Still in Denial, my second book in the Denial series, published by Smiling Eyes Press, is the hardest book I have written to date. I felt immense frustration during the investigative process. Learning about the fake news[mfn]False stories that appear to be news, spread on the Internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke: There is concern about the power of fake news to affect election results of nutrition science, government policy, and the health and fitness industry, really walloped me.
This is why I decided to write in a definite tone. We’ve been conned. There is a calorie deception. We don’t know anything about nutrition, health, or fitness. Business, Government, and Media did more harm than help. The media’s perception of obesity is one of intolerance.
I will defend it. Too many of my friends are sick, overweight, or obese. It’s because of what we are eating, based on a misguided recommendation that fat is associated with heart attacks.
A sickly myth
Beginning in the 1960s, we were told by a handful of researchers to “avoid-fat at all cost,” a response to climbing rates of heart disease. In the 1980s, the persuasive and compelling corporate slash-government drive to increase carbohydrate consumption, and eat low-fat, coupled with the growing gym craze, sent us spilling out of our pants, and into hospital beds.
Perpetrated by a “calories in, calories out” model, one making us fat, and then the devastating failure of the “eat less, move more” movement of the 1990s, we grew to an obese world. We are a fat/overweight/obese planet. We continue to recommend diet after diet without addressing the problem. The very fake foods (Low-fat, High-Carb) science and the government recommendations of what we should consume, transformed us into obese people, and all the while we were warned to lower fat intake.
How is it that since the 1980s we accepted the “fat-can-be-fit” assumption? Are we replacing the word “healthy” with the word “fit”? What are the differences between “fit” and “healthy,” while being overweight or obese? Do they overlap? I exercise, so I am fit but healthy. I eat less fat, but gain weight? So many questions. So few real answers.
And we pay with our health
Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, according to a 2017 World Health Organization report. In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese. More than 39 percent of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13 percent were obese. Most of the world’s population lives in countries where overweight and obesity kill more people than underweight, and 41 million children under the age of five were overweight or obese in 2016. Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight or obese in 2016.
Although there has been a rise in obesity in the last 70 years, it’s not accurate to say that obesity was rare in the 1950s or 60s, as researchers sometimes say. Approximately 10 percent of US adults were classified as obese during the 1950s. From 2011 to 2012, however, the Centre for Disease Control reported roughly 35 percent of US adults were obese; the prevalence of obesity among American adults has more than tripled within the last six decades. Canada follows roughly the same percentages.
Debunking the myth
Nor is it valid to say things like going “plant-based” to reduce obesity, a truly low-fat whole plant-based diet was considered bizarre in the ’50s and ’60s as were eating fatty meat, bacon, and eggs and cooking our vegetables.
Someone once said, “For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.” This was John F. Kennedy’s 1962 Commencement address at Yale University. He went on to say, “Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
I hope Still in Denial: Five Reasons for Embracing the Truth about Fitness will show you why we are overweight and obese, sick, and dying and what to do about it. Just. Eat. Right.
