Why do we spend so much time and money on obesity?

It's really very simple. If you consume more calories than you burn, you put on weight.

Cut the high energy low nutrient foods out of your diet, and throw away the car keys and more than likely you won't become obese.

Given the biological realities we are confronting, we need both medical interventions as well as behavioural. Ironically, all the talk of gambling pre-commitment should be stirring the debate on dealing with obesity. Encouraging people to pre-commit to 'reflective' decisions then helping them stick to those decisions is an area of great potential across both obesity as well as gambling addiction.

see http://www.iconicexchange.com/2011/11/11/pre-commitment-save-yourself-from-yourself/

[chuckles] Yeah, it'd be nice to have pre-commitment limit on chocolates etc; maybe a home vending machine that lets you grab a treat now and again, but prevents binging during a moment of weakness!

I attended (and presented at) a very interesting conference on lifestyle medicine recently and it became very clear to me why obesity and diabetes are on-going problems. Health professionals are not up to speed with the real reason for the rising incidence of nutritional diseases.

This is that our food, and I mean the fresh produce we are so often pushed to eat as healthy and not just fast food, is fast approaching junk food status. NPK, irrigation and genetic selection is making more of our fruits and vegetables high in water (nutritionally dilute), high in sucrose (see following) and low in fibre. Much of it is now as poor a nutritional choice as fast food.

We have several taste drives which influence our food choices; predominantly those for fat and sweet. This being as it is suits manufacturers who can make fat and sugary products and have them sell well.

The problem is that this combination is not common in our free-ranging human predecessors who evolved with a metabolic adaptation that results in elevated levels of insulin when sucrose and fat are co-ingested (insulinogenicity).

Insulin at high levels induces resistance in our cells and switches our sugar-fueled metabolism over to storing fat. Much of this fat goes into our liver, kidneys and pancreas and between all our organs as visceral adipose tissue. This is what has the tendency to make us obese, give us diabetes or kill us from a host of other complications.

High levels of antioxidants (as in our wild foods from pre-historic times) reverse all this so the answer is to consumer more antioxidants from whole food sources while avoiding sucrose from farmed foods.

Kakadu Complex does exactly this and the weight loss can be impressive. See http://www.weightlosswithsuperfoods.com

The answer is in the past. We just need to look back to move forward.

I'm sure that part of the problem lies with processed foods that are rich in kilojoules but deplete in nutrients. We stuff ourselves to fuel our bodies with dead food that never staisfies.
Now we have myths abounding that we need to grow GM crops to (a) feed the world and now (b) to provide more nutrituious 'fast food' (as in the contentious GM wheat trial trashed by Greenpeace)
CSIRO et al want to engineer a white flour that does the job already existing by whole wheat flour....I mean it would be too much to expect people to eat wholegrain foods to get nutrients...why don't we genetically engineer a grain to include all of those nutriets that are stripped from the original grain...stupid idea??...but it makes sense to the GM company and patent holder that will make a killing from its promotion and more importantly allow the masses to continue their 'fast food' diets, which will now include the inherant health and safety problems associated with GM techniques.

There are a few things here worth commenting on.

Firstly we must get the whole food thing into perspective. Food is grown for profit, not our ideal nutrition. We have 3 primary drives that govern what we eat. The first is for sweetness and if we were free ranging hunter-gatherers, by attempting to satisfy our taste drive for sweetness, we'd find some fruits or wild honey or honey ants (in Australia). These would provide fibre, water soluble (and some fat soluble) vitamins, minerals and antioxidants as well as a few other phytonutrients including anti-inflammatories, enzyme modulators, co-factors and so on.

Our second drive is for fat which again in the wild setting would come with proteins, antioxidants (fat soluble vitamins), iron (not from nuts though) and some vitamin C from offal.

Our third taste drive is for functional ingredients eg antioxidants, minerals, anti-inflammatories and so on. I have lived with Aboriginal women who took me foraging for a grey clay because they felt they needed it. My analysis shower it was a very rich source of iron, copper and zinc and the organic matter in the clay suggested that these minerals were not just simply inorganic but bound to organic material and hence more absorbable than inorganic metals,

But the real point here is that modern fruits and vegetables are falling in their nutritional density. When did mangoes lose their fibre? When did pumpkins lose those fibrous strands they had? You see low fibre foods are more in demand. And with the NPK added to soils and the extra irrigation applied, so many of our fruits and veg are becoming high in sucrose and lack the micro-sugars in wild foods. (Micro-sugars seem to enhance the absorption of other nutrients in foods and have been found to be important in over-coming multi-drug resistance in chemotherapy). These sweeter foods sell better too. And they get watery so we have big F&V which also sell well and look impressive. Too bad about their being nutritionally dilute and the combination of sucrose and fat in our diet is insulinogenic. I'll say more about that later.

Let's look at the fats we eat today. There's definitely less beneficial nutrients which accompany fat today and there's more fatty foods than ever. Wild animal liver also contained vitamin C but this is not found in the livers of domesticated animals.

Lastly, as we 'hunt' for antioxidants and minerals we are driven to find, in our modern food supply we end up eating lots of energy dense foods to find the ever-decreasing amounts of these essential nutrients.

And what do antioxidants do for our weight?

There's evidence that antioxidants reduce insulin resistance that our cells acquire because of high sucrose and other sugars in our diet. I mentioned sucrose and fat raising insulin previously. If we get enough antioxidants, we can negate the high insulin impacts and there are a few. Insulin gets into our fat tissues and stimulates beta cells to mature into fully fledged fat cells. These are with us forever and are designed to store fat. Luckily (for them), high blood levels of insulin also switch our metabolism from running on sugars (preferably glucose) to storing fat (in the fat cells it's pre-prepared). We put on the weight as our liver, kidney and pancreas and then our muscles get marbled and we load up our visceral adipose stores of fat.

If you want the solution which will take a long time to write, may I invite you to register at www.weightlosswithsuperfoods.com and see how some whole foods can provide a protective role against rising obesity.