OBESITY BEGINS

Not only did agricultural man add grains, legumes, and milk to his diet, the growth of farming meant he began to live a more sedentary life than had his hunter-gatherer ancestors. This too was great for the development of civilisation. But not without a cost to his body and his health.

By the time the agricultural revolution was in full swing – about four thousand years ago – degeneration had begun in the human body. Men and women shrank in height. Dental decay and malformation of the jaw appeared. Disease epidemics began to shorten natural human lifespan. This time in history marks the beginning of what we nowadays call the diseases of civilisation – and, most important of all, the beginning of obesity.

The institution of regular meals meant that man was obliged to eat more than his body required at the moment of eating so as to tide him over until the next meal. Cereal and grain-based foods which were quick and easy to digest began to flood the body with nourishment he could not make use of at the time of eating. Somehow, somewhere, this surplus had to be stored. As time passed some of the human race developed a tendency to store this excess food in the form of fat. Since the dietary changes had taken place so rapidly from an evolutionary point of view their bodies could not handle them. As centuries passed, we ate more and more of these rapidly assimilated foods. In Venice in the 15th century sugar was refined for the first time. Since then, things have only become worse. Ninety percent of the packaged convenience foods we eat are manufactured using these fast-uptake foods. Meanwhile we grow fatter and fatter. Our modern habits of eating masses of cooked food replete with sugar, cereals, and starchy vegetables makes our bodies assimilate foods so fast that we cannot effectively turn them into usable energy.

Your body's ability to lay down fat is a perfectly normal and necessary strategy for survival. After all, fat has the highest caloric value of any food type. It is the perfect way for our bodies to store food reserves in the smallest possible space. When we eat plenty of food, the body stores away any surplus it does not need at the time. If all works well metabolically, this stored fat is meant to be kept on hand, ready to supply sustenance whenever the body is in need of more food than happens to be available. If it doesn't work well, we get fat.