Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [73]
In 1981 our Institute published Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World, a book by David Weir and Mark Schapiro. It reveals that American chemical corporations are legally exporting to the third world pesticides that have been banned or heavily restricted in the U.S. Residues of these banned pesticides have been found in some of the food we import. Therefore, avoiding imported meat, fruits, and vegetables makes sense as another way to lower your pesticide intake.
Dangerous Change No. 8: Too Many Calories
I probably don’t have to present evidence to convince you of one of the key consequences of the new American diet. A government study confirms what our scales are telling us: as of the early 1970s the average American man was six pounds heavier and the average woman seven pounds heavier than their counterparts of 15 years earlier.50 Twenty percent of all Americans are either clinically overweight or obese.51
THE RISKS
Extra pounds can aggravate hypertension and heart disease.52 (Even a 10 percent reduction in weight can lower blood pressure significantly, according to a recent study.53) It is less widely known that obesity is also believed to promote diabetes.
But why are Americans getting fatter?
We are not eating more calories, but we are burning up less because our lives are more sedentary. Moreover, with the typical American high-fat, low-fiber, high-sugar diet you can eat a lot of calories without eating very much bulk, so you just don’t feel full. A gram of fat has more than twice as many calories as a gram of carbohydrate. This means that for the calorie “cost” of just one pat of butter or two bites of hamburger, you could eat a whole cup of plain popcorn, a slice of bread, most of a small potato, a cup of strawberries, or an entire head of lettuce.
Eating more plant food and less animal food allowed me not only to shed my extra ten pounds (never achieved as a chronic dieter) but to maintain the same weight for the last ten years. And my experience is apparently not exceptional. Says the Journal of the American Dietetic Association: “Persons who were previously omnivores and became vegetarians in adulthood report weight loss rather than gain.”54 It suggests that increased physical activity might also play a part, as was true for me. Most important, I was liberated from the stifling preoccupation with weight that plagues so many Americans.
The Good News
The flip side of the message in this chapter—that so many of our most dreaded diseases are related to the food we now eat—is the good news: we can reduce our chances of getting these diseases since we control what we eat. And it’s easy. We don’t have to memorize a book of tables and walk through the grocery store with an electronic calculator, adding up grams of fat, salt, and sugar. Since the eight threats to our health derive mainly from animal foods and processed foods, achieving a healthy diet involves only a few steps: reducing our consumption of animal foods (limiting eggs to three a week and cutting back on full-fat dairy products), enjoying a variety of whole foods, and using safflower, sunflower, corn, or soybean oil at home. Remember, what the medical authorities are recommending today is not some newfangled way of eating that requires a Ph.D. to put together. It is a pattern of eating that sustained human life for thousands of years.
The lesson is clear: the more we let the food industry create what we eat, the more we expose ourselves to risk. The more control we take over our diet, the better able we are to reduce those risks. (I am not suggesting a corporate plot to make us sick; it is simply that the logic of corporate expansion is frequently in direct conflict with our body’s logic, as we’ll see in the next chapter.)
And the word is getting