It is interesting that an essential nutrient, fat, has become a first for the industrialized Western world. There are probably thousands of researchers with medical or scientific training, but none have “discovered” how we Westerners can avoid getting fat.
Many in the Western world assume that there will eventually be a pill to solve our excess body fat problem, just like there is a pill for just about everything else, weight loss being one of the few exceptions.
The accumulation of body fat is a complex problem and can affect your health to different degrees. Are we motivated to lose weight to appear more attractive to potential partners or are we worried that excess fat will negatively affect our health? We all know that heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some cancers are directly related to excess body fat.
There are now numerous diets that claim to solve the “overweight problem,” but each seems to work for only some people and not others. Many diets require a willpower that most of us don’t have. In general, however, no particular diet has worked for most people, as overweight and obese people in North America are so common that they have just become acceptable as part of the human condition.
Paraphrasing Albert Einstein… “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Perhaps instead of banging our heads against the competitive diet wall, we should look for a society that doesn’t have the problem and never has.
The Chinese municipality of Chongqing, with a population of 34 million, is known by many titles… The City of Beautiful Women… The Mountain City… The City Without Bicycles… The City of Fog . The interesting thing is that overweight people are very rare and you could go six months without seeing an obese person. Even more interesting is that research by Dr. Colin Campbell of Cornell University, in the famous “China Study,” revealed that they eat more calories per day than Americans. That’s right… the world’s thinnest people eat more calories a day than the world’s fattest people.
The westernization of China is causing more and more overweight and obese people in Beijing and Shanghai, the two most westernized cities. Judging by the number of American fast food chains and bakeries that have popped up in Chongqing in recent years, they won’t be far behind those other cities. However, the traditional diet and lifestyle resulted in a lean, healthy population that would not understand our inability to prevent weight gain.
I don’t pretend to understand why the traditional Chongqing diet results in slim bodies without excess fat because their diet seems counterintuitive. Although they eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits in much larger quantities than we do in the West, they also eat carbohydrates, mainly rice and noodles. Also, they don’t avoid saturated fats and eat meat and/or poultry for almost every meal. Almost all Western diets advise us to avoid carbohydrates or saturated fats, but looking at the people of Chongqing, this advice becomes suspect. It would seem that the “overweight problem” that we have in the West needs to be re-examined as it seems that we have been on the wrong track.