W8_H8 or The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse

I don’t know how many of you saw the HBO documentary, The Weight of the Nation but it was, for me, almost unwatchable.  Before I tell you how many things I hated about it let me tell you the thing I loved about it – they mentioned my book.  Well, they showed its picture along with some others and said nasty things about me but hey, I made it – I am part of the dieting zeitgeist.  It was all downhill from there.

I knew I was going to have a hard time watching it because it was done in association with the five horsemen of the apocalypse:Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Health, The FDA and the USDA – basically the establishments that dictate how we eat.  I do realize in the book of Revelations there were only four but since this is about obesity, we gained an extra horseman.

The show took the angle that what a surprise it was that we are all obese or overweight.  It looked at the emotions of the people which I was incredibly moved by – I know what it’s like to be an overweight person and have to struggle every day with what I eat.  It is not a battle that you do not walk away from unscarred.  I still see a fat person every time I look in the mirror. I still have to watch everything I eat and have to think about food every day.  It is exhausting.  This struggle was very well documented in the show; however, the comments from the representatives of the horsemen were really aggravating – it was as if they had nothing to do with it.

I guess the reason I sound so angry is because these stories resonated so much with me; or it could be because I am hungry.  I live my life hungry and you have to be hungry in order to lose weight and maintain your weight loss.  No one tells you that part but guess what folks, it’s true.  Many of the people interviewed for the show didn’t have photos of themselves with their family. I still hate having my photo taken and every photo of the obese me has been destroyed.

Let me tell you a story: Did you know that the first childhood obesity clinic was started in this country at Columbia University by a female German physician?  She came to this country and couldn’t believe how many overweight children she encountered.  Do you know when this was? The mid 1930’s – during the height of the Great Depression.

Can you guess why there were so many fat children during a time when many people could not afford to put food on the table.  It’s because of what they were eating – carbohydrates and sugar because those were (and still continue to be) the cheapest foods around.

Can this please, I beg you, put to rest the notion of calories in vs. calories out.  If I heard this once through the four hours of my life that I will never get back watching this insanity, I heard it a thousand times. It’s a reason I hate most doctors.  It’s not about calories, it’s about the type of calorie that we consume.  This theory has been largely ignored by the horsemen and the documentary.  They kept saying it over and over again.  It may have been the first time in my life I wanted to damage my television.

Let me explain this again: if you eat sugars and grains, insulin gets released which, while regulating blood sugar, also regulates fat accumulation.  This is in medical textbooks as to why our cells get fat.  Yet, the 5 horsemen of the apocalypse don’t make the connection that if you have fat cells, you will have fat human beings.  Seems pretty obvious to me; yet, the policies they set in place led to an increased consumption of grains and sugars and guess what, an increase in obesity, diabetes etc.

These foods make us fat.  Whereas fats, proteins and green leafy vegetables do not because these do not cause the same type of insulin reaction in the body.  For all these years, the horsemen have been making policy, promoting the consumption of carbs and sugars and telling us the wrong things – can we blame the population or should we blame the horsemen?

“My doctor told me to go brown,” one woman said in this documentary.  “So, I guess I will be eating brown rice, brown bread and wheat pasta.” What???? What about telling her to eat lean proteins and vegetables? Go brown – that should only be said when watching college football.

Since the mid-1970’s we have been told that the ultimate healthy diet was one rich in fresh fruits and vegetables and that red meat will make us fat, cause colon cancer, and give us a heart attack.  Since then, the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to prove that salt and saturated fat are bad for our health and spent nothing on sugar.

While our calorie content has increased over the last 30 years, of those calories, 25% come from added sugars, 25% from added fats (most of this from soy) and 50% from refined grains, corn starches and wheat.

And guess what, obesity rates remained almost stable up to the mid-1970’s which by the way is when red meat consumption in America peaked and has been dropping steadily ever since.  Since then, and the switch to the USDA enshrined food pyramid where we were told that grains and starches should be the basis of a healthy diet, was the beginning of the obesity epidemic – yet, consistent with what the five horsemen told us to do.

Before I go on, can anyone tell me why Coy from the Atlanta Falcons who appeared on Don’t be Tardy for the Wedding was carrying a Gucci purse. Not hating, just saying. Can anyone say John Travolta?

The show raged about the epidemic in children.  I published Feed Your Kids Well in 1998 – almost 15 years ago. It sold well enough but it didn’t make any best seller lists. I wasn’t asked to be on any major television shows except the View where Meredith Viera essentially scoffed me by saying we can never get our children to eat healthy.  I have hated her ever since.  I know I shouldn’t h8 but she did a great disservice to the community of women that watch her – and she has so many wrinkles on her face, I almost fell into one.

W8/H8 goes on to say that good intake is a learned behavior and that genetics plays a role in the epidemic.  While that may be true to some extent, stop looking for the reason and just admit that you’ve made a grave mistake in what you tell people to eat.  I came from a family who ate good food but the food was all terrible, all of my family members are/were overweigh or obese as was I and I overcame all of it – so enough about genetics and learned behavior – unlearn it and move on.

There were many moving stories on the show and I cried multiple times – not as often as I cried when Glee won nationals – but a lot.  Obese people don’t want to be obese and they know it’s going to kill them but they don’t see they have an option.

Did you know the NIH spends $800 million dollars each year to try to figure out the cause of obesity? I know!!! As if we don’t already know the cause – just fess up already and maybe I’ll forgive you.

$1.5 billion dollars is spent on food marketing to children and all foods that will kill them.  The companies themselves decide what is healthy.  They and the pharmaceutical industry are the only ones that are allowed to self regulate in this country.

For many children, 40 to 50 % of what they consume is consumed at school.  Have you seen what they serve at school?  And, 90% of the parents thought the food was healthy!  So, the horsemen decided to come up with a new child nutrition act which doubles the amount of fruit served as breakfast – when studies tell us eggs keep you fuller longer and cause you to eat less throughout the day; but yes, go sugar – oops, I mean fruit.

This act also allows French fries to be counted as a vegetable, encourages whole grains and reduces sodium and saturated fat to less than 10% and allows only fat free milk.  Again, my head, like Linda Blair in the Exorcist is spinning and pea soup is spewing as I am writing this. Kids need fat.  Not only is it satisfying but their brains are still developing and does someone need to remind these people that the brain is about 70% fat.

One doctor went on to say that with food, you have to change your behavior every day because you have to eat.  Yes, and his point was…….  Ex-smokers do it; Alcoholics do it, even educated fleas do it – let’s fall in love.  But with healthy food choices please.

Healthy food is more expensive but do you know why? The profit margin for soft drinks is 90% and for produce – 10%.  We spend $40 billion per year in subsidies for corn, wheat, sugar and soy.  50% of all farmland is corn and soy.  Because of these subsidies, food is no longer something that feeds up but it is a commodity to be traded and exchanged on a stock market.  These businesses don’t care about us, they only care about the bottom line and still, the five horsemen sit back, shake their heads and can’t seem to figure out why we are in the midst of the most troubling epidemic since AIDS or the bubonic plaque or I don’t know – this is probably the worse one ever.  But one thing I do know – if the tobacco industry can be taken on, so can the food industry.

So, who is to blame?  As a nation, we listened to those who were supposed to be protecting our health.  So, I will leave you with Dr. Hilde Bruch who pointed out over 50 years ago that telling people to eat less and exercise more doesn’t work and that the individual shouldn’t be blamed if the advice they followed was wrong.

We were duped! Shame us once, shame on you, shame us twice, shame on us.  Stop listening to the horsemen of the apocalypse – just follow the Hamptons diet – you know you want to and you know you can.

Oh, and can someone please explain to me why every CW show (and by every I mean Gossip Girl and 90210) this season ended with the song, We Are Young? Just saying.

Until next time…….


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