Interestingly, an essential nutrient, fat, has become the scourge of the Western industrialized world. There are probably thousands of researchers with medical or scientific backgrounds, but none have “figured out” how Westerners can avoid getting fat.
Many in the western world assume that there will eventually be a pill to solve our excessive body fat problem, just like there is a pill for almost everything else, and weight loss is 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 concerned 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.
Currently, there are numerous diets that claim to solve the “problem of being overweight,” but each seems to work only for some people and not for others. Many diets require willpower that most of us do not 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 simply become acceptable as part of the human condition.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein … “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Perhaps instead of banging our heads against the wall of competitive dieting, we should seek a society that does not have the problem and has never had it.
Chongqing Municipality of China, with 34 million inhabitants, is known by many titles … City of beautiful women … Mountain city … City without bicycles … 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 Cornell University’s Dr. Colin Campbell’s research in the famous “China Study” revealed that they eat more calories a 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 people to be overweight and obese 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 the other cities. However, the traditional diet and lifestyle resulted in a lean and healthy population that would not understand our inability to avoid weight gain.
I wouldn’t say I understand why the traditional Chongqing diet results in lean 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 fat and eat meat and / or poultry at almost every meal. Almost all western diets advise us to avoid carbohydrates or saturated fat, but looking at the people of Chongqing, this advice becomes suspect. It would seem that the “overweight problem” we have in the West needs to be reexamined, as it seems that we have gone the wrong way.
