What's Wrong With Us?

What's Wrong With Us?

There's something wrong with us. When 80 million Americans are overweight—that is, nearly one in two— then I think 1 have reason to state that there is definitely something terribly wrong in our diet and the way we eat.

Despite several decades of diet consciousness the chubby statistics prevail to this day. Since the Second World War, Americans have been on and off an inconceivable variety of regimen.

They've been on diets exclusively devoted to bananas and milk. They've been on others which advocated little more than sucking on a grapefruit. They've ingested the growth hormone from the urine of pregnant women. They've even tried to cut poundage by stapling their ears, in the hope that by wiggling the stapled lobe hunger would disappear.

Dietwise, you name it and Americans have given it a whirl. They've adopted the gospel that calories don't count and they've ballyhooed others that say calories do. They've been on a drinking man's diet. They've followed the Air Force Diet. They've eaten high-cholesterol and

low-cholesterol, saturated and unsaturated fats, liquid and solid, fiber and non-fiber. In short, they've tried everything and they're still fighting the same bulges.

The sad story is that Americans pile their fat back on as soon as each diet has run its faddish course.

But let's travel to certain regions of Africa and Asia, or some parts of Eastern Europe. There we see an altogether different picture.

The people there may not have our comforts. They may not have our variety of foods. But on the other hand we do not see them felled by heart attacks or strokes. Our most common types of cancer are hardly known among

them. They rarely suffer hemorrhoids. They are unfamiliar with certain colon diseases or phlebitis. What's more, they're not obese.

Now let's see what happens when these same people forsake their native nutrition and come to the United States. In the most advanced country in the world they suddenly get sick. If they do not directly succumb to the diseases from which Americans suffer, they do not on the whole feel as well as formerly.

What happened?

Nothing, except that they've adopted our way of living and eating. As a result, they've become prone to stress, with its incidence of heart attacks. And they've become susceptible to obesity, with its incidence of "diet books" that don't work.

All these facts I learned because I used to sign three death certificates a week. This dismal routine set me in pursuit of the relation between nutrition, obesity and stress. It put me on the trail where each mortality was a clue. It set me tracking down the element in the daily sustenance of people who were not fat. I wanted to know more about these hardy specimens that were happily spared the degenerative illnesses from which Americans die.

What I came up with was that the thinner and healthier Africans and Asians were eating diets rich in unrefined carbohydrates. While I was counseling obese patients, they were staying slim on corn meal, bananas, beans, potatoes, rich starch and high-fiber vegetables. They were enjoying longevity, while I was signing death certificates for people who had been punishing their bodies with beef, lamb, fish, eggs and sugar.