Our Food Habits are in Disarray

The average American's diet is out of control.

Walk into any restaurant and you will see the kinds of food we love as a nation – lots of pasta, red meat and sugary sweets. The American way of eating is very self-indulgent and unhealthy.

This is a very unnatural method of food consumption. It's a culture of extremes with extreme indulgence on one end and surprising starvation on the other end. Walk into any bookstore and you will find the shelves stacked with diet books. This is as good a sign is any that we as a country want a quick fix solution and are ready to accept fat diets and fat weight-loss schemes in the desperate hope to lose weight.

Something has to give.

The fact is, we need to pay more attention to the way we eat, what we eat, and the amount we eat otherwise we will always retain the tag of the fattest country in the world.

Everything begins and ends with diet. We have complete control over diet and this is a tremendous opportunity to improve our lifestyle. What you are about to learn will shock and surprise you because the way we eat today is not the way we were meant to eat food. As Americans we have done a phenomenal job to completely mess up our diet. It's time to go back to the basics.

Research demonstrates that genetically we are not even meant to eat a vast majority of the foods we now consider natural or healthy. Pasta, for example, is considered a refined carbohydrate and too much of it throws our insulin out of balance. In fact, many foods suggested to us as part of a healthy, balanced diet are actually completely foreign to our genetic makeup. Our diet today has changed so much over the past few decades that many of the so-called ‘healthy, natural foods' may have directly contributed to most of our ‘modern-day diseases'.

Case in point: Meat consumption in the United States coupled with inactivity.

Our ancestors were hunters and scavengers. From a physiological (functional) and aesthetic (visual) point of view, we are almost the same as our ancestors. We have the same bones muscles and internal organs as our ancestors. However we have several chronic illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and cancer they never had.

Why? The most popular notion is that the vast majority of our existence on this planet, man has lived as a hunter-gatherer. Nomadic people in small groups lived and fed completely off their surrounding environment and they were good at it. Fossil studies show our ancestors to be lean, strong and muscular well into their 80s and 90s! They were very active, robust people that covered hundreds of miles weekly for food. Hunting, running, digging, climbing were habitual, daily activities. We survived this way (as hunter-gatherers) through six ice ages. This was more than a primitive existence. It was in fact a very sophisticated method of survival, one we lack in today's times.

Basically, we have been eating meat a long time, but the difference between us and our ancestors is that we barely move our behinds compared to them and we eat a lot more processed meat filled with saturated fat and cholesterol.

We are eating too much meat, exercising too little and storing too much fat.