Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes

Faith writes:I think we need a thread like this because the American diet has been CAUSING us to gain weight and have all kinds of health problems, so unfortunately we need some guidelines to get us out of the situation. We aren't getting fat just because we overeat good natural food, though that may be the case for some, we're getting fat because there's so much processed stuff out there with so many bad things in it. Even the meat we eat is full of alien substances like hormones that affect our metabolism. Read some labels on packaged things in the market, to find out how much sugar is put into all sorts of foods you wouldn't think needed it, and different forms of sugar too so you have to know what all the chemical terms mean. And then there are the long lists of completely undecipherable chemicals in some things.
There's nothing natural about this problem, at least in America. Maybe South Africa doesn't have the same problems we have. Exercise is always a good thing of course and maybe it would do it for most of us -- not me though, too many joints down to bone on bone, but there are some forms of exercise I could do with my upper body if I could get motivated.I sometimes think about the diet my English-Scottish grandparents and their eleven offspring ate on their ranch in Canada. Was it the extremely hard work they had to do to run the place, feed the animals, milk the cows, gather the eggs, weed the garden, kill the chickens and pluck them, can it all for overwintering and so on, or was it that the food itself was natural that explains why they were so skinny and tough and lived into their eighties and nineties? Maybe both. They ate all the "bad" things including white bread they made themselves, butter they made themselves, etc etc etc. I do doubt any of them had a self-indulgent moment in their lives, too many of them, too few resources for starters.