The primary problem with the American diet is that during the past hundred years we have started eating much more animal fat, fewer high-fiber carbohydrate foods (such as whole-grain bread and cereals), and more concentrated, non-nutritive sugar. The carbohydrate foods that we normally eat either have had most of their natural fiber content removed or they are sugar carbohydrates,” which are almost completely without fiber.
I picture food as being one a balance scale – fiber-rich cereals on one end and sugar on the other. In America today sugar weighs far heavier in what we eat then fiber-containing cereals. It should be the other way around. I now think of fiber as being similar to vitamins – and essential element the body continually needs to maintain health.
The human body was designed to function on a diet high in fiber and low in sugar, just as your new car engine was designed to run on gasoline high in octane and low in lead. If you run it on leaded gasoline, the engine will become gummed up and start functioning poorly. In the same way your body will function poorly and deteriorate if you persist in eating a diet that is low in fiber and high in sugar.
It now seems that many of the common diseases and healthy problems we always thought were a natural part of growing older are instead due to the foods we have been eating. This is exciting news, because it means that if we establish new habits of eating we can eliminate many of the diseases always assumed to be part of old age.
Copy typed by Shirley-Ann Pearman
An excerpt from page 808 of “1250 Health-Care Questions Women Ask With Straightforward Answers by an Obstetrician/Gynecologist” (by Joe S. McIlhaney, Jr., M.D. with Susan Nethery)
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