Chapter 16
I am hoping that Chapter 16 will stimulate debate and push people into thinking what needs to be done to stop this horrific obesity epidemic. I make some hard-hitting suggestions, while simultaneously saying that they should not actually be seen as radical – I’m merely trying to return humans to eating what we ate before we got too fat to function as human beings.
I could debate on either side of the fence the role of government. On the one hand I naturally welcome government that intervenes as little as possible and lets individuals run their own lives. I could argue, therefore, that government should stop all public health advice and bow out and leave us to our own devices. However, we cannot escape the fact that public health messages have been given out since the change in dietary advice 30 years ago. The government started this obesity epidemic, so perhaps it is only right that government cleans up its mess and leads the U-turn back to our pre-1980 diet advice. For me, the government route has two additional advantages:
1) It would speed up the change process dramatically;
2) It would force government off the fence to show if they are on the side of public health or on the side of the food and drink industry – they can’t be on both.
I say in this chapter what I think will happen, rather than what would save the most lives the quickest – (immediate and unequivocal government leadership back to real food). I think that change will happen with a bottom up evolution of enlightened individuals. The sensible ones will realise that nature can feed us best and will eat nature’s produce. The gullible ones and the processed food addicts will likely continue to eat man-made food and will suffer obesity and various ailments as a result.
There are some shocking anecdotes about childhood obesity in this final chapter. It is bad enough that government has used 400 million citizens as an experiment to see what happens if we base our meals on carbohydrates. That children, our next generation, have been used as guinea pigs is unforgivable.
Chapter 16 leads into the summary – six pages of pulling all the evidence together with no pulled punches. Just a flowing summary of everything shared in the book – hopefully leading you to become so convinced that your only thought at the end is – what can I do to stop this? Harness that thought and join the growing bandwagon to return ourselves and our fellow humans to eating what we have evolved to eat.
“If we have been eating real food for 24 hours, agriculture gave us large scale access to carbohydrates four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the past five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for the obesity epidemic or any modern disease…”
Zoë Harcombe