Death By Supermarket (23 page)

Twenty-first-century humans have this exact same fat-storage system. That means if you deprive your body of food it will perceive this deprivation as a time of famine and will adjust your insulin output so that, when you break your diet, more insulin will be secreted and more of what you eat will be stored as fat.

The second reason low-calorie dieting fails is that starvation signals your thyroid to slow down in an effort to save energy and keep you alive, leaving you with a new metabolic set point for calorie consumption. In German concentration camps during World War II, prisoners were fed subsistence diets ranging from 600 to 1,700 calories per day (1,700 calories applied to circumstances, such as hard labor, when it was useful to keep people alive). In Vietnamese POW camps, prisoners were fed between 300 and 1,000 calories per day. Many survived by eating rats and insects. Concentration camp survivors and POWs were emaciated when the camps were liberated at the end of the wars, but survivors subsequently suffered a greater tendency toward obesity due to down-regulated thyroid function. Likewise, babies born to malnourished mothers during the Biafra famine in Nigeria forty years ago are now struggling with obesity.
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This is how down regulation of the thyroid occurs: When you eat a low calorie diet, the meager fuel is quickly used up. Your brain needs an ongoing drip of sugar or you will lapse into a coma and die, and so it demands that you eat again. Your body keeps a ready supply of glycogen (sugar) stored in your liver and muscles to use to satisfy your brain and draw upon for fuel. But these glycogen stores are quickly used up. (Because glycogen is stored with water in a 1:3 ratio, when you burn off your glycogen stores you can see a drop in your weight of up to 10 pounds in one week.) When
your glycogen stores are gone, your liver struggles to regulate the blood-sugar supply to your brain.

And so your adrenal glands work overtime to secrete the stress hormone cortisol, which breaks down bones and muscles to get the sugar (fuel) and amino acids (proteins for repair and rebuilding) that your body needs. By the time you break your low-calorie diet, you have two more problems: less lean body mass and a lower metabolic set point. Since the more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolic rate and the less muscle mass the lower your metabolic rate, you now have a lowered metabolic rate. In addition, as a protective measure to prevent catastrophic muscle and bone mass destruction, your thyroid has down-regulated to slow down energy needs. That means every time you low-calorie diet, your body becomes a more effective fat-storing machine. By simply resuming a normal diet, you will put on more weight than you lost.

Today many Americans eat a subsistence diet of less than 1,500 calories a day—even when they are not actually dieting. When they have that small bag of chips, it all goes to their butts, bellies, and thighs. Those who follow the South Beach Diet after a period of time will have an up-regulated insulin response and a down-regulated thyroid, and less muscle mass, which contributes to a lower metabolic set point. Losing weight on a low-calorie diet is great if you want to eat that way for the rest of your life.

The third reason low-calorie diets fail is because starvation can provoke a binge response. Without adequate food, your neurotransmitters can’t replenish. To get through the day, dieters often resort to using stimulants (coffee, diet drinks, tobacco products, alcohol, and OTC and prescription diet pills, as well as recreational drugs). Using stimulants may give your brain enough of a boost to resist powerful messages to eat. But ultimately you’ll have to eat again, and then you may likely binge. People who have suffered from starvation (from war-time food shortages, as prisoners of war, from being marooned or shipwrecked) or those who have imposed starvation on themselves (anorexics and volunteers in semi-starvation
experiments) suffer from uncontrollable urges to binge and have a greater tendency toward obesity.
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The most definitive study on starvation was conducted in the mid-1940s for the War Department at the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota. The study was intended to help starvation victims in war-torn Europe—but will likely never be repeated as today nothing this life threatening could be imposed on even willing volunteers. Forty twenty-to thirty-three-year-old men ate 1,570 calories a day for six months to lose 2.5 pounds a week, or 25 percent of their body weight. When the three-month nutritional rehabilitation began, the men’s resting metabolic rates had declined by 40 percent, and their pulses and body temperatures had dropped, indicating hypothyroidism (down-regulated thyroids). They demonstrated all the symptoms of malnutrition, such as feeling cold, tired, hungry, having difficulty concentrating, insomnia, thinning hair, dry, thin skin, gastrointestinal problems, and no interest in sex. Even when given unrestricted amounts of food, researchers noted what they termed “semi-starvation neurosis”: The volunteers were agitated and nervous, withdrawn, impatient, and self-critical, with distorted body images and extremely aberrant eating behaviors, such as voracious appetites followed by large and rapid food intake; they exhibited lack of control and distress over amounts eaten; they complained of hunger despite huge meals; they believed that eating “triggered” hunger; they suffered from cravings and obsession with food, as well as secrecy and defensiveness over food; they had a new preoccupation with body shape and weight; they scavenged or ate from garbage containers; they stole, hid, and hoarded food and manipulated others for food; they made bizarre mixtures of food; they ate unpalatable and inappropriate food (raw meat, scraps); they used excessive spicing and flavoring; they exhibited poor table manners (licking knives and bottle lids, collecting crumbs, gnawing at bones); they preferred to eat in isolation; they induced vomiting or ate until they vomited; they suffered self-loathing; they took drastic measures to resist binges; they
relapsed into binge eating despite attempts to rehabilitate them. In addition, they became morose and obsessive; a few mutilated themselves, one man cutting off three fingers.
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On a healthy diet within nine months, the majority of the volunteers regained normal eating and emotional patterns, and their previous weight and thyroid function. What this experiment demonstrated is that the experience of starvation compels us to binge in an attempt to provide our brains with fuel and our bodies with a fresh supply of nutrients necessary to restore hormone balance and heal from malnutrition. It also demonstrates that on a diet of real, whole food, cravings, binging, and all the aberrant behaviors of unnatural hunger can be stopped.

The fourth reason low-calorie diets ultimately fail is that, although the United States is the richest country in the world, the majority of our citizens are suffering from malnutrition, even if they are obese. Our factory-food diet is viewed as a period of starvation to our bodies. Some people even attempt to diet on fast food. In addition to starving on a low-cal diet of fast food, you would also be consuming trans fats, chemical solvents, industrially processed soy, commercial milk, MSG, aspartame, refined white flour and numerous other toxic substances. In addition to harebrained fast-food diets, there are diet factory foods such as the Special K challenge, a starvation diet that promises you will lose six pounds in two weeks by eating two bowls of their product every day (and now we have South Beach Diet cereal). Weight Watcher’s, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem make industrialized meals that are devoid of enzymes and are otherwise nutritionally dead. These are but a few examples of the fake diet foods you can eat to perpetuate malnutrition.

A persistent state of malnutrition from eating factory food keeps Americans bingeing, obsessing, and ever seeking satiety. If you begin a low-calorie diet while in a malnourished state, you’re beginning the diet with a preconditioned low metabolism, hormone imbalances, and other health issues. There’s no way your body is letting go of your fat stores if your life is in danger. The reason is that we are hardwired for survival. This
inherent programming to survive is the fifth reason dieting fails. Our bodies are programmed to hold onto fat cells in case we need that fat to survive in an emergency famine in the future.

In an interview on
Inside the Actors Studio
, Russell Crowe told James Lipton how bulking up 44 pounds to play the real-life tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D., for the movie
The Insider
ruined his metabolism for life. “I must have been clearing 235, 240, or something like that at the time. I’m only, like I said, five-eleven and a half and a bit, so that looks gigantic on me. But the one thing is my metabolism has never been the same since I did that film. Now I always have this incredible uphill battle.”
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Crowe, who fattened up on cheeseburgers and beer, experienced an accelerated version of what many factory food-eating Americans are going through today. Getting fat on factory food bulks up fat cells, and your body does not like to let go of fat once it’s onboard. Fat cells have just recently been recognized by the scientific community as something other than inert blobs. Fat cells are now recognized to behave like endocrine organs that secrete hormones. We’re bombarded with xenoestrogenic toxins every day in factory food (including factory produce and animal products), chemical exposures, and city water.

Xenoestrogens aren’t just causing the problems listed on
page 151
, they’re also causing people to gain fat. Researchers think that these endocrine-disrupting chemicals—which are also referred to as obesogens— mimic estrogen and mis-program stem cells to become fat cells, and alter the function of genes. Obesogens are thought to inappropriately alter lipid (fat) homeostasis (all the metabolic processes that depend on fats and strive for equanimity in the body). Obesogens increase fat storage, change metabolic set points, disrupt energy balance, or modify the regulation of appetite and satiety to promote fat accumulation and obesity. The pesticides, chemicals, rBGH dairy, soy, and other toxins in factory food can deliver the estrogen mimickers xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens— obesogens—into your system and keep you fat.
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In addition to xenohormones mutating into obesogens, simply having toxins from factory food infiltrating your system may contribute to fat retention. When your body is confronted with a steady influx of toxins, those (mostly fat soluble) toxins have to be stored away somewhere, as your body cannot have toxins floating around in your bloodstream. So your body must retain fat cells as storage repositories. To convince your body that it’s OK to let go of fat cells, you have to provide reassurance that there will be no more incoming poison. The more of a purist you are about eating organic, real food, the better your chances of losing fat.

Remember the people mentioned earlier who have suffered from starvation or those who have subjected themselves to starvation? They were found to have a surprisingly high amount of body fat, even if they were emaciated.
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In other words, people who have starved down to skeletons still have fat cells. This is because body fat is your last defense against death and your body does not want to give up any fat if it feels threatened that you might die.

I don’t fault people for being obese, and I don’t fault obese people for resorting to extreme measures, such as gastric bypass surgery. I fault the FDA for allowing purveyors of factory food the freedom to inundate our food supply with grossly unhealthy, fattening, addicting substances that have created a population of neurotransmitter-imbalanced, unnaturally hungry people and then for allowing the diet industry to perpetuate obesity. When a person becomes morbidly obese there is often no turning back, and they have to have some recourse or their lives are virtually over, and so some resort to gastric bypass surgery.

Obesity is a complicated problem. Fifty years ago, Adelle Davis wrote, “To say that obesity is caused merely by consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party.”
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But it makes sense that factory food is the primary reason for obesity as this is the first time in history that humans have experienced this level of obesity. Often people become fat and even obese by eating the same
number of calories of factory food as thin individuals who eat real food. Sweets, soft drinks, and alcoholic beverages make up almost 25 percent of all calories eaten by Americans, 5 percent is comprised of salty snacks and fruit-flavored beverages, and 10 percent is bread, rolls, and crackers. That means 40 percent of our intake is junk to our bodies.
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What many Americans don’t understand is that it’s not the volume that is making us fat as much as it is what is actually being ingested.

I have a number of friends from foreign countries who gained weight when they came to the United States (or Canada) and ate factory food. Pedro from Brazil came to the United States as a fifteen-year old exchange student and gained 33 pounds in five months. When he returned to Brazil, he naturally lost the weight not by dieting, but by simply going back to eating the traditional Brazilian diet. Hadrien went to college in Canada, where he lived around the corner from a McDonald’s. He returned to Paris 30 pounds heavier but lost it all and then some by simply eating the typical French diet. Fumiko from Japan came to the U.S. at age seventeen in to attend boarding school. She gained 20 pounds in ten months, but she too naturally lost the weight when she returned to Japan, not by dieting, but by eating the traditional real food Japanese diet. Today Fumiko is the dean of a woman’s college in Tokyo. She told me, “One of my students who studied at our Boston campus gained 28 pounds in four months. The average weight gain among our girls who study in the U.S. is about nine pounds. But immediately after they return to Japan, they go back to their previous weight without dieting.”

Instead of ridding our culture of factory food and providing real food abundantly, affordably, and conveniently, our government has now agreed to allow “obesity” as a Medicare diagnosis, which paves the way for more people to turn to the surgeon’s scalpel in a desperate attempt to “fix” their obesity. In his book
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
, Atul Gawande, a surgical resident and staff writer on medicine and science for
The New Yorker
, recounted a “successful” gastric bypass story
in which he writes “[The patient] was concerned about the possible longterm effects of nutritional deficiencies (for which patients are instructed to take a daily multivitamin).”
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