Fed Up

I know that many of you have had the opportunity see the movie Fed Up.  In fact, nearly 100 people came to our community showing of the film at the Red Bicycle a couple weeks ago.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie focuses on the American obesity epidemic and how our modern diet is directly linked to the chronic disease that afflicts approximately 80% of our society as the primary cause of death. 

We've always been told that the solution to weight loss is to eat less and exercise more.  This implies that obesity is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out.  But what if not all calories are created equally?  Obviously exercise is necessary for better health and it should be looked at similar to getting a vital nutrient.  But if you’re trying to exercise yourself out of obesity or excess weight while eating the wrong diet, you’re fighting an uphill battle that you will never win.  Modern science and the rules of physiology prove that the quality of the calories ingested is what really matters.  For instance, when you take in a healthy, natural carbohydrate such as a vegetable or most fruits there are calories from sugar.  But those calories are bound to fiber that slows the release of sugar into the bloodstream thereby keeping insulin levels low and allowing those calories to be burned more slowly.  This is normal physiology from healthy food.  However, when you ingest the sugar that’s in junk food such as soda or candy or even a processed carbohydrate such as white bread, snack foods, or most cereals, there’s not much fiber there.  This causes a large surge of sugar that raises blood sugar, increases insulin, and immediately gets sent to the liver to be stored as cholesterol and fat.  This is unhealthy physiology that leads to obesity and chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and stroke.  It’s all about the sugar including the processed sugars such as high fructose corn syrup.  Believe or not, the same phenomenon happens with the fructose found in fruit juice and even with artificial sweeteners found in diet drinks and foods.  Unfortunately about 80% of the food you find in the grocery store has added sugar or artificial sugars.  As a result, between 1977 and 2000, Americans have doubled their intake of sugar.

Hopefully, this is all impactful information to you, and I could go on.  But how do you make change and how do you get your family to begin cutting the sugar?  The first step is to begin planning your meals in advance and make a real commitment to get back into your kitchen and start cooking real food – this is the stuff that is found on the perimeters of the grocery stores and rarely sold in a cardboard box or plastic bag!  We’re doing a couple other things to help you with this.  First go to our Facebook page titled “Rivertown Fed Up Challenge.”  This site will support/teach you how to eliminate sugar from your diet for 10 days and see what changes you experience.  Secondly, we’re working with North Madison Christian Church to show Fed Up a second time and follow it up with an expert physician who will help teach you how to make change.  This will be happening in the coming months and I’ll share the details once we have everything finalized.