Obesity follows Western culture's influence around the world

Sunday, November 09, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: junk food, obesity, nutrition

They say obesity follows the golden arches. In every city where McDonalds appears, it seems, the population begins to get fatter. It's no coincidence, of course: fast food is rich in calories, loaded with saturated fat, and high in refined carbohydrates. It all adds up to excess body fat.

This study shows that even New Zealand isn't immune from the effects of junk food. It seems that the demand for weight loss products, supplements, drugs or services will soon be nearly global.

Even Asia, a region known for healthy, traditional diets and a healthy populace, is affected by the Western diet. Cities in China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea now boast KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and a long list of restaurants serving foods and drinks that add to the growing obesity problem.

If you take a perfectly healthy community that has never known Western food and introduce breads, pastries, sweets, hamburgers, and other processed food items to that community, they will be stricken with our modern diseases (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.) in a single generation.

That's all it takes: serve a healthy population Western food, and they suddenly become diseased with all the popular diseases that seem to baffle researchers in the Western hemisphere. But it's no secret: the cause of your disease is your food, plain and simple.

It's the groceries with all the metabolic disruptors like hydrogenated oils, refined sugars, artificial colors and cancer-causing chemicals like sodium nitrite. It's the junk food like potato chips, nacho chips, ice cream and candy. And it's the fast food restaurants serving sugar water (Coke and Pepsi) alongside greasy burgers. Put it all together and you get every modern disease in the book.

There's a fascinating book detailing all this, called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, a dentist. It's a highly recommended read if you really want to know the truth about the link between foods and disease.