ALL CHANGE

To recap: The most significant change to human diets in two million years began with the agricultural revolution, when man went from a carbohydrate-poor to a carbohydrate-rich diet, as cereals and quickly digestible starches entered our diet. The more that these carbohydrates became refined in the past three hundred years the more problems they have caused us, not only in terms of burgeoning obesity worldwide, but also in the development of the chronic degenerative diseases of civilization.

More recently, the overwhelming increase in sugars and fructose – especially in the form of corn syrup – found in so many convenience foods has become a major contributor on both counts.

In the eighteenth century we ate between 10 and 20 pounds of sugar per person per year. Today we consume between 150 pounds and 212 pounds per capita. Yet, the vast majority of obesity researchers continue to insist that fat accumulation is a mere question of a "calories-in-calories-out" situation demanding little more than will power and regular exercise to sort out. Meanwhile, according to World Health Organization statistics, more than a billion adults throughout the world are now overweight. Obesity rates have "risen threefold or more since 1980 in some areas of North America, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, Australasia, and China."

There is an important observation attributed to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It is highly appropriate to the thousands of obesity research projects which remain unsuccessful in establishing the cause and a cure for obesity as a result of the unfounded "calories-in-calories out" assumption on which they continue to be based: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

It is time for mainstream science to move beyond the first and second stages which Schopenhauer describes if it is to bring to an end the expanding obesity epidemic plaguing the world as well as the chronic illness and deep suffering it engenders.