If there was any conspiracy theory around our food intake ever, it was what happened in the early 70s in America. It not only crippled the world’s digestive genes but killed the healthy bacteria in our food pipe forever — eventually introducing the word ‘obesity’ to the global lexicon.
The Vietnam War had become a major headache for US President Richard Nixon and he was desperate to bring food prices down before he could even think of going in for re-election. In came food academic Earl Butz and his thoughtless but revolutionary farm plan which damaged the human genes forever.
He persuaded the farmers to switch from wheat to corn growing, that too in mass production. It was cheaper and found shelves en masse. Before the world could fathom the crippling impact of this food radicalism, the entire population was having everything corn with the traditional wheat going out of the window.
All that Nixon wanted happened. Food prices went down, the farmers came on his side and all looked well for elections. But then came a glut of corn in the market and Butz took his next giant leap into food disaster. In collaboration with the Japanese, he worked on and flew back an even more damaging concoction — something called high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or sweet syrup made out of corn which was just too cheap to be true.
By the mid 80s, sugar was replaced by this damaging HFCS entirely which, after Coke endorsed in their soft drink in 1984, appeared everywhere — in breads, desserts, cakes and all things you could not even imagine. Good sugar was gone forever and everything one wanted to eat had that deadly corn syrup in it. And that’s when the word obesity started getting currency.
Before long, food scientists all over the world started wondering why the world was getting into the grip of a heart epidemic. The general perception was that the fat in our food was clogging our arteries even if we were not gluttons. No one looked at sugar as the real culprit. A British food professor John Yudkin, who first suggested that fructose was killing us faster, was rubbished at the behest of the fructose lobby which by then had become as strong as the pharmaceutical industry is today.
The next inevitable revolution in our platter was low-fat food which became a fad soon enough with huge financial gains for the food industry. “This was the second biggest dent in our health as the low fat conundrum is the most deceptive cause of growing obesity,” points out seasoned diabetologist Dr Anoop Misra. He explains how fat, indeed, has been taken out of these foods but, to make it taste better, it is liberally splashed by the unseen fructose, thereby skyrocketing the incidence of heart diseases and diabetes all over the world.
Urban India was at that time just opening up to these highly processed foods in their daily diet so the word BMI was still in rare use here. However, according to a health survey data from Britain, in 1966 the proportion of people with a BMI of over 30 (classified as obese) was just 1.2% for men and 1.8% for women. By 1989, the figures had risen to 10.6% for men and 14.0% for women. WhyIJ No one was able to fathom. And that was because they were still looking at the fat in the food and not the fructose infusion.
Slowly but inexorably, the world shifted to a new health issue called metabolic morbidity, also known as diabesity, struggling to tackle the diabesity epidemic at all ages.
Over the past 1,000 years, and due to the wanton industrialisation of food, the world population has developed a slow killer in its genes called the highly toxic digestive system. This means we have messed up our metabolism to get more heart disease, more diabetes both powered by obesity.
World’s leading functional medicine expert Dr Mark Hyman adds all the above to other inventions like antibiotics, acid blockers, anti-inflammatory medication, aspirin and steroids to tell you how our digestive powers have been injured and “gut flora” irreparably altered, leading to systemic inflammation.
So what is needed nowIJ We need what he calls the 4R programme: Remove bad bugs, drugs and food allergens; Replace with needed enzymes, fibre and pre-biotics; Reinoculate your gut with good bacteria or probiotics; and, finally, Repair the gut lining with omega-3 fats, zinc and other healing nutrients.
