jopar said:
An interesting fact, Friday it was announced that the average female waist measurement has increased by 6 inch's in the last 60 years!
Now if we look at how life has changed in this time spam.. Several things stand out
More food and easier available!
More time and labour saving gadgets
Easier availability of personal and easier access to public transport
Food..
Yes having a better access to a good diet is a very good thing.. But several factors which make this a double edge sword.
In bygone years, your diet was based around a seasonal availability..
Now wonder why, Starchy carbs, tend to be more abundant in autumn/early winter when you need to keep the body warm, and food is sparse.. Where foods that are less dense in carbs are freely available in spring/summer months!
Another factor
Processed foods, these tend to be higher in carbs and a lot easier to buy, cook and enjoy as snacks or meals with ease..
Another factor
Foods that once where consider treats are now everyday items!
Such as fizzy drinks, Chocolate and high sugary foods, all used to be reserved for high days and holidays
Labour saving Gadgets and Transport
In bygone years we burnt of a lot of energy but simple everyday tasks which had to be done... Even in industry the physical work is carried out or lessened by a gadget or two!
So it's a case of turning our perceptions around foods back a bit..
With teaching, moderation in everything is good, too much of one thing is bad!
And yes encouraging exercise to replace the manual labour we used to do..
But if you were talking to a Vegan
They will say, if you want to prevent T1, T2, Cancers and all sorts of things is to fully a Vegan diet as all our ill's are because we ate animal products!
This represents, to me, everything that is wrong - people desperately trying to prove the hypothesis by matching anecdotal evidence.
I am 55 years old
I am 5' 6"
I am classed as obese by my weight
my current wrist measurement is 6 1/2 inches - at my slimmest (9st) my wrist was 5 1/2 demonstrated by a bangle bought for my 21st
according to BBC Health:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/tools/
Waist to hip ratio is increasingly being used by doctors in preference to BMI as a better measurement of the risk of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Work out your ratio with our online tool.
I did … this is the result:
Ratio 0.80
This ratio is
Good
this is better than average - but based on my height and weight this is total rubbish I just happen, genetically, to have inherited a 'curvy' shape
Nobody mentions that if your thigh measures 27” you’re probably in the ****
In bygone years my mother didn't take her washing to the river nor did she use a copper and wringer and my father didn't work in the fields, he was a policeman - there was a lot of stress in their lives, WW2 bombings, babies who died before reaching 5
We were a relatively slender though not a particularly active family (though I did walk to school and back four times a day) who ate potatoes year round, mother occasionally made cakes and on pocket money day I spent mine on chocolate.
Until the age of 14 I never knew that people went ‘on diets’
Then the crazy started .. all the girls in my Jackie mag were like pans people, bridgitte bardot was a sex kitten – everyone I knew with a few exceptions was trying vainly to ‘look’ like someone else. It wasn’t just about diets, it was dying your hair, false eyelashes and for those flatter fronted girls, well they had to wait a while before twiggy saved them. We had to have flared trousers, everyone must remember the kids who either didn’t earn or who’s parents wouldn’t cough up, turning up with their own design flares, jeans split to the knee with random material inserted for the ‘flare’
Pressures on kids became more onerous – yet we had no clear education. My mother wouldn’t have known a carbohydrate if it had slapped her face, she just knew that she had to put food on the table and balance her budget.
Biology may have touched on one or two areas and Home Ec taught you how to make rock cakes – but pretty much, that was it.
I grew up in a world burgeoning with choice and gadgets with little sense of what to do to make ‘right’ choices.
Industries eager to make a profit used advertisements to blind and bewilder us
There is one I love at the moment for some yoghurty thing .. opening scene girl with mussed up, dry uncombed hair. Second shot, girl spooning yoghurty thing into mouth, third shot, girl spins round, has shiny perfect hair, makeup and a bright smile – cut to product brand. There is no dialogue saying eat this and you’ll change from an unkempt unhealthy looking girl to ‘miss gorgeous’ but the message is there nonetheless
Remember Marlboro man – tempted us all to smoke ‘cos it was cool, even though it tasted vile, made us cough, smelly and broke.
These companies have a vested interest to sell us their product – do they care about us? No is what they say or infer true – Probably Not
Did the author of the cabbage soup, the beetle and mealy grub diet make loads of money – yep
Why, because they sold us a dream (a yoghurt if you like) – these books are works of fiction but in the absence of scientific information we turned them into laws and the authors into guru’s
Just like we all swallowed:
eggs are good for you – go to work on an egg,
eggs are bad for you, only eat one a week,
eggs are good for you, but not at the moment because we have salmonella in most chicken herds,
eggs are very bad for cholesterol,
eggs are ok, yes they have cholesterol but it can’t pass into the body …..
“In bygone years, your diet was based around a seasonal availability”
perhaps this is true, but we also tinned and bottled stuff, made jam, pickles etc and anyway aren’t strawberries/ blueberries really really good for us ?
In bygone years goat herders in Switzerland went up the mountain with pasta and potato and onions, a traditional meal was slathered in cream and cheese with pasta and potato, yet they lived long and healthy …was it the high fat diet, perhaps it was the climbing exercise counteracted the carb overload, maybe altitude has an effect ?
How do we know the variables ? how can we say that it is healthy or unhealthy – it maybe genetically programmed as ‘safe’ for some to eat fat and carbs
To go back to genetics
If a goat herder begets a child with an Inuit the child inherits genetic predispositions from both parents, if that child begets a child with a aborigine their child will still retain genetic material from its grandparents ….. who knows what ancestry we have these days and how it influences our genetic makeup.
I can’t eat carbs at the moment they make my bgs silly – Sid Bonkers tells me he eats a good deal more carbs with no apparent negative influence and that to lose weight I should count my calories – that works for him – I have found that I just eat loads of fat and protein, hardly any carbs – if I were to count calories they’d be around 2k per day, yet I am losing weight.
Whatever the way forward for diabetes and is impending explosion – there cannot be one diet fits all
Lifestyle choices cannot be the cause for everyone diabetes
Witness the non-overweight health eating T2 or the 100 a day smoker who lived till he was 96
I believe the only way to manage the impending meltdown is to check everyone, regularly, whether it’s government /HCP driven, or whether its in schools, when you start a new job, whatever – if you don’t gather the information the opportunity to make adjustments here and now is lost.
If, in May I had been willing to acquiesce to the “inevitable” then by now I could be on metformin and still weigh nineteen stones.
I am so lucky to have been frightened into action – but I’m not all people, everyone doesn’t respond as I do (hell even I don’t respond as I do all the time)
Some people are simply not educationally/intellectually able to research this stuff, some cannot deal emotionally with negative health issues and some people, really do believe what they read in the papers.
Meh :***:
. Your GP sounds very sensible - aiming for a sensible BMI and concentrating on your health. 
