Home
Almost one-third of all Americans are overweight! The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company has found that:
“The death rate is one-third higher among those whose body weight is 20 percent above the average. The death rate from coronary artery disease (heart disease) is 50 percent greater among the overweight.”
The well-known American scientist, Dr. C. M. McCays of Cornell University, through his extensive studies has definitely proven that overeating is one of the prime causes of degenerative diseases and premature death; or, as he put it, “the thin rats bury the fat rats.”
Overeating
Everyone agrees that the cause of obesity is overeating. But what causes overeating?
Dr. T. L. Cleave, famous British scientist, has a theory which explains what makes us “civilized” people such compulsive eaters. He says that man, like animals, has an inborn instinct which guides him in his choice of the kind and the amount of foods he should eat. He can trust this instinct with absolute confidence, but only as long as he uses natural substances; that is, the foods which occur naturally in his environment and are in their natural state. This appetite instinct, however, is “confused” if your food is so over-processed, and so adulterated with artificial flavors and colorings, that it bears very little or no resemblance in either appearance or taste to the original food.
Cholesterol and heart disease
We have been reading and hearing a great deal about animal fats in connection with heart disease. We have been told that the high level of fat consumption, particularly of cholesterol-rich animal fats, is the cause of arteriosclerosis and heart disease.
Now I would be the last person to defend or justify animal fats in human nutrition. But in all fairness it must be stated that it appears as though some scientists are accusing the wrong villain in their attempt to solve the problem of heart disease. Although cholesterol deposits on the walls of the arteries are symptomatic of cardiovascular disease, more and more researchers, particularly in Europe, have become convinced that cholesterol in itself is not the villain, but that a general biochemical imbalance, impaired metabolism and the resultant inability of the system to handle cholesterol, are to blame! This view is supported by the fact that many peoples, like Eskimos, some of the North American Indians, inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, and some tribes in Russian Siberia, consume large quantities of cholesterol-rich foods, yet they do not suffer from hardening of the arteries or heart disease at all. That is, they do not until they adopt “civilized man’s” eating habits and start to eat white sugar, white flour, canned foods, and such. There is mounting independent research which shows that cholesterol is an effect, not a cause.
*82\58\2*
