Friday 17 October 2008

The Basics: Diabetes and Prediabetes and Why They Are on the Rise - 7

Under Beating Diabetes

Why Type 2 Diabetes Is Becoming More Common


If all of human history was represented by a twenty-four-hour day, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be the last twelve minutes of that day. Yet in that blink of a geological eye, our lifestyle has changed more than in the previous hundred thousand years. The implications of our current environment are still playing out, but we are already seeing adaptations to out new industrialized lifestyle that aren't necessarily good. Simply put, we're moving our bodies less, eating mote, and eating more of the wrong foods.

We're Moving Less: From Farm Worker to Couch Potato

The industrial revolution changed the type and amount of work we perform. Before the industrial revolution, most of us did labor-intensive, physically taxing work. Increasingly, machines have reduced the hard physical work we have to do. "I'm going to work" has a very different meaning now from the meaning it had one hundred years ago. Fewer and fewer of us perform physical labor, and more and more of us sit at desks for most of the day.

The clearest example of this shift in the work we do is in agriculture. In the 1700s, more than 90 percent of the U.S. workforce finned to grow their own food. Two hundred years later, automated, mechanized manufacturing has reduced the number of people working on farms to about 1 percent of the workforce. Instead of finning, more people became factory workers, building the tractors and other farm equipment that would streamline finning, making it more efficient and a less physically taxing way of life. Not only was a smaller fraction of the population engaged in farming, but farming had changed. The hard-featured, gaunt firmer of the Grant Wood painting was replaced, at least to some extent, by an overweight firmer driving an air-conditioned combine and single-handedly harvesting many acres of com or wheat in a day. Although the fraction of the population working as farmers in the United States has decreased by more than 90 percent since the founding of the nation, these farmers now raise enough food to feed much of the world.

Labor-saving devices-tractors, forklifts, assembly lines, riding mowers, snow blowers, vacuum cleaners, and paint sprayers-have made not only farming but all of our physical activities less demanding. Granted, these advances have left us with more time for leisure activity. But the vast majority of us are not playing more tag football, planting more tulip bulbs, or taking more walks around the block after dinner. Instead, we're watching television, playing video games, and surfing the Internet. Sedentary activities occupy far more hours of the day for most people than physical ones do.

A recent analysis of the National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS) paints a clear but startling picture of our culture. The NHAPS surveyed 7,515 adults between October 1992 and September 1994. Study volunteers were asked to record everything they did and for how long. Not surprisingly, people spent the most hours sleeping or napping (about eight hours per day on average). But during waking hours, the top six activities (based on the number of hours people spent doing them and energy burned) were driving a car, doing office work (filing, typing), witching TV or movies (at home or in a theater), taking care of children (feeding, bathing, dressing), doing activities while sitting quietly, and eating. On any given day, only 14 percent of the population spent any lime performing leisure-time physical activity (for example, swimming or planned "exercise").

While activity levels vary from person to person, it's clear that out world discourages movement. In addition to changes in the workplace and at home, schools have scaled back physical education programs (daily participation in high school physical education classes dropped from 42 percent in 1991 to 29 percent in 1999). Americans spend more time at work, albeit in sedentary jobs, when compared to other developed countries, which puts the squeeze on time that could be spent in physical endeavors. And between 1990 and 2000 the number of people who commuted for more than thirty minutes per day increased from roughly 20 percent to nearly 34 percent. Even when we do have free time, we tend to use it passively. According to NHAPS, adults spend nearly three hours per day watching TV or a movie, and nearly an hour and a balf each day on "activities performed by sitting quietly." As a culture, we're growing roots to the sofa.

We're Eating More than We Need to: From Famine to Buffets

What Is a Calorie
The terms no carb, low carb, low fat, end high protein have all but elbowed the word calorie out of our vocabulary. In fact, few people even know what It means. A calorie is a measure of heat and reflects energy quantity or expenditure. The amount of energy contained in food is expressed in calories. Similarly, the amount of heat given off by your body is expressed as calories expended or "burned." Using this common term for heat, or energy allow us to calculate the balance between the amount of energy contained in food we eat and the amount of energy that we expend doing specific activities—or just lying around.



Because of the mechanization of farming, food is more plentiful and more affordable than ever before. For example, fish production and the available supply of vegecables per capita have doubled in the past thirty years, exceeding population growth. Despite the abundance of fresh produce, the fraction of total calories people derive from dietary fat and the consumption of saturated fat, both of which are associated with heart disease, remain highest in North America and Europe.

While the availability of large quantities of food is obviously not in itself a had thing, it has set the stage-or the table-for ovemutrition. That is, most of us take in more calories than we burn. Not only is there plenty to eat, hut we don't have to expend much energy to obtain a meal. The farmer's lifestyle, where every calorie consumed was balanced by a similar expenditure of energy to grow the food, has all but disappeared.

In other words, it isn't just the fast-food burger joint that's die problem. Most of the inconvenience and much of the work required to obtain and prepare food have been reduced. Very few of us hunt or farm for our next meal. Even fewer have to build and maintain a fire to cook, pump water by hand, or even wash dishes by hand. Supermarkets have made grocery shopping easier. One-stop shopping often includes conveyor belts that deliver the food into the trunks of our cars (or home-delivery services that bring food right to our doors). Freezers with large storage capacity decrease the frequency of shopping, microwave cooking makes food preparation faster and easier, and dishwashers make cleaning up nearly effortless. Vending machines and convenience stores also make access to food incredibly easy and require virtually no expenditure of calories. We no longer have to work-meaning to perform physical labor-to obtain or prepare our food.

But that's only half of this story. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are eating more than ever (see Table 1.2). Where do these excess calories come tram? It's not just what we eat but how much. Serving sizes have increased, both in the home and especially when eating out. Prepared foods such as Hungry-Man-sized TV dinners (a dangerous combination if ever there was one) and "single-serving" portions of prepared foods, such as soups, have almost doubled in size. Over the past twenty years, the size and caloric content of the average egg, bagel, muffin, preformed hamburger patty, and doughnut have grown by 20 to 50 percent. We have become accustomed to giant, economy-size packaging and portions.

On average, Americans eat one in three daily meals out of the home, and competition for customers has resulted in a virtual war to provide large quantities of relatively inexpensive food in fast-food and other restaurants. High-calorie meals abound in fast-food restaurants, an American invention of the 1950s. Hamburgers have become cheeseburgers, double cheeseburgers, double-bacon cheeseburgers, and "truck burgers" (with a fried egg on top). Steak restaurants offer sixteen-, twenty-four-, and even thirty-two-ounce steaks and prime ribs. A typical restaurant prime rib provides 3,410 calories-2,200 of them (or 65 percent) from fat. That's nearly all the calories you would need to survive nicely for two days. All-you-can-eat buffets, pizzas with cheese injected into the crust that come with a pastry dessert as a freebie on the side, and ninety-six-ounce sodas (which exceed the volume of the normal human stomach) are but a few other examples. (See Table 1.3)

We're Eating the Wrong Foods

Not only are we eating too much food, but too many meals contain the wrong kinds of food. Processed, high-fat, low-fiber foods with refined sugars are inexpensive and easy to quickly grab almost anywhere. Unfortunately, they make up a large part of the American diet and are loaded with saturated and trans fats, both of which are associated with atherosclerosis and heart disease. Even single-serving packages of potato chips, nuts, and cheese crackers routinely have 250 to 400 calories with 35 to 50 percent derived from fat. On a recent four-hour crosscountry flight, I was given a snack box that contained a 0.5-ounce bag of potato chips, 1.35 ounces of cheese crackers, a 0.5-ounce box of raisins, a 0.7-ounce package of cookies, and a chocobte bar. This totaled 500 calories-45 percent from fat (twenty-five grams of fat, six grains of which were saturated) and 48 percent (sixty grams) from carbohydrate. My total energy expenditure during the flight amounted to approximately 350 calories (1 sat in my seat with no physical activity other than the "work" of changing the movie).

Many of us eat fast food at least several times a week. Table 1.3 gives you a hint of what you're really getting for your dollar.

Source: David M. Nathan, M.D. and Linda M. Delahanty, M.S., R.D, Beating Diabetes: The First Complete Program Clinically Proven to Dramatically Improve Your Glucose Tolerance, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (2005)

1 comments:

Anonymoussaid...

top [url=http://www.001casino.com/]casino bonus[/url] brake the latest [url=http://www.casinolasvegass.com/]free casino[/url] autonomous no store perk at the best [url=http://www.baywatchcasino.com/]no deposit reward
[/url].

 
© Copyright by Improve-U  |  Template by Blogspot tutorial