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CHAPTERObesit y
M
y colleagues and I were sitting around a table in the faculty
lounge of the university where we teach, discussing the untimely
death of Jim, an administrator, from a stroke. Only forty-eight years
old, he was sixty to seventy-fi ve pounds overweight and had high blood
pressure. Because of his craving for junk food he hadn’t followed his
doctor’s advice to go on a calorie-reducing diet. One colleague quoted
a United States government survey that showed that in 2008, eight out
of ten individuals over the age of twenty-fi ve are overweight. Being
grossly overweight, defi ned as fi fty pounds over the norm based on
height, is linked to every major degenerative disease, including cancer,
heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis.
A diet suited to the individual’s metabolic type is especially impor-
tant for those who are fi fty or more pounds overweight, for the excess
acid waste from a metabolically inappropriate diet in those who are
obese is converted by the body into fatty acid and stored in fat mole-
cules in the body. Thus it is not only excess calories that put on weight
but also undigested food that acidifi es.Raw Foods Prevent Excessive Weight Gain
We should emulate, to the extent possible, the raw food–eating habits
of preindustrial cultures, because for nearly all of the three hundred
thousand years of protohuman’s existence, everything was eaten raw. It
was only with the Wurm Glacial period sixty-fi ve thousand years ago