[Jilli]

It is my humble opinion that the government is causing obesity...they encourage us to eat grains and other carbohydrates (insulin producing products) Insulin is what converts simple sugar to fat on your body...Eskimos never ate charbohydrates they ate fish, meat and fat...mostly eskimos died because their diet ate them (polar bears, walrus', falling through the ice etc) We have become obsessed with low fat and no fat products, causing an ever increasing need for anti depressents (also curtesy of the governments propaganda) Fat is what makes us feel good, we need it in our diet.

Protein and fat are metabolized differently than carbohydrates. Which is why those who use the Atkins diet experience such success. I'm not advocating any special diet here, just providing some basic facts to counter the miss information circulated by doctors and our local government.

Eating less and exercising more is another myth that just does hold water...What hard science is there to prove this..any time you start to starve your body, your body will want to burn the muscle first (hence working it out more is going to damage it) and second your body becomes much more efficient at hanging onto the fat it becomes able to store once you start eating again...even if you skip just one meal. It is more a matter of what you eat not, not a matter of cutting back.

[aruanan]

It is my humble opinion that the government is causing obesity...they encourage us to eat grains and other carbohydrates (insulin producing products) Insulin is what converts simple sugar to fat on your body...

This is simply not true. Carbohydrates do not produce insulin. Insulin does not convert "simple" sugar (or any other sugar) to fat. Unlike hogs, humans make very little de novo fat. If you were to take samples of all the fats in the foods you ate over the course of several months and then compare their ratios to the fats stored in your adipose tissue, you'd find almost an exact match. Virtually ALL the fat that you've stored in adipose tissue is dietary fat.

[chilepepper]

Amen! I am astonished at the implications of the effects of carbs on our system. i've been lo-carb for about three years now (fall of the wagon a couple of times a year) and hunger is a thing of the past. haven't lost MASSIVE amount of weight since because i have a serious hip problem (pre-Atkins) i am must more inactive than i was. none-the-less i am *much* lighter than i was twenty years ago!

i see obesity in the US and the world as a man-made catastrophe, all created through either a sinister plot, or incalculable incompetence and scientific arrogance or through cold blooded greed, or perhaps a combination of all three...

to me it has been a real eye-opener on public knowledge and public manipulation by the powers that be...