A new study using data from the International Atomic Energy Agency nutrition database confirms something I have been saying on this blog for over a decade. It is not the lack of movement and our sedentary lifestyles this driving our obesity crisis, it is excess calories.
This study involved 50 different institutions across 19 countries and showed rather conclusively that it is the almost entirely excess calories that cause weight gain. Why is this important? Because it shows that while hitting the gym and doing lots of exercise gives you fantastic health results like increased muscle mass and better insulin sensitivity, if your only goal of exercise is weight loss, you are wasting your time.
This proves the old maxim, you can’t outrun a bad diet. However the study fails to explain why we are eating more so please allow me to explain it. The companies that make our foods are using science to make foods more addictive. In many cases, they are using the same techniques and often the same scientists that were used to make cigarettes more addictive.
Food companies are fighting for more space in your stomach so they are engineering foods that dissolve quickly when eaten by taking out all the fiber so foods pass quickly through your stomach leaving you feeling hungrier faster. They are testing the ratio of salt, sugar and fat in each food looking for the “bliss point” of each food so you want to eat more of it. They are also adding as much sugar to our foods as they can because sugar triggers a dopamine response causing us to seek out the reward of eating more of these foods.
Fortunately, the answer to these problems is pretty easy. You have to opt out of the corrupt food game and stop eating foods that have been engineered to make you fat and sick. Stop eating foods out of the middle of the grocery store and from the fast food restaurants. Cook at home, take food with you if you have to go out and only eat single ingredient foods. Concentrate on a diet of mostly meat and animal products and a few vegetables if you want them. Stay away from condiments with sugars and seed oils. (The only condiment I eat is mustard because that’s about the only one you can pick up off the shelf that isn’t terrible.) And don’t be afraid of salt. A big steak with lots of salt and maybe a fried egg is the perfect meal.
