The Big Food lie, it isn’t fat, sugar and salt. It is addictive junk additives, the most infamous being the so called flavour enhancers. Flavour enhancers do nothing to alter the taste of the food you eat, they alter your perception of that flavour, the trick your taste buds into perceiving flavours that aren’t there. Naturally enough just like all other nuero stimulants they are highly addictive and, of course their affect does not stop at your taste buds but goes our through your whole body. Why the hell do you the that the food industry attempted to introduce legislation during the Cheney era to give them immunity from prosecution for using any ingredients that latter proved to be toxic, they already know exactly how toxic and addictive they are. Big Tobbaco, became Big Food and brought their tactics with them.

nestoffour:

Your second post, with the link, is very welcomed. I do love Bill Moyers

nestoffour and liecatcher:

nestoffour’s video link and liecatcher’s post about seniors in Florida, reminded me of something that I did not mention about being on SSI/SSA disability and social security in my earlier posts. According to the social security code, people on Social Security disability can’t, I repeat, can not receive more than $20.00 worth of food from any NGO service every 3 months. That’s right only $20 every three months. More than that, you have to report it and have it taken out of your benefits for the next month.

If family, friends, or what ever give you food and/or clothing. That also must be reported and taken off your benefits. If they help towards your rent, that too is taken off your benefits.

What this boils down to is that the disabled, and their family and friends, are forced to break federal law and become willing criminals. This is just to keep the disabled person from starving to death, going unclothed and living in horrible conditions, not to rob the system so that the disabled can live a life of luxury at the expense of the tax payer!

Here in California, the disabled have had their COLA (Cost of living adjustment), taken back by the state. We have had this done 15 times in the past 20 years. From the early 1980’s to the present, we have gone from being approx. 140+% above the poverty level in CA, to 104% currently. Arnie wants to roll back our state benfit back another $20 per month, which will then put us at approx. 98.9% of the poverty level. In other words, below the poverty level.

What can we afford to eat then? We do not get food stamps because the state pays us a small amount each month instead, which saves the state money they would be spending on issuing those food stamps to us instead. It was ment to help both the state and the disabled person. Arnie and others now look at it as a burden upon the state.

I am simply tired of having the state budget balanced on my disabled back in order to balance the budget and pay for tax breaks for the top 1% earners in CA. It is not just wrong, but in my mind, criminal.

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Hubert H. Humphrey

nestoffour:

Thank you so much for your kind words. They made all that typing (and retyping) worth it. I try to bring these facts to light when ever possible as a way to educate the public and hopefully make a difference.

Again, thank you!

Kesey Seven:

Thank you! I am hanging in there. I have very good family and friends and I am doing this for them as well.

Corie:

To quote you: “Will my tax dollars that will support the proposed government health plan go to provide lap-band surgeries for couch potatoes who stuff their faces all day?  Probably.”

People eat better when they have the money to do so. That is a simple fact. There use to be “Poor Food”, such as fish, beans, rice, vegies, and so on, but that is no longer true, EXCEPT for highly refined foods. When you are poor or low income, often that is all you can afford.

Have you ever noticed that lots of people on Food Stamps are over weight? That is the reason. I know, I live there now and in the past. For instance, a mother on Food Stamps does not have enough money to feed everyone. What to do. Well, a candy bar cost less than a $1.00, will give you energy and hopefully tide you over till when you can really eat. So mom has candy bar for lunch and the rest get the food she can afford. I know this to be fact and something that I often did while raising my daughter. She recently said she was amazed by me because she never went hungry and never missed a meal while growing up. She could not figure out how I did it. I missed breakfast, had a candy bar for lunch and a descent meal of chicken, rice/potato,etc and a vegie at dinner, that was how I did it. During school my daughter also got a free lunch. Have you ever raised a boy? I have seen a boy eat a family’s whole month’s worth of Food Stamps in a few days during rapid growth during puberty. Then what does the family do?

Fat bigotry is the last bastion of social prejudice. It is not only socially acceptable, but enforced and encouraged by every institution in this country. Since poor families are forced to survive on cheap highly refined foods, taxing some of these foods as “Junk” foods, would add an additional burden upon those who do not have enough food to start with. THAT was the crux of the hue and cry you speak of. Yes it is a matter “still related to class”, but not in the way you think. It has less to do with education, ethnicity, and gluttony, and more with economics, cooperate welfare, and the encouraging of shipping food from long distances, rather than governments supporting local and family farms. It is a very complex and non-racial matter, but we are lead to believe that that is all it is.

I agree with the above commenters—-it’s far more complex than just eating the “right food”.  And who you believe about the “right food” varies tremendously, and it’s not the same for everyone.  I too started out as a thin person, then a normal size, then ballooned with my two pregnancies, then became very slim again, then very heavy.  I am working very hard now, including a great deal of studying, to determine what will work to help me get back to a normal weight and most importantly, feel good on a consistent basis.  The various factors involved, with many negative environmental triggers and influences, are infections, inflammatory processes, insulin resistance, liver overwork/toxicity, low physical activity, and then, and only then, weak will.  For each category I just mentioned, there are many factors to consider, and many of us have several of those categories operating within our bodies, then manifesting as a “heavy” person.  So, I have found some powerfully helpful answers and hopefully am healing many layers of imbalance as i go.  But it’s very complex and that is what I think we need to remember—-that it is what is all around us that we’re programmed to want to eat, but it is far more complex than that now, and any way you slice it, it will take alot of careful homework and willpower to study and work with your body to give it the best chance possible to be a life-friendly vehicle through your time here on Earth.

From an economics standpoint, we cannot discount the effect that free market capitalist competition has had on our communal waistline. Formal restaurants lost to “all you can eat” buffets from coast to coast.

About 15 years ago, California tried to impose sales tax on “junk” food—that is, food that was sold in grocery stores already prepared, like chips and frozen meals.  Fresh food would still be exempt.

I voted for this increase because I thought that the people who ate “junk” food would then be encouraged to eat, oh, apples or cottage cheese instead of tortilla chips or Stouffers.

Silly me.  The stink and hue and cry were amazing.  The opponents turned it into a class and race issue, because apparently poor minorities disproportionately purchased more “junk” food than other people.

I think it’s still related to class.  If you go to a fine restaurant, the portions are realistic and balanced.  You go to Chili’s, and it’s fat, calories and salt in portions equivalent to a full day’s USRDA.  Educated people tend to eat better. 

What can you do about it?  Force people to change?  Will my tax dollars that will support the proposed government health plan go to provide lap-band surgeries for couch potatoes who stuff their faces all day?  Probably.

If upon reading my two part post below, what I wrote rings true for you or someone you know, please post here and let me know. I am doing a survey.

Thanks!

There are always more reasons for something that happens than we are willing to admit. The decrease in physical activity is not to be discounted, but when you get a plate groaning with surplus food every day of your life that can’t be discounted as a cause of increasing fat.

If you add to that documentation where an industry is discussing way to increase peoples eating without need, just to increase their profits, that too can’t be discounted. Anymore that the Pinto blowing up all the time in accidents when we have the auto industry on record discussing how it would cut into their profits to fix the defect causing the car to explode.

I can remember that the soda pop serving when I was young was what today would be considered a taste, when in fact it was all that was needed to still ones need. I have been trying to find products that have not been contaminated with “high fructose” corn syrup. It is hard to do, but I find the flavor much better with corn syrup. We know that our food has been contaminated, why not do something about it?

I like Ellen Goodman’s writing. She is very clever.

But I wonder if the food suppliers are really the cause of the continuing rise in American obesity. Are they actually becoming more effective at duping consumers, or are consumers eating more and moving their bodies as little as possible. Is it possible that our vaunted agricultural abundance is based on defective science—using fertilizers that lack many essential elements found in undepleted soils.

The problem with legislation inspired by skillful writers who jump easily to conclusions that are accepted just as easily by readers and politicians, is that it is often wrong-headed. Unfortunately democracy is well-equipped to make quick and popular decisions, but poorly designed to solve problems by doing serious research and thinking carefully, which might require too much time that is now spent campaigning. And, even if Congress took the time, the average voter wouldn’t, so where is the percentage?

Part 2:

At first I thought it was a fat oxidation disorder, where instead of burning the calories, they where sent to the liver to be converted into fat and stored in fat cells (that is how it works when there is to much sugar in the blood, hence, weight gain). But after trying a newly discovered plant (in the west that is) called Bitter Melon, which stimulates the metabolism AND the production of insulin, I came down with severe hypoglycemia symptoms that even eating could not stop for long. My blood sugar was kept artificially high as my body went into a tail spin of removing the sugar to fast, thus causing adrenaline to be dumped into my blood stream (to cause the liver to turn fat into sugar and keep me from going into insulin-low-blood-sugar shock), which then causes more insulin to be produced, to again lower the blood sugar, and then back again, over and over for nearly two days. Crazy making and hell to live through.

At this point I realized that what was happening was that I was truly insulin resistant, which causes sugar cravings worse than nicotine, and adverse side effects that make you think you are having a seizure and can only be stopped by eating, especially sugar (sugar + protein is the best). Sigh!

Then, to my dismay, and then anger, I recently found an article in one of the medical research sites I go to and there I find that ALL children become insulin resistant during puberty, but nearly all go back to normal after a few years. Just some of us tend to develop “Reactive Hypoglycemia or True Hypoglycemia” during puberty and many of them go on to develop adult onset diabetes type 2. THIS HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR DECADES! Yet, no one told any of us about this, we where just mocked, ridiculed, told to take dangerous drugs (like Fen-Fen) and so forth because we must be: 1 Over eating and lying about it, 2 not exercising enough, 3 eating nothing but or almost exclusively fast food, sweets and so forth and 4 Not trying hard enough

It was and is not just negligent, but down right criminal. How many of us have died because these facts where not part of the general discussion on weight and diet. How many of us committed suicide, became alcoholics, cutters and so forth because of a lifetime of being told we are worthless, a nothing, a pariah because we are fat. A survey of doctors and nurse a few years ago revealed that most (or a large portion, can’t remember) hated, where groused out by or afraid to touch an overweight patient! MY GOD are we not human anymore!

Sorry, need to take a deep breath. ... So, here I am, along with millions of others, yet again facing an “it is because you are weak willed or a dupe, or what not” theory about why you are fat. Not genetics, not real science, just bigotry, bias, and the human need to hate someone, any one, to make up for all that we lack in ourselves.

Do not get me wrong, I think this discovery is great, and will go a long way to reverse the effects of what many now call “The Western Diet Disease Theory”. I support it, BUT I want to make it clear, that those of us who do everything right, and still can not lose weight, still need to be researched, helped, and understood.

Now it’s off to research what hormones are involved, exactly, in puberty, what they do, how they effect the body and how they cause the teenage body to become insulin resistant. Then match that with the two pathways sugar is passed into the cell to be used for energy. How are these related and what, if anything can I do, take, find or what every, to counter act this genetic nightmare! Any scientist out there willing to take this up?

Part 1:

This article both encourages me and saddens me at the same time. I am heartened to hear that fast food and refined food have always been marketed and designed to trip people up. Being a member of a family of multi-generational weight issues, this does not relate to me or my family, and it can only hurt us. It has always been so.

The women in my family start out as very skinny kids. Puberty hits and suddenly we have dizzy spells, nausea, vomiting, palpitations, sweating and so forth on a daily basis. We are often so sick we can not get out of bed for several days, every month or so. Forget PMS, its major PMSD for us as well. We also start craving sugar like crazed people, something we never did before. The doctors poo-poo us and send us home. Then in our mid to late twenties or early thirties, tada! We have full blown diabetes type 2 and all the doctors point fingers and say, see, we knew you where causing this! Dieting, starving and learning to not feel hunger, but just a stomachache, meant nothing to them, nor did being an athlete in constant training help or convince them either.

Because I knew I was not over eating, my mother was an Adel Davis fan, so we ate health food, and I was training daily, I knew I was not the cause of this. Through chance, research and other methods, I slowly learned that what we had as kids was severe Hypoglycemia, though the doctors today still say there is no such thing. Then we discovered we all had a genetic form of Thyroid disease, where anti-bodies attack and slowly kill the Thyroid. Then it is Celiac we find we have, where gluten causes our immune system to attack the gluten in our intestines, secrete a poison that then set about damaging our intestines and the ability to absorb all but the simplest sugars, fats and some proteins.

Yet when fixing these things or treating them, the weight stays on and even increases, the doctors jump on us and say, see you can’t blame it on your medical conditions. This is a hard blow, yet being an athlete, I was very in tuned with my body. I notice that after two or so months of dieting all my muscles would start to scream in pain. After 4 to 6 weeks of screamoing pain, it was only food, eating that would stop it. The best day of my life was when I stopped with the dieting over and over again lifestyle. I was happier and healthier, but still gaining weight if I was not severe with watching what and when I ate.

Next came a decade of research to find out why my muscles acted like they where starving when ever my caloric intake dropped, even a moderate amount (I tried all kinds of caloric levels, always the same results). I studied the two types of metabolism cycles, how fat oxidation worked, what ATP was and how to take B-1 and Biotin to help all that (which they do, but not enough), how the Mitochondria of each muscle converted the sugar into energy and so forth. How insulin resistance is supposed to work, and so on.

As I delved deeper and deeper into medical research papers on these various subjects, it became clear that some how the process of going into puberty triggered not only the Hypoglycemia, but all the other immune problems my family and I have as well. What was it about that particular cycle in life that would cause such non stop havoc to our bodies and sabotage every diet and exercise we did?