Social Reasons for Sickness?

To be a normal senior in our society is to be overweight and sick, the problem beginning in your 50's and getting worse over time.

Why?

There are social reasons why we might prefer to be like everyone else, even if that means we will be sick and feeble and die too early.

Science can't tell us what the best diet is. But science can tell us what DOES NOT WORK.

We now know that the Women's Health Initiative, tells us with certainty, that the low fat high carbohydrate diet has no health benefits. So does that make any difference for us? It should, especially if you are beginning to have weight problems of general problems with your health.

What is Normal Aging?

At 70 years of age, 10% of NZ'ers have been diagnosed with 5 or more diseases. She may well be undernourished, he's clearly got metabolic syndrome.

We've been rejecting the idea of using ketosis for 147 years, so why change now? It's likely that we'll continue to say “It's not about me.”

There's lots of evidence, if we care to look, that our diet is faulty. Has been faulty for a long time and is getting worse not better. Modern researchers have done some remarkable studies, small, but tightly controlled, where people were fed all their meals from a single kitchen, for quite long periods (three to six months).

Most of these studies have been done with elite athletes, or elite military personnel. These people have skin in the game in terms of wanting to discover if there is any real health and performance advantage in a ketogenic diet, in preference to a carbohydrate loading diet, that elite athletes have used for the last 40 years.

We could reject these findings, thinking these people are not like us. I think that's a mistake we've been making for 147 years, ever since Lt. Frederick Schwatka told us about Inuit diets, that were not just low carbohydrate, they were also devoid of vegetables. That seems very strange to us.

For athletes, many lost weight, most improved their athletic performance, not immediately, but after a month or so. All those doing endurance events found there was a great advantage in burning fats for energy, rather than burning sugar.

For ordinary people, with metabolic syndrome, there are immediate health benefits in beginning a Banting Diet. Once your weight is normal, and your health is stabilized on a very low carbohydrate diet, you may choose to be less strict with yourself. Even as an experiment you will learn a lot about yourself, which will be useful in the future.