Top 5 Reasons Why North Americans Are Getting Fatter
By Charles Poliquin
1. Thanks to “cereal” mass murderer Ancel Keyes, the man behind the cholesterol scare, saturated fats were falsely demonized. People were told that everything with fat in it was evil. Of course people still have to eat, so they replaced nutritious foods such as eggs with highly processed sugar laden cereals.
2. Portion size is climbing constantly. According to Sugar Shock, the original Hershey candy bar was 0.6 ounces in 1908, while current bars range from 1.6 to 8 ounces. The book also points that serving size of Coke have tripled since the1950s.
3. Kids are far more inactive than ever. Television watching hours used to be a far better predictor of obesity than obese parents or dietary habits. Now the trend is that the Internet is replacing TV watching. The average teenager in the province of Quebec in Canada, surfs the Net 32 hours a week!
4. Their portion sizes are far superior to European ones. My European students always say how surprised they are at servings sizes in American restaurants. Psychologist Paul Rozin, Ph.D. and his colleagues point out that anything that contains sugar in the U.S. is significantly larger; candy bars and soda portions are respectivally typically 41% and 52% larger in Philadelphia than in Paris.
5. The Canadian and US governments preach high grain consumption. So, compliant people will eat 6 to 12 portions of grains a day, coming from bagels, breads, boxed cereals, and pasta. Most of it being the cheap, highly processed kind.