In 1900 diabetes was rare.  A doctor could spend an entire career and not come across diabetes.

A century later in the US there are 24 million people with diabetes and another 56 million or so who are pre-diabetic.  Americans spend an estimated $116 billion annually treating diabetes.   Although it’s not currently believed that diabetes is infectious, the startling rise in the number of people with it has risen to the levels normally associated with pandemics.   Houston, we have a problem.

There are two basic types of diabetes.  Type 1, called juvenile diabetes, commonly shows up in young people and happens suddenly.  One day you seem to be fine, the next day you’re thirsty and peeing all the time and you go to the doctor and find out you have Type 1 diabetes.  And you have it for life.

Type 1 is labeled as an auto-immune disease.  Your body suddenly decides pancreas cells that manufacture insulin are bad and attacks them.  Human beings can’t survive without insulin.  Diet and insulin regimes are used to control the problem, but to date there’s no real “cure.”

Type 2 usually appears later in life, is associated strongly with being overweight but unlike Type 1, Type 2, if identified early, can be slowed or even reversed by lifestyle and diet changes.

While there are important distinctions between Type 1 and Type 2, there are themes common to both.

Take the environment.  Not just the flora and fauna around us, but our personal environments.

Compare the lifestyle we lived for the hundred thousand years, or so, before we started farming. For most of our existence, we’ve been hunter gatherers.  Back then we exercised regularly, what with having to run around to hunt and gather.  That means we were outside more than we are today.  It means babies were fed their mother’s milk.  And it means we ate food unpolluted by man made artificial fertilizers, pesticides, anti-biotics and growth hormones.  

So let’s visit this list of differences and see if they might be, as the police are fond of saying, “persons of interest” in a crime.

Take the exercise and outdoor exposure we got as hunter gatherers and compare it with our existence today.  Many of us spend the vast majority of our day indoors under artificial light.  Low Vitamin D levels are strongly associated with diabetes.  Exposure to natural sunlight is what creates Vitamin D in humans. Someone who lives in Maine is more likely to have diabetes than someone living in Florida.  Globally, diabetes is found at much higher levels in northern, temperate climes compared to those found in equatorial regions.

People who regularly exercise burn off more calories and tend to have more muscle than those who don’t.   Type 2 diabetes is strongly associated with being overweight and physical inactivity.  Measure your waist size at your belly button level.  If it is equal to half or more of your height (in other words you’ve got a “pooch”) your chances of developing Type 2 increases dramatically.

Consider our diets today versus the diet we had when we spent time outdoors hunting and gathering.  Back then there were no processed foods and very little sugar and salt added.  No Dunkin Donuts or Cheetos or processed foods of any kind back then.  Processed foods invariably are packed with sugar and sugar creates huge spikes in insulin levels.  They are also packed with fats, many of these fats long identified as being unhealthy.  What they don’t have is fiber and fiber is known to be necessary for good health.

Back then there were no man made fertilizers in the food we ate.  No man made growth hormones.  No man made pesticides to ingest.  For more than a hundred thousand years of our evolution as humans, we didn’t eat any of these things.  And genetically, we’re still the same humans today as we were then.

So who do we take a good hard look at, other than ourselves, for consuming all this stuff our bodies never had to deal with until very, very recently?  Who are the enablers?  The “people of interest?”

That would be government, by its policies, and the food industry.  Our government, as just one example, spends anywhere from $4-$7 billion per year subsidizing corn.  As a result of that we have corn coming out the whazoo.  Problem is, corn is starchy and high in sugar.  There are many, many other vegetables far more healthy for us than corn.

But corn it is, our government has decided.  With the subsidy it’s cheap and in America as elsewhere price is everything.  So our cattle are fed corn instead of what cattle are supposed to eat, which is grass.  That makes them fat and unhealthy.  But cheap.  So we Americans consume cheap beef that’s unhealthy for us because corn is cheap because the government has decided it should be thus.  And it’s not just the fat.  We end up feeding the cattle growth hormones so we can slaughter them earlier.  And we end up pumping them full of anti-biotics because we force them to eat corn, which makes them sick.   And we have slaughterhouse factories where these poor beasts live, literally, shoulder to shoulder hock deep in their own excrement until the day they are marched to their slaughter.

If you want some more about corn (including the massive use of high fructose corn syrup in just about everything you can find on your supermarket shelves) and how its subsidy has warped our farm system and our food supply, you can type in “corn subsidies” in the web search box to your right.

Interestingly, young people who grow larger, faster, are statistically more likely to develop Type 1 disease.  One can only wonder if there’s a connection to all the hormones we now eat (chicken also get hormones because, just like cattle, we can fatten them up quicker that way) and rapid growth among some young adults.  They are getting a good dose of growth hormones because of what they eat. 

Another concern is that our environments, paradoxically, may be too clean.  This, some think, may cause our immune systems to weaken.  Also, mother’s milk contains plenty of immune enhancing ingredients.  So breast feed your kids and when they’re old enough, make sure they get a lot of outdoor exercise and nibble a few mud pies.  And while you’re breast feeding them, lay off the packaged foods and industrial ag produced meats.  If you must eat meat, buy pasture fed beef, free range chicken and wild caught fish.  What the mother eats gets pumped into the baby, whether it’s still attached to the umbilical cord or the mother’s teat to feed.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of cows, let’s consider dairy.  Don’t do dairy.  It’s thought that infant baby formula using milk tinkers with the child’s developing immune system.  And a number of nutritional experts recommend everyone reduce their dairy intake.   If you want to see previous posts about the problem with cows and dairy, just type ”dairy” in the search box.

If you want a quick article listing the five suspects in creating our diabetes pandemic, you can go here.  If you want a book length discussion of the diabetic pandemic, read Dan Hurley’s “Diabetes Rising: How A Rare Disease Became A Modern Pandemic, And What To Do About It.”

And if you want to start eating healthier, both for yourself and for your children, know beforehand it’s going to be tough to do in America.  Almost everything on your local supermarket shelf is supercharged with high fructose corn syrup and fat and contains pesticide residues both inside and out.  And all the meats are laced with fat, growth hormones, and anti-biotics.

Fast food eating is definitely out.  You might as well take up smoking and heavy drinking instead. 

If you have a health food supermarket nearby, such as Whole Foods or Trader Joes, you’re halfway home.  But you still need to more carefully plan your meals, and for most of us who’ve grown up the past 40 years or so, that’s a lifestyle change all by itself.

And get some outdoor excercise, particularly if you live in a northern clime where clouds are more common than sun.

The good news is that if you even do half of this, your chances of developing Type 2 are lessened dramatically.  And if you’re pre-diabetic, you can actually reverse the development.

Finally, contact your Congressperson and tell them to end the corn subsidy.  Subsidize healthy foods instead.

About $4-$7 billion in annual corn subsidies will expire at the end of the year unless they are extended by Congress.  There is already a bill in Congress to extend the subsidies for another five years, and it could come to the floor as early as next month, according to CNBC reporter Jane Wells in a report this morning.

Beezer has written several times about the ill effects of this subsidy on the nation’s health, here,  here and here.  If you want a full list, just go to the search box to the right and type in “corn subsidies.”

To make a long story shorter, the subsidies have basically destroyed our small farms and thus our food diversity, engendered the mass production of less nutritious food and, in the case of beef and chicken in particular, resulted in food that’s laced with hormones and antibiotics.  The results of this is proving to be incredibly expensive as we’re having an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. 

It’s also enriched the big corporations in what is commonly referred to as “Industrial Ag.” Industrial ag is yet another big corporation dominated industry–a classic oligopoly which seeks to use government power to inhibit competition and thus fatten profits.

It would seem to be a no brainer that if we’re going to subsidize farms, we should use the subsidy to encourage growing healthy food, and growing a wide variety of healthy food.  It would seem obvious that having a healthier population being fed nutritious food is excellent policy.

As we’ve already witnessed in health care reform, are witnessing in finance reform and will no doubt witness in this corn subsidy battle, getting good things done in Congress (particularly in the Senate) is incredibly difficult when the opponents are entrenched oligopolists who dominate the industry.

This isn’t really about just one vegetable, corn.  This is about our entire food supply.  Mono cultures never survive.  And we are rapidly being turned into a mono culture.

Consider this paragraph in a March Newsweek article that touches on the upcoming battle.

“Of course, none of these efforts will change a thing if we don’t overhaul what we eat (too much fat, sugar, and salt) and how we eat it (supersized portions). Take one highly publicized ingredient, high-fructose corn syrup, which is derived from corn and has made its way into a multitude of the foods and drinks we consume—ketchup, sodas, and even the presumably good stuff like salad dressing and yogurt. A formidable contingent of nutritionists believe that agricultural subsidies for corn and other crops have contributed to the obesity crisis by making fattening foods cheap and ubiquitous. They want the subsidies expunged. Others, including USDA economists, argue that the effect is small and that eliminating them won’t solve the problem. It’s unlikely, given the outsize power of farm states in the Senate, and of Iowa in choosing presidential nominees, that the subsidies will be axed. But you’re certain to hear a lot more about this in the run-up to the 2012 farm bill. In the meantime, here’s something to chew on: a new study out of Princeton University found that rats who consumed high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than rats who ate plain old table sugar—even when they took in the same number of calories. Sign them up to testify on the Hill.”

All the internet blogs in all the world plus all the votes in this country may not be enough to bring common sense to America.

But we can try.  Subsidize healthy food, not just corn.  First Lady Michelle Obama, your organic White House garden, and the nation’s health, awaits you.

It seems like almost overnight America found itself fat and diabetic.  In earlier posts Beezer has argued that a main driver in this fat phenomenon, if not The main driver, is the industrialization of our food industry.

With the help of $4 billion in annual government subsidies, industrial agriculture has quickly and fairly quietly, destroyed the diversity of our food supply.  We now eat primarily corn or soy based food instead of enjoying a healthier, more diverse diet. 

To make a long story short, we subsidize corn to make it cheaper than it would otherwise be, and as a result corn and corn byproducts now dominate our grocery shelves, including the meat counter.  This policy is one of the root causes of why our diet is coming apart at the seams.  We’re being forced to eat a narrowing group of real foods and our health is the main victim. 

Now along comes more damning information about how our narrowed diet is the main driver in our headlong plunge to fat and sicknesses of all kinds.  We are what we eat, and what we’re eating is terrible.

Critical to health is a good balance between Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids.  Unfortunately for Americans, our industrial ag food machine is supplying lots of Omega 6 and far too little Omega 3.

In an article in Prevention Magazine, science writer Susan Allport explains why we need more Omega 3 and why our diets contain too little of this vital nutrient. 

“Our Collective Omega-3 Deficiency…
Every once in a while, a discovery comes along that changes everything about the way we see the world. In the early 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus had such a moment when he discovered that Earth was not the center of the universe. Our new understanding of essential fats is that kind of discovery, and I was lucky enough, as a science writer, to make a small-yet-key contribution. While researching a book on omega-3s, I realized that the essential fats–the omega-3s and their close cousins, the omega-6s–change with the seasons. It might sound like a small idea, but it may soon fundamentally change the way you think about food.

First, let’s start with omega-3s, what I’ll call the spring fats. These are likely the most abundant fats in the world, but they don’t originate in fish, as many believe. Rather, they are found in the green leaves of plants. Fish are full of omega-3s because they eat phytoplankton (the microscopic green plants of the ocean) and seaweed. In plants, these special fatty acids help turn sunlight into sugars, the basis of life on Earth. The spring fats speed up metabolism. They are fats that animals (humans included) use to get ready for times of activity, like the mating season. They’re found in the highest concentrations in all the most active tissues: brains, eyes, hearts, the tails of sperm–the flight muscles of hummingbirds. Because fish have so many of these fats in their diets, they can be active in cold, dark waters. These fats protect our brains from neurological disorders and enable our hearts to beat billions of times without incident. But they are vanishing from our diet, and you’ll soon understand why.

…And Our Omega-6 Surplus
Next up are the omega-6s, what I’ll call the fall fats. They originate in plants as well, but in the seeds of plants rather than the leaves. The fall fats are simply storage fats for plants. Animals require both–omega-3s and omega-6s–in their diets and their tissues. But omega-6s are slower and stiffer than omega-3s. Plus, they promote blood clotting and inflammation, the underlying causes of many diseases, including heart disease and arthritis. Omega-3s, on the other hand, promote blood flow and very little inflammation, which may prevent things like heart disease. The proper mix of these two fats helps create tissue with the right amount of blood flow and inflammation. But because they’re in constant competition to enter our cells, if your diet consists of too many omega-6s, your body will be deficient in omega-3s. And that is what’s been happening to us as we’ve been eating more and more seed fats in the form of soybean, corn, and other vegetable oils.

Since 1909, according to the USDA, Americans have more than doubled their daily intake of omega-6s–from about 7 grams to around 18. One hundred years ago, heart disease was much less common in this country. Over the past century, though, heart disease has risen in tandem with our increasing intake of these seed fats, or omega-6s, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). So have neurological disorders like Lisa’s, as well as depression, arthritis, obesity, insulin resistance, and many cancers. While other dietary factors such as increased consumption of calories, trans fats, and sugar undoubtedly contributed, our essential fatty acid imbalance is a key player in most of these illnesses.

Over the same time period, omega-3s began disappearing from our food supply. Cows used to be raised on grass and other greens, producing meat, milk, and cheese with much higher concentrations of omega-3s. These were the animal products that our grandparents and great-grandparents grew up on, before industrial feedlots replaced family farms. Now these livestock are fed corn and soy, and their tissues are swamped with omega-6s. Chickens, too, used to eat grass and grass-eating bugs. Those chickens produced eggs and meat that were high in omega-3s, but now they’re fed full of omega-6-rich fall fats.

We are now eating a diet that is supposed to fatten us up for winter, when weather is harsh and calories are scarce. But today food is never scarce for the average American. The base of our food supply has shifted from leaves to seeds, and this simple change means our bodies are storing more fat, leading to obesity and all its associated diseases.”

How We Got Here
This is all too simple to be true, you might say. But arriving at this understanding was anything but simple. In the 1930s, the first family of essential fats was discovered and mapped by George and Mildred Burr at the University of Minnesota. These were the omega-6s. It was another 40 years before omega-3s were also found to be essential, by a researcher at Hormel named Ralph Holman. A great deal happened to our food supply in those decades. Due to farm subsidies, the acres of soybeans, for example, grown in the United States exploded from about 4 million to 70 million. Oil processors like Archer Daniels Midland mastered the process of extracting oil from these and other seeds, and vegetable seed oils–thought to be healthy–began to dominate our food supply as they were added to the foods that make up the center aisles of the grocery store.

At the same time, food chemists discovered that rancidity in packaged foods was caused by the oxidation of some minor but pesky fats: omega-3s. Scientists extended the shelf life of processed foods such as cookies, chips, cakes, breads, and spreads by removing omega-3s–a nutrient that no one thought mattered. Health agencies, like the AHA, and the US government also promoted omega-6s, because seed oils are low in saturated fat and free of cholesterol. So omega-6 oils, such as corn and soybean, they thought, were good for the heart.

Scientists have known since the early 1970s, however, that omega-6s also promote blood clotting and inflammation, two immediate and direct causes of heart disease. But because omega-6s were essential, doctors thought you had to take the good with the bad. By the time they learned that omega-3s protect our hearts and fight inflammation, omega-6s were already the foundation of our modern food supply.

Then, in the 1980s, epidemiological studies published in prestigious journals like the New England Journal of Medicine showed that fish-eating populations in Greenland and Japan are much less prone to heart disease. Omega-3s became associated with fish (rather than with green leaves), and that became the method recommended by such organizations as the AHA for us to obtain our omega-3s. The only problem is that eating more fish isn’t a sustainable solution, as many of the world’s fisheries are at the brink of collapse, according to a major study recently published in Science. Literally, there aren’t enough fish in the world’s oceans….”

It is probably no coincidence, I realized, as I researched my book The Queen of Fats, that leaves are the most metabolically active tissues in plants, and brains and eyes are the most metabolically active tissues in animals: They are both full of omega-3 fats. Omega-3s speed up the activity of cells.

It is no coincidence, I realized, that omega-6s are simply a storage fat for plants. Both omega-6s and omega-3s play many vital, essential roles in animals, as I cannot emphasize enough. But in plants, the only role of omega-6s is to serve as a storage fat. Omega-6s are also the main polyunsaturated fat in the storage fat of animals: white adipose tissue–the belly fat of every overweight American.

It is no coincidence that hibernating animals such as the yellow-bellied marmot of Colorado do not go into hibernation when their diet is full of omega-3s, as it is in the spring and summer. Their diet must change to one rich in omega-6 seeds before these animals will slow down for the winter.

It is no coincidence that animals that migrate long distances–like the semipalmated sandpiper, which flies from Nova Scotia to South America–fill up on omega-3s for their long journey. These birds know what human athletes are just starting to learn: High omega-3 concentrations in muscle membranes lead to improved performance.

So it is no coincidence that as America shifted its diet–from one based on green leaves to one based on seeds–we became fatter and fatter and sicker and sicker. Our hibernation diet is exposing us to epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and brain disorders. Even infants, according to the Child and Family Research Institute of the University of British Columbia, are getting fatter–long before they could ever be accused of overeating–when they are fed formulas high in omega-6s. Sure, America’s seed-based foods are remarkably cheap, but we spend the lowest percentage of our income on food and more on health care than any other country in the world.

Since publishing The Queen of Fats, I’ve continued to comb the literature for studies that shed light on the role that the essential fats play in nature. I came across one not too long ago in the journal Lipids about the African kudu and impala, showing that these animals also experience a shift in the amounts of omega-3s and omega-6s in their diets over the course of the rainy and dry seasons– rather than our seasons based on day length. It made me realize that these shifts are universal signals, experienced and interpreted by animals all over the planet–at least until we humans came along and devised a way of eating a diet rich in seed fats all year long.

There’s a solution to our imbalance, but change is difficult, and we must first accept that polyunsaturates–omega-3s and omega-6s–are not one big happy family; rather, they are two competing families–spring fats and fall fats– with very different effects on cells and health. Once we’ve accepted that, making the necessary dietary improvements is relatively easy.” 

Of course making the necessary dietary improvements will NOT be relatively easy.  Getting rid of our corn subsidies (and, could we actually figure out it’s better to subsidize healthy, organic foods?) will be as easy as getting rid of too big to fail (TBTF) Wall Street banks, or predatory health insurance companies.

The same folks who claim unfettered free markets are best, are the same ones who subsidize corn.  Yet the unsubsidized organic food system is the fastest growing segment of the food industry, clocking in at more than $11 billion per year and growing rapidly.  Word that we’re being fed unhealthy ”shadow” food is apparently getting around.

So fight back.  Eat your leafy greens, fish, flax seeds and if necessary Omega 3 supplements.  And every once in a while email your Congress critters and tell them to stop force feeding us all this fake, unhealthy food.  And using our tax dollars to do it!

The industrialization of our food industry is churning out great volumes of lousy food.  It looks OK, and tastes OK, but it’s shadow food.  It really isn’t the same food your grandparents ate.  It’s a shadow of that food.

Even if you don’t consciously understand, your body does.  It knows you’re eating shadow food.  The bulk is there, but the nutrients aren’t.  So your body says “Eat More.”  And you do.  Couple that with a sedentary lifestyle and Bingo!  You’re fat.  Keep it up and you’re really fat.  And really develop diabetes and a host of other debilitating, expensive, illnesses.

Which is just fine for Industrial Ag because they’re making a fortune on shadow food.   And of course our federal government is pleased too because they’ve instituted policies and subsidies that feed Industrial Ag.  No shadow food for Industrial Ag.  They get the real dough.

Plus, Industrial Ag has figured out that they can get us to eat this shadow food in quantity by simply adding more sugar, salt and fat.  They cram more of this stuff into their shadow food to make it tasty, tasty.  For it’s part, the government steps up to the plate by subsidizing corn so the sugar part (via High Fructose Corn Syrup) can be ladled in without limit.  Walk down your supermarket store and look at the list of ingredients in almost any can of food.  There it is, high fructose corn syrup.  It is literally in every can.

Unless, of course, if it’s organic.

Take, for one example, comparisons between organic foods versus the conventional “shadow” food.

From “The Kind Diet” by Alicia Silverstone:

“Organic foods outperform their conventional cousins like this: 

• 63% more calcium
• 78% more chromium
• 73% more iodine
• 59% more iron
• 138% more magnesium
• 125% more potassium
• 390% more selenium
• 60% more zinc

And remember, nonorganic food is not only sprayed with nasty chemicals, it comes from soil filled with them, so they actually get into the vegetables as they grow.  There’s no escaping the chemical cocktail.”

And here’s a nice, brief summary article about this overeating from the blog “opposing views.”

As the waistlines of Americans continue to grow, Dr. David Kessler provides answers to some of my lingering questions about the causation of this epidemic. What is it about food that does not let us stop with one piece of cake or a single slice of pizza? Why do we override our innate fullness sensor and continuously overeat? How can this be stopped? Dr. Kessler tackles all these questions in his recent book, The End of Overeating.

Question 1: What is it about food that does not let us stop with one piece of cake or a single slice of pizza?

Food today has three major additives that have been added to our food in major quantities compared with days of past: sugar, fat, and salt. These three components make manufactured food addicting, as proved by recent studies. A University of Washington researcher added sugar to skim milk, whole milk, half and half, and a heavy cream safflower oil mixture. Participants in the study preferred the cream and oil mixture (containing the most fat and sugar) to all others. Food companies have picked up on the fact that sugar, salt, and fat sell and are using it to their benefit.

Question 2: Why do we override our innate fullness sensor and continuously overeat?

Simply put, sugar, salt, and fat are rewarding. Think about a time when you have a plate of cookies in front of you. You eat one, it is delicious, you eat another and it is still delicious. Before you know it, the plate is half gone. Your control in this situation is damped by the sugar and fat. Continued exposure to overwhelming rewards from foods leads to conditioned overeating, a term used by Dr. Kessler. “Chronic exposure to highly palatable foods changes our brains, conditioning us to seek continued stimulation. Over time, a powerful drive for a combination of sugar, fat, and salt competes with our conscious capacity to say no.”

Question 3: How can this be stopped?

Sadly, we are incapable of changing the manufacturing procedures of food. Therefore, we must learn to control ourselves. First, understand conditioned overeating. No progress can be made in our battle with food if we do not acknowledge that hyper palatable foods are to blame. Next, you must learn to say no. Dr. Kessler reminds us that we have a choice when it comes to what goes into our bodies, and the urges we have for that next cookie can be ignored. We are warned that this is difficult, and there will be times when we slip. After practice, food will lose its captivating power over us… freedom at last!

I encourage you to read The End of Overeating in its entirety. It offers a new perspective on food and our addiction to it.

By Mitzi Dulan with research assistance from Kaylee O’Connell

Beezer here.  I disagree with the kind Dr. Kessler when he says we can’t do anything about it but to limit our eating.  We can change the subsidies flowing into conventional Industrial Ag and, instead, redirect this money to balanced, organic farming.

Instead of subsidizing corn to feed cows (it makes them sick and us too because the corn fed cows need antibiotics) and make cheap suger substitutes, why can’t we subsidize organic farming?  It’s healthier by far for everyone, and modern organic techniques have produced some of the most efficient farms in America.

I’m an optimist.  And stubborn to boot.  Particularly when I spot something that is so inefficient and unhealthy for us all like our modern, warped food system.  Or Wall Street.  Oligopolies both dominated by huge corporations which have purchased our government into their fold and point of view.

Time for change.