The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Intelligence of Human Physiology / 77
Thanksgiving ritual feast is so fat she could barely walk and couldn’t
mate when alive, a caricature of the wild, sensitive bird that inhabits our
forests. The pigs, cows, and chickens on modern factory farms and feedlots
are forced to be similarly obese. Are we creating these creatures in
our image, or are they creating us in theirs?
To understand obesity and body weight, we simply need to understand
what agribusiness animal fatteners figured out long ago: eating
excess calories and fat makes confined herbivore animals fat. The same
is true for us. The key is to realize and remember that all foods have just
three basic components: carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids (fat).
Carbohydrates are the necessary fuel we burn for energy. Animal foods
are high in fat and protein and have no carbohydrates, except for honey
and the lactose in milk. Unrefined complex carbohydrates from whole
grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes, and the proteins from either
plant or animal sources, are not typically fattening in themselves,
because the body must first convert them to fat in order to store them
as fat. This has been scientifically demonstrated, as Neal Barnard, M.D.,
points out: “Scientists have biopsied people’s fat stores and found that
virtually all of their fat has come from fat in the foods they have eaten,
and almost none of it is produced by carbohydrate.” 27
Why do so many of us mistakenly believe carbohydrates are fattening?
There are two main reasons. One is that our culture has created
and mass-produced a completely unnatural type of carbohydrate, the
refined white sugar and white flour that are used by the food industry
to make junk foods that are also high in fat. These refined foods have a
high glycemic index and break down too quickly in the body, contributing
to sugar level imbalances in the blood. Nutritionists correctly agree
they are best avoided. The second reason is that these unnatural refined
carbohydrates have become the scapegoat of our herding culture, for the
last thing we want to admit is that the source of our obesity and other
problems is the animal foods that define us. So we erroneously blame
“carbohydrates,” which are actually the healthy and natural fuel on
which our physiology of peace is designed to run. Low-fat, high–complex
carbohydrate diets based on vegetables, legumes, whole grains,
nuts, and fruits have been shown universally to be the healthiest for