Beware of advertising! It distracts us in our efforts to live health-
fully. It’s negative education — propaganda. These shameful activi-
ties, frequently directed at children, have completely reshaped the
modern world’s eating habits. In less than a century we’ve gone from
a diet high in natural foods to one made mostly of highly processed
harmful items. No one should be surprised at the prediction that in
the next decade 75 percent of our population will be overfat; chronic
life-threatening diseases are already affecting people at younger ages
than ever before, including children.
Unfortunately, the so-called “natural foods” movement of today
is not helping. Synthetic vitamins, processed and packaged conven-
ience items, and organic junk food is now the norm, making up most
of the items in health food stores.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to avoid all the hype.
For every bad food, it seems like there’s a new diet associated with it.
While the low-calorie, low-fat and other diet plans don’t work very
well, they’re still the most popular. Let’s look at some of them.
Counting Calories
The calorie-counting theory is based on the idea that the calories in
the food you eat minus the calories you burn for energy equals the
weight you lose or gain. The idea is that balancing energy intake and
output results in stable weight. If you eat fewer calories than you
burn, you lose weight, or, if you take in more than you use, you gain.
The problem with this theory is that it does not work as simply as it
seems for most people. This is because everyone has a slightly differ-
ent metabolism, food is utilized differently, and fat and sugar are
burned at different ratios from person to person. For example, some
people get 60 percent of energy from fat and 40 percent from sugar,
while others are just the opposite. When you hear “burning calories,”
your question should be, “calories of what — fat or sugar?” (This
issue is related to your aerobic system as discussed later.)
In addition to the number of calories taken in, the amount of car-
bohydrates, fats and proteins eaten also significantly affects how the
body burns energy. So to use only the total calories as a guide may be
misleading. More importantly, counting calories doesn’t work in real
life for most people, and the side effects can be significant — the least
ONE LAST BITE • 175