The reason for obesity is simple: refination of food
All food in nature (including potatoes, meat, fish, avocados and what not) provide a certain "caloric load" together with a certain "volume load"
The body signals a lack of hunger not only when you've consumed enough calories but also when your stomach capacity is 80% full and when a certain intake of minerals and vitamins has been reached
Compare a meal where you have a corn and beans soup, a medium salad with raw vegetables, a beef steak with extra virgin olive oil and steamed zucchini, 100 grams of seasoned artigianal cheese and a fruit salad
The 600-700 calories comes here with a big volume of food and with an high intake of nutritive elements.
Refined foods on the other hand can provide you even 1.200 calories in the kind of volume that is not enough to fill 20% of the capacity of your stomach. Add to that that with foods like this 3500 calories may not be enough to get a proper intake of vitamins and minerals while with "high volume/nutrient dense/caloric sparse" meals your body can get what it needs consuming just 1800 calories
This lack of volume also stimulates other habits: the food doesn't take much time to be eaten; mindless and fast eating is therefore promoted. Through this we bypass any sort of "physiological true hunger" signal. Real hunger is felt in the throat and causes a strong plesant feeling at the thought of eating whether food. The kind of hunger that causes headache, stomach cramps, craves for a specific food is not true hunger but toxic hunger or gluttony. True hunger not only allows us to know how much to eat and what we need but make us aware of the connection between physical activity and food need, between consuming calories and re-integranting the lost elements.
Another aspect of lack of physical activity is not lazyness per se but that the people eating this way are too sick adn weak to even exercise. Children who prefer to stay in front of Playstation instead of going out and ride their bike, do sport or play are not just "lazy" ... their diet is causing them post-prandial weakness and spaciness. The natural desire for body acivities is unheard, the solution to the discomfort is both indoor sedentary activities and "eating some more" (as the process of disgestion councel the feelings of spaciness and weakness by activating the blood flow toward the digestive system)
I've heard lot of people saying that when they go to French (in spite of tasty and dense food) they lose weight and feel better and as soon as they go back to UK they gain weight and feel ***.
What France does insted of UK/America:
They savour their food.
They are passionate about food
76 per cent eat meals they have prepared at home; the favourite place to eat both lunch and dinner is in the home, with 75 per cent eating at the family table. In the UK, by contrast, we like to eat our meals (a) standing up, (b) in front of Coronation Street , (c) at a desk while catching up on emails or (d) by the side of the M40
French typically spend two hours over lunch, UK/Americans bolt down their food in the time it would take them to butter a petit pain.
Nutritionist Dr Francoise L'Hermite believes that the French secret is to sit down with friends or family for a meal, and to eat three times a day at regular intervals. She points out that the French don't eat in front of the television, and they eat slowly, enjoying both the food and the company
"For France, a meal is a very particular moment, in which you share pleasure, the food as well as the conversation" says L'Hermite. "From an Anglo-Saxon point of view, food is just fuel to give energy to your muscles. If you have no pleasure in it, you are breaking all the rules of eating."
Eating in France is a social activity. There are several but small courses, with plenty of time between courses for the physiological feedback to kick in. In England, we eat more pre-prepared foods and ready-meals; we eat fast food both in and outside the home. We have single, large meals, and family members will eat different foods at different times... Fast food is, by definition, eaten fast, so there's no time for that physiological feedback.'
French tend to aim for quality over quantity. Almost every village in the country boasts a bustling market featuring local sausages, patties of farm-made chevre, figs and fennel in the appropriate season or truffles dug from a wood down the lane. It's not just a choice available to the moneyed middle classes, but somewhere for everyone, every day.
Instead of an addiction to 'invented foods' full of hydrogenated oils, E numbers and preservatives, the French way, even today, focuses on the careful preparation of unprocessed foods. It's why French women ration themselves to one rich, dark square of real chocolate rather than hogging-out on a preservative-laden, pre-frozen, half-chemical wodge of pseudo-foodo
French portion sizes are smaller in comparable restaurants, in the sizes of individual portions in supermarkets, individual portions specified in cookbooks, and in the prominence of "all-you-can-eat" restaurants in dining guides.'
Mean portion size in Philadelphia was about 25 per cent greater than in Paris. Philadelphia's Chinese restaurants served 72 per cent more than the Parisian ones. A supermarket soft drink in the US was 52 per cent larger, a hotdog 63 per cent larger, a carton of yoghurt 82 per cent larger.
The CFES reports that 'the French, in contrast to Anglo-Saxons, hardly ever snack outside of meals'.
Comments by French Women living in UK
French women never eat while they're walking or standing, like you do here. We have no culture of snacking, and especially not on fast food. This habit is ingrained in us from a young age.
In France, we eat far more dairy products, yoghurt and cheese, but it's tasty cheese so we don't need to eat a lot of it. For a treat, I'll have chocolate cake but made with dark chocolate so it's not full of refined sugar. In France, we don't drink fizzy drinks. We drink water with our meals. If we have coffee, we order an espresso, which has far fewer calories than a Starbucks cappucino. In Britain, people eat for the sake of eating. I've put on weight since I moved to here.
When I first arrived here I was very puzzled by tinned food - I still don't understand spaghetti on toast, or why you use so much vinegar. And to me something like steak and kidney pie looks like it has been cooked using leftovers. Here there is no discipline: no one listens when their body says 'stop'.
I never snack. When I eat, I eat: bread and butter, honey and jam, proper meals. I eat lots of fruit, and real fruit juice and I only use olive oil. I was amazed at the aisles of salty, sugary foods in UK shops.
I start my day with an infusion. I eat yoghurt, a pain au chocolate or eggs and ham. For lunch I have fish and vegetables. For supper, I always prepare a meal. We eat at the table together - we would never dream of eating in front of the TV.
It's no great secret why British people are often overweight. When I lived in London, the family I lodged with were addicted to frying potatoes, and the bread was of poor quality. In France, we will happily drive for 10 minutes to buy a good loaf of bread. Many British girls eat too much junk food and drink too much. I don't think young British people know how to cook properly, so they cook quickly and eat quickly
P.S It bears saying that the obesity in europe and other continents/countries is a product of America! The culture of junk food, high refination, fast food, snacking comes from America. If now people is becoming obese even in Europe is because of sugary snacks (that are either american or clone of the american) of fast foods (the McDonald and BurgerKings they have in Europe come from American) beause of snacking culture (they get from American movies or channels) and so on
Topic: obesity of 21st century america