Dr. Lee on Food, Disease and Obesity

Food For Thought: 9/6/18.

Diabetes: Dr. Lee, 1956

“Diabetes was practically unknown amongst the American Indian 50 years ago and the ordinary inhabitants of countries like rural China and rural India. It only used to occur in their wealthy citizens who live on the Western type of diet.  The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Joslin), reports that while diabetes was the twenty-seventh cause of death in 1900, today it ranks close to third, after cancer and cardiovascular disease.”

It’s been 62 years since Dr. Lee made this statement in a public presentation, hoping his message would be understood. Both China and India were primarily agrarian culture 62 years ago, and both of these cultures were predominantly raising their own food and living on a natural organic diet at the time. As times have changed and the population has become more affluent, their diet has changed and obesity, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease have increased and become one of their major concerns.

Thus, several decades later, Dr. Lee’s point has proven all to true, because governments are influenced by dollars. One look at the food pyramid should explain the problem.

“Madness,” they say, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” In 1977, the U.S. federal government began officially recommending that its citizens eat more carbohydrates and less fat, prompting one popular nutritionist to quip, “I don’t trust the government to do government, why would I trust it to do nutrition?”

Unaware that the decision was based on no conclusive evidence, Americans dutifully complied, and in the past 30 years we have dramatically increased the percentage of calories we eat as carbohydrates and decreased the percentage we eat as fat.

At the same time some other interesting trends—and by interesting I mean alarming and disturbing—have developed.