Why We Are Fat: It’s Taco Night at Arriba’s!

I have been reading Gary Taubes’ new low carb book Why We Get Fat, as I have started up my low carb diet again. There were some interesting quotes. 

In 1968, George McGovern, a U.S. senator, chaired a series of congressional hearings in which impoverished Americans testified to the difficulty of supplying nutritious meals to their families on limited incomes. But most of those who testified, as McGovern later recalled, were “vastly overweight.” This led one senior senator on his committee to say to him, “George, this is ridiculous. These people aren’t suffering from malnutrition. They’re all overweight.”

This is often the way we look at things. We see the "obvious" and do not stop to ask is it obvious? Taubes suggests that a high carbohydrate diet consisting of cheap foods will lead to obesity. The body will, when offered too many carbohydrates, put fat into the cells, even as it does this it will not nourish the rest of the body. There is an interesting variety of rat that genetically will store fat even when the researchers are starving them. When they die from this "experiment" they look obese.  

A Pima is Undergoing a Test To See How Fat He IsThe powers that be have run this same experiment on the Pima Indians of Arizona. When this tribe came in contact with the white race they were thin, lean, and healthy. But they lost their traditional foods and had to rely on the "generosity" of their conquerors, and the immediate result was one the the highest rates of diabetes among any group, and great obesity. They ate the food that the Bureau of Indian Affairs gave them or they starved. 

Why did this happen? Once  Again I quote from Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About it. 

With the California gold rush, the relative paradise of the Pima came to an end and, with it, their affluence. Anglo-Americans and Mexicans began settling in large numbers in the region. These newcomers—“some of the vilest specimens of humanity that the white race has produced,” wrote Russell—hunted the local game near to extinction, and diverted the Gila River water to irrigate their own fields at the expense of the Pimas’.

While being overweight may be a sign of American prosperity, the obesity of the poor is actually a sign of the opposite. Click here for another blogger's view of why the Pima people became fat. 

On a personal level what I am going to do is try to make sure I eat my vegetables—4 cups a day. I know that is a lot, and as much as I might wish it, bread and potatoes do not count. Since vegetables are not usually on the top of my ideal food list, it will be difficult. It will be particularly difficult to get any vegetables into my daughter. The salads I am currently eating every day (Day two so far … HaHa) puts me at about 40% of my goal.

Tonight dinner will be particularly difficult. It is taco night at Arriba's! Lettuce is a vegetable after all. 

Friday I will talk about the Pimas again. Something in the world affairs area that is "obvious," until you think about it.