THE AMERICAN DIET
The American love affair with refined carbohydrates only began at the beginning of the 20th
century. Cola drinks started the movement (we were big water drinkers before then) and the
refined white flour and sugar products that now dominate our diet were only introduced in the
early 1900s. Before then, sugar had been prohibitively expensive for most people. Interestingly,
heart disease was virtually unheard of in sections of our society before this time.
Much has also been made of increases in life span during the century. Life expectancy in the
early 1900s was only 50 years, but it’s increased more than 20 years since then. Many have chalked
this up to improvements in diet and lifestyle, but it’s frequently forgotten that the incidence of
death among citizens under the age of 16 has dropped dramatically during the century. A national
program of vaccinations for disease, medical advances in pediatric and perinatal care have greatly
decreased the death of children at birth and through adolescence. When you take these figures
into account and factor them in with advances in adult medicine, the average lifespan increase
is not so remarkable.
The fact is, we’re out of shape as a society, and not nearly as healthy as many would have you
believe. The birth of television, an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, advanced technology, service
economy, lack of exercise and other changes in the way we live have combined to produce a
society with a real fitness crisis.
I think our 20th century carbohydrate-loaded diets also play a major role here. As discussed
above, the chronic insulin response we get from all those carbs greatly increases the laying down
of fat in the body. Obesity results, and there’s no doubt obesity can play a large role in heart disease.
Chronically high carbohydrate consumption may also decrease motivation and general disposition,
as we’ll discuss later, and this could have an effect on overall exercise and lifestyle habits.
But instead of falling into the carbohydrate trap and letting them get the best of us, we use
the carbs for our own purposes in the Anabolic Diet. By scheduling and manipulating their
place in our diet, we time hormone bursts to obtain a positive effect on amino acids and muscle
growth. Then, before those hormones can create a bodyfat problem, we cut them off. It’s very
simple. But it’s also very effective.
CANCER AND DIET
As if it wasn’t bad enough that the responsibility for coronary heart disease was laid at the
doorstep of dietary fat, fat has also become a prime suspect in colon, breast and prostate cancer.
There is even less validity to these claims than the fat/heart disease link.
In fact, a number of studies have cast doubt on any dietary fat/cancer association. Recent
research on colon cancer found there to be no link between the consumption of red meat or
total or saturated fat in either sex with the cancer.^3 Another found the existing evidence linking
fat and prostate cancer to be inconclusive.^4 Likewise, several studies of breast cancer and fat
intake have shown little support for a connection.5,6,7.
Recent animal studies indicate that it may be total caloric intake, and not dietary fat, that is
the cause of breast cancer.8,9 Tumor development seems to depend on a complex interaction
20 CHAPTER 2