Is and has led you a right merry dance over the years – their propaganda is extremely inviting, even alluring, but certainly damaging. They make it all sound so amazing, so feasible, soooo healthy? Who can resist such professional play on words and incredible packaging, and mind blowing advertising?
In general the information the public gets comes from the food industry, with budgets that are huge and the campaigns are relentless, to say nothing of the powerful lobbyists. For instance margarine is good, butter is bad, that was so damaging to every ones health. Margarine was/is highly processed, which is damaging enough and was packed with the killer ‘trans fatty acids’ for many decades, quite the opposite to what the industry was saying. The food industry had known this for decades, believe. For decades they ignored champagnes that kept appealing to them to remove “trans fats” from products.
The industry had everyone believe ‘fat’ is bad – so people become ‘essential fatty acid’ deficient, the word ‘essential’ describes the fact we cannot do without them. They are essential to health, margarine was as far away from essential as one could get.
People where con–vinced to eat so called ‘low fat’ products, which more often than not had more sugar than the regular fat variety. The industry would substitute fat with sugar for texture and flavor.
Each time a “new” artificial sweeter is released onto the market, we are told this time this one is different, this time this one is safe compared to the previous ones, this one is not like the previous ones that caused cancer or damaged the nervous system (which they flatly denied at the time even though they knew the potential dangers), plus a whole host of other damage.
The latest – is that fruit is now the enemy, because now all ‘carbs’ are bad. Generations of people, and animals for thousands of years, have eaten fresh fruit they did not suffer like we do today. I am beside myself as people tell me fruit makes you put on weight, fruit causes diabetes, fruit contains sugar, alas the power of the food industry.
We all know diabetes is on the rise and now extremely worrying is that children/teenagers are suffering adult onset diabetes, almost unheard before. That was why it was originally called adult onset! NOT due to eating fresh fruits and vegetables! This statistic of increased diabetes and/or weight gain, is because of low consumption! NOT because people are eating so much fruit and vegetables.
When was the last time you saw a modern over weight child eating loads of fruit and vegetables on a regular basis?? Statistics show most children and adults are taking no notice what so ever of the five to nine fresh or frozen fruit and vegetables, everyday.
ONLY 23 percent of men and women eat the minimum five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Research shows it is not this 23 percent that are getting chronically overweight and sick with heart disease, diabetes etc.
Obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in adolescents over the last two decades, with one in seven young people now obese and one in three now overweight, to me this is shocking. This is not caused by the average kid saying please ‘super size me’ with fruit and vegetables! Believe me. I am sorry if I am repeating myself I am so out raged by the mistruths and misleading advice the media puts out there.
Only when you already have diabetes, things are a little different, you will have to be more careful how and when you eat fruit and some vegetables, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat them. If you have diabetes don’t eat them on an empty stomach, don’t eat large portions of fruit at any one time, fruit juices are out of the question etc.
The World Health Report 2002 attributes at least 2.7 million deaths globally each year to low fruit and vegetable intake. In addition, globally there are more than one billion adults overweight at least 300 million of them obese! A high intake of fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet, can make an important contribution to preventing chronic disease and obesity. Today 95 of our food today is processed and this is what people are eating.
A resent study of researchers led by Nita Forouhi, from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the Institute of Metabolic Science of Addenbrooke s Hospital in Cambridge, collected data on 21,831 healthy middle aged men and women who did not have diabetes. Over the 12 years of the study, 735 people did developed diabetes.
To determine how much fruit and vegetables these people ate, the researchers measured blood levels of vitamin C, which serves as a marker for the amount of fruits and vegetables eaten.
We have found that eating greater amounts of fruits and vegetables is associated with lower risk of future type 2 diabetes, Forouhi said.
Scientific studies have shown that people who eat a lot of fruit and vegetables have a lower risk of getting illnesses, such as heart disease, diabetes, some cancers and of being overweight. For this reason, health authorities recommend that you eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day and it doesn t matter whether they re fresh, or frozen. But every piece of research shows people are not eating enough fruit and vegetables.
Fruit and vegetables contain fructose and in their fresh whole natural form do not cause a problem. So where did some of the confusion arise? Something that is in the food chain, it’s almost in all manufactured foods now – HFCS high fructose corn syrup. It is not natural, far from it. Made from corn, and is highly refined, highly concentrated and causing numerous health problems. There is no comparison in any shape or form to fructose in whole natural fresh fruit and the highly processed concentrated HFCS.
The same thing happened with fats – all fats became the enemy, causing more health problems and weight gain as nations avoided ‘essential fats’, getting fatter and unhealthier!!
Now products are made to be low in sugar and carbs, but are higher in processed fats!
Before products where low in fat and higher in sugar and carbs!
Use logic and do not believe the hype of advertising the big food manufactures feed you. Believe me your health is the last thing on their agenda.
GI and GL you may have seen these terms before? I would just like to briefly clear up what they both mean, in a nut shell. GI stands for Glycemic Index – this refers to how fast a particular food is digested. In foods with a high Glycemic Index this process happens quickly causing a surge in blood sugar levels, causing the body to release insulin, which has a knock on effect of encouraging the storage of fat in our cells. This in turn results is a drop in blood sugar levels, resulting in hunger and cravings. GL stands for Glycemic Loading it not only looks at how quickly it affects the blood sugar levels but more importantly the proportion of ‘carbs’ contained in the food.
What does this mean? Okay, a food might have a High Glycemic Index but a Low Glycemic Loading as is the case of fruits, this is the important thing, only a small proportion of this food has an affect on blood sugar levels. So in reality its affects are much lower than its actual G I rating.
Glycemic load for a single serving of a food can be calculated as the quantity (in grams) of its carbohydrate content, multiplied by its GI, and divided by 100.
For example, a 100g slice serving of watermelon with a GI of 72 and a carbohydrate content of 5g (it contains a lot of water, as do most fruits) makes the calculation 5*0.72=3.6, so the GL is 3.6.
The glycemic load assesses the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, giving a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn t tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food s effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn t a lot of it, so watermelon s glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.
Watermelon is 3.6
Author Resource:
Sonia Jones - I am a Brit living and working in Panama for the last five years. A naturopath, nutritional therapist and reflexologist with 20 years experience. A published author of three books. Owns her own spas and clinic, and launched her own natural organic skin care range. Married for 34 years - husband and business partner who is also an acupuncturist. http://www.arthritisalternativetreatment.com http://www.naturalweightlossmethods.com
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