HEALTHY AT 100 (15 page)

Whole grains clearly protect against cancer. But that’s far from all. Reporting on the Iowa Women’s Health Study in the
American Journal of Public Health
, researchers found that women who ate at least one serving a day of whole grain foods had “substantially lower risk of mortality, including mortality from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other causes” compared to those who ate less.
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That’s from just one serving of whole grains a day. Sadly, though, most Americans don’t get even that. Whole grains make up less than 1 percent of the average American’s diet.

It’s important to understand that while both whole and refined grains are high in carbohydrates, they do not act the same way in the body. Whole grains, you may recall, include all parts of the plant kernel, including the fiber-rich bran and the nutrient-rich germ. Refined grains, on the other hand, have had these nutritious components stripped away during milling. White flour, white rice, and other refined grain products are absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream, causing rapid fluctuations in blood sugar levels. The fiber found in whole grains slows these fluctuations, helps lower cholesterol levels, keeps the digestive tract healthy, and provides many other
advantages. Plus, whole grains also provide important nutrients, including B vitamins, vitamin E, and many other health-promoting substances.

Do you know why they call it Wonder Bread? Because if you eat it, it’s a wonder you’re still alive.

The diets that have enabled the world’s longest-lived peoples to live such healthy lives are very high in whole grains and other healthful carbohydrates. In this way they could hardly differ more from the low-carb regimen advocated by Robert Atkins, M.D., and similar authors. But there is a very real problem the low-carb diets are seeking to correct. The problem is that Western diets include far too many refined carbohydrates. The elder Okinawans and other members of the world’s healthiest peoples rarely if ever eat such foods.

When it comes to eating unwholesome carbs, Americans quite literally take the cake. It’s incredible how many Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Hostess Twinkies and Ding Dongs Americans manage to down each year. The number is in the tens of billions. Nearly a third of all calories in the average American diet today come from refined sugar and corn syrup.

Food manufacturers put such massive amounts of refined sugars in foods for a simple reason—to stimulate appetite. People whose appetites are stimulated eat more food. This is good for sales, but it is also why excess sugar consumption is so strongly linked to obesity. People eating highly refined and processed foods typically consume 25 percent more calories than those on a more natural diet.

I’ve known that the amount of sugar consumed by children and adults in the industrialized Western world today is entirely out of hand. But I hadn’t realized how bad it’s gotten. At present, the average American consumes a staggering total of 53 teaspoons of sugar each day. This amounts to a five-pound bag of sugar every ten days for each man, woman, and child.

Thanks to the roughly $4 billion a year in federal subsidies handed to corn growers in the United States, high-fructose corn
syrup has become so cheap that it can now be found in almost every processed food, even ones like soups and salad dressings that didn’t used to be sweetened. Some studies indicate that corn syrup is even worse than cane sugar. Though that remains to be settled, some things are beyond doubt. A single 12-ounce can of soda pop has about 13 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. Today, the average American drinks about 55 gallons of soda pop a year.
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Ten to 15 percent of all calories consumed by America’s teenage girls come from soft drinks.
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Many U.S. schools today actually have more soft drink machines than water fountains.

What’s so bad about sugar and corn syrup? A lot, if you eat too much. Excess sugar consumption is linked not only to obesity, but also to kidney stones, osteoporosis, heart disease, and dental cavities. Sugar and corn syrup are also addictive—the more you eat, the more you want. Plus, the more sugar and other empty calories you eat, the more other calories you have to eat just to get your minimum daily requirement of vitamins and other nutritional factors.

The result isn’t pretty. We’ve got a lot of overfed and overweight people who are always hungry and are actually undernourished. Despite the excessive number of calories they are eating, their cells are not getting the nutrients they need.

Furthermore, sugar (like white flour) is low in fiber, so not only do you get a lot of calories that provide almost no nutrients, but also, because such carbs are absorbed quickly, you get a blood-sugar spike and an insulin surge, which causes you to gain weight.

And then there are your teeth. Naturally occurring bacteria in your mouth feed on sugar. Within a few minutes of your eating foods high in sugar, bacteria in your mouth produce by-products that bathe your teeth in an acid that eats away at your tooth enamel, leading to cavities and decay.

So essentially, if you want to become malnourished, obese, and toothless, foods high in sugar and corn syrup are your ticket.

Although I’m not a big fan of the low-carb diets, I do recognize that they’ve done good in reducing the amount of refined carbohydrates people eat. As a result of the widespread popularity of these diets, Interstate Bakeries was forced in 2004 to file for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection.
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The company’s foremost products? Twinkies and Wonder Bread.

Sometimes, we don’t realize how valuable our health is until we’ve lost it. This was brought home to me a few years ago when I met a neighbor of my parents’, a man named Marvin Davis. As my dad and I were walking over to Marvin’s house where we had been invited for dinner, my dad mentioned that Marvin was one of the richest men in the world. I later found out that
Forbes
magazine estimated his worth to be $5.8 billion. The oil tycoon was known for buying and selling things like the Twentieth Century–Fox studio, the Pebble Beach golf course, and the Beverly Hills Hotel.

His home, as you might expect, was palatial. One of the first things I noticed was that all the doors, even the doors to the bathrooms, seemed to be double-width. I wondered why…until I met our host. The poor man—poor, obviously, not in wealth, but in health—must have weighed four hundred pounds. He was so large that he apparently could not fit through a normal door, even an oversized one. I couldn’t help but be moved by the pathos of his situation. Here was a man who was so rich he could buy almost anything in the world, yet he was so hugely overweight that he could not go to the bathroom without several attendants to help him.

I don’t think I can adequately describe the feelings I had that evening as I watched Marvin eat multiple servings of steak, lobster, and caviar. As I spoke with him and watched him interact with others, he seemed distracted, burdened, and unhappy. Some might have envied his immense financial fortune, but I found myself feeling sorry for him. I kept remembering something Maurice Sendak said: “There must be more to life than having everything.”

It was hard not to notice the dramatic contrast with the peoples of Abkhasia, Vilcabamba, Hunza, and Okinawa. Lean, light, and happy, they walk with a spring in their step and speak with a lilt in their voice. They eat slowly, give thanks for what they have, never overeat, and are remarkably content. They laugh and joke a lot, and
their eyes sparkle with joy and peace. Though most have little in the way of material possessions, they rarely hoard resources beyond their needs. Instead, they are eager to share what they have with others. In their cultures, it is not the person who accumulates wealth who is esteemed. It is the love in people’s hearts and the wisdom in their lives that counts. It is not how much you have that matters, but how much you give of yourself to others.

No, I did not envy Marvin Davis. Perhaps I was being unfair to him, but to me he seemed to embody something that has gone terribly amiss in modern society. If we can afford it, we buy it; if it tastes good, we eat it. We are very big on consumption.

There is a deep problem with this. If we continue to pursue short-term gratification without regard for the long-term consequences, the results can only be disastrous. Insatiable is not sustainable.

When Marvin Davis died in 2004, the
Los Angeles Times
featured a lengthy front-page article about his life, saying he had been the richest man in Southern California for several decades.
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The article spoke of his buying and selling professional football, basketball, and baseball teams and mentioned some of the other ways he spent and used his billions. Perhaps out of respect, it did not use the word “obesity.”

Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, and this diversity is part of our beauty. Yet modern society can be very cruel to people whose bodies do not fit the cultural ideal. I certainly do not want to add to the suffering that larger people often have to endure in modern culture as a result of their size. No one should ever be ostracized or put down for their weight.

But we need to start talking about the dire health consequences of obesity. The number of Americans who die prematurely each year as a result of being overweight is now rapidly approaching the number who die prematurely from cigarette smoking.
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Obesity now contributes more to chronic illness and healthcare costs than does smoking.
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The Rand Institute equates being obese with aging prematurely by twenty years.
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When researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle studied 73,000 adults aged 50 to 76, they found that obesity was correlated with forty-one different adverse health conditions.
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Some of these conditions are life-threatening, such as heart failure. Others, like high blood pressure, increase the risk of more serious diseases. Still others, including insomnia and chronic fatigue, reduce the quality of life.

Obesity is a serious disease, and it’s becoming an epidemic in modern society. Liposuction is now the leading form of cosmetic surgery in the United States, with nearly half a million operations performed per year. More than half of U.S. physicians are themselves overweight.
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A few weeks ago, when I accompanied a friend to a doctor’s appointment, I found it unnerving that the receptionist must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. Then she sent us in to see the physician. Compared to him, the receptionist was slim.

In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity to be an epidemic, noting that the percentage of American children who are overweight had tripled in the previous twenty-five years. In 2006, the
International Journal of Pediatric Obesity
announced that nearly half the children in the western hemisphere will be obese by 2010. According to James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, “If these trends continue, within a few generations every American will be over-weight.”
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Already, almost two-thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese.
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And the problem is not just an American one. Obesity is increasing today in every country in the world.
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It’s increasing in Alaskan Eskimos, in the Evenki (reindeer herders in Siberia), and in the Walpiri (Australian Aborigines). More than 25 percent of children in Egypt, Chile, Peru, Germany, and Mexico are now obese. Nearly 20 percent of four-year-olds are obese in Zambia and Morocco.
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In Mexico, the average family of five drinks six gallons of Coca-Cola a week, and 65 percent of the population is overweight or obese.
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Dr. Stephan Roessner, president of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, is alarmed. “There is no country in the
world,” he says, “where obesity is not increasing. Even in [developing] countries we thought were immune, the epidemic is coming on very fast.”
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In England, childhood obesity has tripled in the last twenty years. In 2004, a British parliamentary committee examining the obesity epidemic highlighted the death of a three-year-old girl from heart failure brought on by her excess weight. One expert quoted in the report by the House of Commons Health Committee told of children who require ventilator assistance at home for respiratory conditions because of their obesity. The children were “choking on their own fat,” said Sheila McKenzie, M.D.
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The books written by Robert Atkins, M.D., have sold more than twenty million copies in more than twenty languages. When the Atkins diet was at its peak in the first six months of 2004, no fewer than 1,864 new “low-carb” products were launched in the United States, including low-carb pasta and low-carb gummy bears.
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Every sector of the food industry, from Heinz ketchup to Michelob beer, was jumping on the low-carb bandwagon. Kraft brought forth low-carb Oreo cookies. Round Table Pizza presented a low-carb pizza crust. Even W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the seed seller, was ranking their vegetable seeds according to carbohydrate content in order to help customers choose which seeds to plant in order to grow “low-carb” foods in their home gardens. One 2004 survey found that half the U.S. population was either on a low-carb diet, had tried a low-carb diet, or planned to try a low-carb diet in the future.
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People can be desperate to lose weight, and many have looked to low-carb diets to accomplish this ardently longed-for result. When people do lose weight on these diets, it’s largely because they are consuming fewer calories, owing primarily to reduced consumption of unhealthful refined carbohydrates. In the short term, these diets can actually cause more weight loss for the same number of calories consumed than most other low-calorie diets. Proponents of these diets call this “the metabolic advantage” of a low-carb diet. On a severely carbohydrate-restricted diet, the human body has to expend energy
(burn calories) to manufacture carbohydrate for tissues that absolutely require glucose, like the brain and the red blood cells. Thus, extra calories are expended without exercise.