Excerpt: The Obesity Connection
Obesity is consistently linked to ongoing degenerative disease in adults, but more recent studies are showing that obesity in children has even more far-reaching and dire consequences. Caballero found “while preventive intervention in adult life may reduce risk, this is usually difficult and results are often limited. One example would be obesity. In contrast, interventions early in life, aimed at reducing these early risk factors, could potentially result in major reductions in the incidence of several diseases of adults.” Some researchers are speculating that obesity acts as an inflammatory condition, raising the blood levels of markers like C-reactive protein, which are also associated with cardiovascular disease and other degenerative diseases.
World-wide, both childhood and adult obesity are increasing at alarming rates, but childhood obesity has the potential to be even more devastating since it puts risk factors in place at the same time young bodies are growing and changing. In addition to North America, regions with diverse food sources and lifestyles including Australia, Egypt, Mexico, Europe and Asia are all reporting increases in degenerative disease—particularly type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease—coupled with rapid rises in obesity rates. Many researchers believe the shift away from traditional diets to a higher-fat, sugar-laden “western” diet is the major reason for these changes. In Baja California, Mexican children now consume very low quantities of fruits and vegetables and excessive amounts of high-fat snacks and soft drinks. Ninety-two percent of fifth-graders consume at least one soft drink daily, and most (85 percent) also consume at least one high-fat snack. This potentially deadly combination of high sugar and high fat intake is putting our children directly in harm’s way.
Today, relatively few families in Canada and America can boast garden-fresh produce. Most shoppers must rely on commercial agriculture to meet their daily nutritional needs. Yet, for the last 50 years most commercial farms have been relying on NPK fertilizers to grow their crops. During the late forties, three minerals, nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K), (left over from the World War II armaments industry) were found to produce fine-looking crops. The subsequent use of these nutrients quickly replaced traditional mulching and manuring and, over the next half-century, depleted North American soils of many of the essential micronutrients.
To make things worse, commercial processing of nutrient-deficient foods further depletes their nutritional value. The mass production processes of storing, drying, cooking, freeze drying, extracting and hydrogenating wreak havoc on an already marginal nutrient content. According to Colgan, the processing of cereal grains depletes the magnesium content by 80 percent. Up to 50 percent of the folic acid content in foods is lost through preparation, processing and storage, while commercial milling of cereals depletes the vitamin B6 content by 50 to 90 percent. Store asparagus for a week and 90 percent of its vitamin C is gone; blanch vegetables or fish and up to one-half of their B-complex vitamins and vitamin C content is lost.
Even with the best of intentions and the most careful planning, daily consumption of commercially processed foods grown in nutrient-deficient soils will not provide us with the quality nutrition we will need for a lifetime of optimal health. The simple fact of the matter is, if the nutrients are not in the soil and not in our foods, then they’re not in our bodies.