The cold hard truth about obesity in Australia,
- 70% of Australian adults are overweights, whilst
- 1 in 4 children are overweight
- By 2025, close to 80% of all Australian adults will be overweight or obese
- Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness
- Obesity has become the single biggest threat to public health
- Obesity costs Australia more than $56 billion per year
- Obesity poses a major risk for chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke and certain forms of cancer which can all contribute to either illness, disability, poor quality of life or premature death.
Obesity is now the single largest threat to your health and in less than 20 years there's an 80% chance your going to be overweight or obese.
I don't know about you but these figures scare the shit out of me. I'm scared of the physical and mental implications of being so sick. I'm scared of the current state of our food system and it's interest in producing calorie dense, nutrient poor products. I'm scared of the lack of solutions we have to fix this mess and I'm scared of peoples helplessness towards fixing it themselves.
Below is my take on how we ended up in this mess and what I believe is needed to help get us out of it.
Big Business Controls Our Diet
The food you eat comes from only 10 sources
We make bad food choices because we only have bad options to choose from.
Our supermarkets, schools, sporting grounds and even hospitals are riddled with junk food and it's becoming increasingly harder to find real, fresh produce.
You only need to walk into your local supermarket to look at the "products" on sale to see that our diets are controlled by corporations whose profit margins are more important than our health.
Through relentless advertising, these food corporations are influencing us to buy us products that contain too much energy and not enough nutrients. The bombardment of food adverts has become so problematic that food advertising has now become a stronger contributing factor towards obesity than inactivity.
Let me repeat that - Advertising influences obesity more than inactivity.
What makes this even worse is these corporations are targeting children because of the strong influence they exert on the foods their parents purchase. This has dramatically increased our childhood obesity rates to the point where parents can no longer distinguish between their children being overweight or not.
Any real food here?
We're Addicted To Calorie Dense Products
Your brain is being used against you!
Our brain's contain a reward system whose primary role is to encourage us to seek certain nutrients like fat, salt and sugar to survive. This was great when food was hard to come by but today we have a constant food supply which makes our reward system no longer needed.
The problem we now face is that food corporations are engineering their products to contain unnaturally large amounts of these rewarding nutrients and combining them together to create super foods we cant resist! These food are designed to be hyper-palatable and hyper-rewarding and it has caused us to become addicted to them in a similar way that drug addicts become addicted to drugs!
The reason this is such an issue is because the rewarding nutrients are generally very calorie dense (hence their importance to survival when food was scarce) and by overloading our reward systems with them we completely distort our bodies ability to determine when we are hungry or satiated.
So now we are stuck with a reward system we no longer need which is being over stimulated by the unnaturally high amount of the rewarding nutrients that are deliberately combined to create addiction. This is why we crave certain foods, even when we aren't hungry and why we simply can't stop eating them!
"Food reward, not hunger, is the main driving force behind eating in the modern obesogenic [obesity-promoting] environment. Palatable foods, generally calorie-dense and rich in sugar/fat, are thus readily over consumed despite the resulting health consequences" - Alsio, Olszewski, Levine & Schioth, 2012
Recipe for Obesity
We Allow Ourselves To Be Nutritionally Oppressed
We've starting working longer hours, sleeping less and less and suffer many problems (mental and physical) from having such a sedentary lifestyle. This coupled with the other distractions of modern day life has resulted in us being too time poor and exhausted to exercise or prepare our food any more.
What really concerns me is the fact we no longer have the drive to be healthy and have started to accept a life of junk food and obesity as normal. We have allowed an abundance of shitty food options to expand and prosper across our nation and have popularised an unhealthy market of ready made meals that offer a very small amount of nutritional benefits when compared against real food.
In fact, it's got to the stage where we have forgotten how to cook and don't understand food labelling. Vulnerable children are being malnourished with calorie dense foods that lack important nutrients because their parents don't know what's in the food they serve or how to cook properly! These children grow up to obese, addicted to junk and with no idea how to break the cycle for themselves or for their own children when and if they live that long.
Growth in Australian fast food outlets and transactions, 1999-2013 with projects to 2017. Euromonitor International
We need to break the cycle somehow. People are too malnourished to have the energy to exercise or take control of their health and slowly this is bleeding into the lives of their children and the vicious cycle will continue.
I could go into many other areas in life I feel we have lost our way in but I will leave it at nutrition and with this brilliant quote...
"An argument can be made that typical modern-day dogs never really grow up. Perpetual puppies. They are fed, they’re groomed, and they’re coddled for their entire lives. They never hunt. They never work. They don’t roam in free packs, learning from each other. They’re nourished with biscuits. They beg.
Sure they’ve survived. But have they, really?
And what is it about the human condition that has potentially created this same effect in us? Have we been so removed from our food, from direct work, from each other…that we aren’t really growing up, experiencing real life, and maturing into adults?" - Angelo Coppola @ humansarenotbroken
So How Do We Fix It?
We cook with real food.
WHAT?! That's it?
Yes!
Not only does this mean our bodies will be jammed packed full of nutrients to make us look and feel better, but we can learn to enjoy our food again, have the energy to get out and exercise and end up saving ourselves a bit of money in the process!
Lets break the shackles these food corporations have over us and take back our health and happiness by doing something that is so simple and enjoyable. If you struggle with cooking or simply don't know how to then invest some time in learning! Even if it means attempting 1 or 2 simple dishes and slowly building up your arsenal, you can still make a huge difference right from the first meal you cook!
There is also no reason why you cant put together whole, minimally processed, nutrient rich ingredients together and create amazing meals that your reward system will love you for!
Yes there are many of other options or ways in which we can tackle obesity but I truly believe this is where we should start. Every single one of my clients start here and every single one of them have ended up feeling, looking and BEING in much better health without any other form of intervention needed.
Yes we can still enjoy the odd convenient meal or indulgence here and there - but earn the right to enjoy these treats and enjoy the mountain of health benefits real food can give.