"It's fast food outlets - supplying us with fatty foods" "Our thin-obsessed society is putting all sorts of pressure on even slightly overweight folks" "The weight loss industry is to blame - after all if everyone was slim - they would go out of business"

Some will simply blame overweight person - making generalizations and attaching unhelpful labels to person. "After all" they say, "it's up to us to manage what we eat and how much we exercise".

There is truth in this, but it is too simplistic. Many overweight people have tried desperately to eat 'properly' to manage their weight - yet continue to struggle for years. There are a number of outside forces here that have more of an influence than we realise.

So Who Is To Blame?

The weight loss industry is large, with millions being spent every year by people looking for answers. Like any industry, it has it's share of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. Many manufacturers of diet pills and weight loss supplements are certainly opportunists - rather than looking to treat source (i.e. by eating right), they are trying to treat symptoms. However we have found that most decent commercial weight loss programs have a genuine interest in helping people manage their weight. So it's unfair to cast blame on entire 'industry'.

If we were to start looking for culprits, we might want to cast our eye at food processing industry - that, coupled with savvy marketing experts, has snared us into eating so many kinds of processed foods that going to supermarket is like walking through a nutritional minefield.

Get Them While Their Young

The Center For Science in Public Interest (CSPI) recently conducted a study of magazine "National Geographic for Kids". In 17 recent issues they found 51 ads for junk-foods - including a depiction of one meal that contained 590 calories (remember this is a magazine for children).

Many years ago a certain famous fast food outlet began calling its meals for children "Happy Meals" - creating an emotional response and attachment to certain foods - typically nutritionally poor foods.

Chemical Food and Clever Marketing

So what?

This is a costly, stupid, perhaps health threatening fad.

When I was growing up, I did not understand that biblical quotation of "Man does not live by bread alone", attributed to Moses (old testament, torah) and Jesus (new testament). Well, I understood that message was meant to be "People have spiritual as well as physical needs." But I had no idea how people could live very long on bread. At that time, I was used to spongy white bread with no character.

Somewhere along way, I learned about whole grain breads, and how peasants through centuries had lived mostly on dark breads that Marie Antoinnette would have rejected, with occasional fortifications of cheese, eggs, sometimes meat. Peasants tended to eat vegetables, but knights and nobles often dismissed such as "farmers' fare", preferring lots of meat, alcoholic beverages, pastries. Few people lived long in those days, so statistical studies of life span versus diet were not performed. (Statistics were not well known.)

So I read up on bread recipes, found a few health gurus who argued for blends of whole grain wheat, cornmeal, rye, and soy flour. A fairly recent development is triticale, a long sought hybrid of wheat and rye. Why these blends? It turns out that grains and legumes can provide all balanced protein that we need, without meat. Verrrry interesting! Also, such blends contain valuable dietary fiber.

The prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread", is now explained. Properly made, bread really can be "the staff of life."