6. The Carbohydrate Trend
As companies began refining healthy foods, making them sweet-
er and increasing shelf life, sometimes to months and years, the nutri-
tional quality of these foods diminished significantly. This is true of
carbohydrate foods more than any other. This includes the mass pro-
duction of sugar that has grown dramatically as its use in many foods
continues to increase. The result is that over the past few generations
most people consume too much carbohydrate. Today, one obvious
result is that overfat people now make up the majority! One reason is
the fact that a significant portion of carbohydrate foods turns to fat in
the body.
The trend in carbohydrate overconsumption continues today,
propelled by companies selling refined carbohydrates and sugar.
They’ve been so successful that the newest epidemic includes obese
babies. This is due to the promotion of highly refined baby cereals,
which are actually worse for babies than pure sugar.
For many generations, the common recommendations have been
to eat a large amount of carbohydrates. And, if you’ve followed the
USDA food pyramids through the years most of your diet is carbohy-
drate, and you’ve gotten fat. The problem goes beyond being fat —
highly refined carbohydrate diets are unhealthy on all levels, signifi-
cantly reducing human performance. Today, the term “carbohydrate”
is almost always synonymous with “refined carbohydrate.”
One reason for this imbalance is that the human body has not
adapted to processing this amount of carbohydrates, especially in
refined forms. For 99.6 percent of our existence on earth, humans con-
sumed diets that were relatively low in almost all carbohydrates but
higher in fat, protein and vegetables. During most of evolutionary his-
tory, humans lived near the sea and consumed significant amounts of
fish, seafood, and other land-animal proteins. More importantly, sig-