. When you hear someone who lost weight and asked “how did you do that”? The answer has a high probability of being “well, I changed my diet and started on an Exercise regime”. Some times it is something different ” I had bariatric surgery” (stomach stapled)
Here is an exert from my book on Health and Fitness about another probable cause for increased obesity in our country. Get Back The Man Who Romanced You. How to defeat “old man syndrome”.
ARTIFICIAL HORMONE
Among the other chemicals that causes both obesity and cancer because they are estrogen disruptors, are artificial hormones. These are added to animal feed and injected into animals, and when we eat the animals or products that come from them, we eat the hormonal residue. Yuck! This has been linked to girls reaching puberty at an earlier age, the feminization of men, cancer, and obesity.[i] In the early 1990s, European nations banned the importing of American meat because of the hormones and other chemicals in our animals. Why is it that other countries seem to be more stringent about the chemicals and products that they allow in the food sources and the chemicals that they use?
[i] Gunther AL, Karaolis-Danckert N, Kroke A, et al: Dietary protein intake throughout childhood is associated with the timing of puberty. J Nutr 2010;140:565-571.
Veldhuis JD, Roemmich JN, Richmond EJ, et al: Endocrine control of body composition in infancy, childhood, and puberty. Endocr Rev 2005;26:114-146.
Wiley AS: Milk intake and total dairy consumption: associations with early menarche in NHANES 1999-2004. PloS one 2011;6:e14685.
Annual Review of Nutrition 1991 11:325-53
The things you can do about decreasing your artificial hormone ingestion are very simple but will cost you more money in the short run. Buy organic meat and animal products. I am so thankful that there is such a thing as organic animal products.
I don’t eat meat and haven’t for the past forty years, but I do eat cheese, a little milk, and rarely butter. When purchasing these products, I really try to buy organic and hormone-free. Even eggs can be purchased from chickens that aren’t fed hormones. Oh, by the way, I don’t push my way of eating on anybody. I did that in the first decade I was vegetarian, only to alienate myself and piss off a lot of people. My in-laws in particular.
After fifteen years of being a vegetarian, I met a great guy in graduate school. He was from Montana, a farm kid, as he likes to say.
If you know anything about Montana, you know that it largely concerns cattle ranching and hunting. He should have had two strikes against him. But love never knows about the “shoulds.” You know what I mean. My husband and I fell hard in love with each other, even though our worlds were far apart. We met in chiropractic college, I in my early 30s and he in his mid-30s. I had never been married and never wanted to marry. He had been married for twelve years, had two boys, and had been divorced for three years. I had lived in many states and traveled to many countries. I was a vegetarian who explored many different dietary regimes, including macrobiotics and raw foods diets. I liked Tai chi and yoga and avant-garde dress. He hadn’t been out of Montana; had no other pants than blue jeans, ate two-for-a-dollar hot dogs, mostly purchased at gas stations; had hunted; and had come from a cattle ranching/farming family. Could two people be so seemingly opposite? But despite these outward differences, we fell in love and married. When he introduced me to his family and announced that he too was not eating meat any more, his family, especially his mother thought that he had married the devil demon herself. I stood for everything she thought was weird, and she told him, “There is nothing good about that girl.” Sometimes one just needs a few decades of time and hanging around to change someone’s opinion, and that’s exactly what I did. I got a lot less preachy about the meat thing, and they all got a lot more accepting of me and my life choices. I think we all were better for it.
I guess the lesson here is that when you make changes in your diet and the foods you eat, you may get a lot of flack and lip from your family and friends. Be true to what you want, thank them for their opinion and input, and go on with your life.
[i] The CDC used the NHANES program (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey). cdc.gov/exposurereport/pdf/fourthreport.pdf
[ii] Gunther AL, Karaolis-Danckert N, Kroke A, et al: Dietary protein intake throughout childhood is associated with the timing of puberty. J Nutr 2010;140:565-571.
Veldhuis JD, Roemmich JN, Richmond EJ, et al: Endocrine control of body composition in infancy, childhood, and puberty. Endocr Rev 2005;26:114-146.
Wiley AS: Milk intake and total dairy consumption: associations with early menarche in NHANES 1999-2004. PloS one 2011;6:e14685.
Annual Review of Nutrition 1991 11:325-53
[CD1]This is a really awkward sentence. Can you try rewriting it? Maybe “The other thing you can do to try to avoid GMO is buy organic!”
[p2]ok