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foreign
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the traditional medical view on Obesity
is summed up nearly a century ago all
obese persons are alike in one
fundamental respect they literally
overeat well this may be true in a
technical sense this is in reference to
overeating calories not food our
primitive urge to overindulge is
selective people don't tend to lust for
lettuce we have a natural inborn
preference for sweet starchy fatty foods
because that's where the calories are
concentrated
think about hunting and Gathering
efficiency uh we used to have to work
hard for our food prehistorically it
doesn't make sense to spend all day
collecting types of food that on average
don't provide at least a day's worth of
calories right you would have been
better off staying back in the cave
right so we evolved to Crave foods with
the biggest caloric bang for their buck
if we were able to steadily Forge a
pound of food an hour and it had 250
calories per pound it might take you you
know 10 hours just to break even on your
calories for the day but if you were
gathering something with 500 calories a
pound you could be done in five hours
and spend the next five practicing your
wall paintings so the greater the energy
density the more calories per pound the
more efficient the foraging so we
developed an acute ability to
discriminate Foods based on calorie
density and to instinctively desire the
densest
if you study the fruit and vegetable
consumption of four-year-old children
they're liking correlates with calorie
density they prefer bananas over berries
carrots over cucumbers well I mean duh
isn't that just a preference for
sweetness no they also prefer potatoes
over peaches and green beans over melon
just like you know monkeys prefer
avocados over bananas we appear to have
this inborn drive to maximize calories
per mouthful
all the foods that researchers tested
were naturally less than 500 calories
per pound uh bananas topped the chart at
about 400. something funny happens when
you start going over that we lose our
ability to differentiate over the
natural range of calorie densities we
have this uncanny aptitude to pick out
the subtle distinctions however once you
start heading towards you know bacon
cheese and chocolate territory which can
reach you know thousands of calories per
pound our perception has become
relatively numb to the differences no
wonder since these Foods were unknown to
our prehistoric Brains it's like the
dodo bird failing to evolve a fear
response because they had no natural
predators and we all know how that
turned out or sea turtle hatchlings
crawling in the wrong direction towards
artificial light rather than the moon
aberrant Behavior explained by an
evolutionary mismatch the food industry
exploits our innate biological
vulnerabilities by by stripping crops
down into almost pure calories straight
sugar oil which is pretty much pure fat
and white flour it's mostly refined
starch right at first they have to
remove the fiber because it effectively
has zero calories run brown rice through
a mill to make white and you lose about
two-thirds of the fiber turn whole wheat
flour into white and lose 75 or you can
run crops through animals to make meat
eggs and dairy and remove a hundred
percent of the fiber right and what
you're left with is crap an acronym used
by one of my favorite dietitians Jeff
Novick calorie rich and processed foods
calories are condensed in the same way
plants are turned into addictive drugs
like opiates and cocaine concentration
crystallization distillation and
extraction they even appear to activate
the same reward Pathways in the brain
put people with food addiction and MRI
scanner show them a picture of a
chocolate milkshake and the areas that
light up in their brains are the same is
when cocaine addicts are shown a video
on crack smoking
food addiction is a misnomer and people
don't suffer out of control eating
behaviors to food in general right we
don't tend to compulsively crave carrots
right and milkshakes are packed with
sugar and fat two of the signals to our
brains of calorie density when people
are asked to rate different foods in
terms of cravings and loss of control
most incriminated with a load of crap
highly processed foods like donuts along
with cheese and meat
those least related to problematic
eating behaviors fruits and vegetables
calorie density may be the reason people
don't get up in the middle of the night
and binge on broccoli
animals don't tend to get fat when
they're eating the foods they were
designed tea now there is a confirmed
report of Free Living primates becoming
obese but that was a troop of baboons
who evidently stumbled across some
dumpsters at a tourist Lodge the garbage
feeding animals weighed 50 more than
their wild feeding counterparts sadly we
can suffer the same mismatched fate and
become obese eating garbage too for
millions of years before we learned how
to hunt our biology evolved largely on
leaves Roots fruits and nuts maybe it
would help if we went back to our roots
and cut out the crap
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thank you
foreign