Most Likely Not!
Submitted by LeAnna Sheehan - Sheehan Personal Training
In the book The Pleasure Trap by Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, they cite the fact that overweight wild animals are non-existent. These same animals have an abundance of food resources and can eat as much as they want, so why don’t they gorge themselves?
Maybe it's because their primary meals don't consist of prime rib, pasta primavera, chicken parmegian, and scallops covered in cheese. Humans have become conditioned to eat processed and massively laced fat foods, and they taste good! The only problem with this is that these foods that taste so good are also the ones which are creating disease and making this country the unhealthiest that it has ever been. The foods that have been shown to greatly improve our health and reverse such diseases as cancer and heart disease are also the ones that people seem to eschew. While animals have the opportunity to gorge themselves and eat until they explode, they do not. Yet most Americans know the dangers of eating the above mentioned diets, yet still indulge in chemically laden and fat filled foods with reckless abandon. Why is that?
In the book The Pleasure Trap by Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, they cite the fact that overweight wild animals are non-existent. These same animals have an abundance of food resources and can eat as much as they want, so why don’t they gorge themselves?
They don’t because of the “Law of Satiation” which states: In a natural setting of caloric abundance, animals will consume the correct amount of food needed for optimum function.[1]
What this means is that there are millions of humans that struggle to count their calories and constantly battle to keep their weight under control, but there are billions of animals that can do it effortlessly. Today it is estimated that more than one half of Americans are either obese or significantly overweight. The number of people classified as obese has doubled just in the last 20 years.[2] It doesn’t seem to make sense, unless you examine the types of food that are eaten today in the Standard American Diet.
Over the past one hundred years, there has been an exponential increase in not only overweight Americans, but in the disease suffered by them. If all animals have an innate mechanism that signals the body that enough sustenance has been eaten for optimal function, then why isn’t it working for humans?
Despite the misguided speculation of “diet experts” and the over 25,000 books that have been written on them, the solution is simple. Our modern diet is artificially concentrated, and this artificial concentration causes our internal calorie counting machinery to make errors. Specifically, our calorie counting machinery consistently underestimates the caloric value of artificially concentrated foods, and this inexorably leads to overeating.[3] Our machinery is breaking down and causing our disease-fighting and health creating cells to end up looking like a scrapyard.
The diets of most Americans are artificially concentrated with high-fat animal products, oils, sugar, and mostly refined carbohydrates. People regularly eat butter, eggs, burgers, ice cream, fried food, fast food, and other processed foods which have chemicals and high fat percentages vastly greater than what would be found in a “natural” diet. Fat is always calorically concentrated so it has a greater caloric density. It is this unnatural concentration that causes mistakes by our calorie counting machinery.[4] This in turn leads to overeating, obesity, and disease.
