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Evolutionary approach to weight
27/09/2007 UK Daily Telegraph
William Leith reviews Waistland: the (R)evolutionary Science behind our Weight and Fitness Crises by Deirdre Barrett At the start of this sensible book about the "weight and fitness crisis" in America, the Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett tells us some shocking things. By 1995, she says, two-thirds of Americans were overweight, hundreds of thousands were dying fat-related deaths, being overweight was people's most common gripe and obesity was poised to overtake smoking as the biggest cause of preventable death. All of this, she says, accounted for $99 billion in medical costs. What's more shocking is that, as she points out, in the decade since then, things have got much worse - by 2004, people were eating 50 per cent more fast food, and the annual medical bill had risen to $117 billion. The problem, in other words, is bad, and it's getting worse, and we can't seem to stop it. So why does fattening food - sugar, starch and fat itself - have such a grip on us? The answer, says Barrett, lies in the study of evolution. As animals, we are genetically almost identical to our Stone Age ancestors. We live in advanced societies, with supermarkets and cars and lifts, but we are built to be hunter-gatherers. We are programmed to seek out fat, sugar, starch and salt, because, in the Stone Age, these things were hard to come by. When they turn up in abundance, our bodies, for the most part, can't say no. She tells us lots of interesting things about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who immediately preceded the first farmers. The point about farming, she says, is that, although it makes populations bigger and tribes more powerful, it's not necessarily healthier for the individual. Rest of article he http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...7/bobar122.xml Book he http://www.amazon.com/Waistland-evol...1089117&sr=8-1 |
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