Obesity is a true pandemic and one of the worst health disasters of our lifetime. The best treatment is unknown. Diets that are appropriate for thin people do not help the obese—advice like “eat a moderate diet” and “don’t eat between meals” is useless for them. Intermittent fasting and the Adkin’s-type diets work but require weeks to months of adjustment and need to be continued indefinitely.
Agriculture is a great gift that is saving the world. Farm productivity has exploded in the last 50 years. Worldwide famine deaths have crashed. The chart below is from Steven Pinker’s phenomenal Enlightenment Now (2018):
Hybrid crops and mechanization have driven up corn yields. There were 20 bushels per acre in 1980, but by 2019 this increased to 160. Other crops show similar trends.
Other advances have paralleled and were likely the result of abundant food. Global literacy was 55 percent in 1950 and rose by 5 percent a decade after that. It is now 86percent. No rational person—outside of an oddball billionaire or two—still worries about the “population bomb.” The number of people in the world is projected to be 9.7 billion by 2064, but this will decline to 8.8 billion by 2100.
These trends debunk the media’s disaster-mongering. But against this optimistic tide, we have obesity. The daily calories food producers supplied to US citizens rose from 2900 per person in 1961 to 3700 today. Adult caloric requirements range from 2000 for sedentary women to about 3000 for a few active men. Big Food must either export the excess or force-fed it to us using marketing. In 1980, 15 percent of us were obese, but this number is now a third. Overweight people are another third (CDC).
Authorities have recommended low-fat diets for forty years. “Saturated” animal fats increase blood levels of “bad” cholesterol (LDL), which was assumed to be evidence that a high-fat diet caused heart disease. So in 1985, the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health recommended dietary fat restriction. When the Food Pyramid came out in 1992, these guidelines went mainstream. Later versions were promoted in 2005 and 2011. It all sounded sensible—the government was trying to help. What could go wrong?
Our obesity began about the same time as the Food Pyramids promoted low-fat and low animal fat diets. The for-profit food companies helped market these ideas, peddling cheap manufactured fats and processed sugar under “low fat and cholesterol” labels. The graph below shows that how this correlated with the development of our obesity.
Although the consensus is not complete, powerful evidence has now developed that we eat too little fat, and that saturated animal fats are safe.
(continued in Butchered by "Healthcare."