Chapter 3 Chemicals
Make You Fat
The Medical Evidence
When I started researching this book, never in a million
years did I expect to find the overwhelming evidence
that I've now uncovered. The solution to the puzzle
of why we are all becoming fatter is under our very
noses. It lurks in every bite of food we eat, every
sip of liquid we drink and in the very air we breathe.
Now the time has come for the evidence to be pieced
together. I think the easiest way to explain it, is
to use a simple financial example.
Imagine a beef farmer, who raises cattle and sells
them for slaughter. One of his major outgoings will
be animal
feed and his profit will be linked to the final weight
of the cattle. The more it costs him to feed the cattle,
the less profit he will make. If he had a magic 'fattening'
pill his cows would eat less food and put on more weight,
so he would make more money. It is therefore not surprising
to learn that farmers have actually been using powerful
fattening synthetic chemicals to force animal weight
gain for a long time. For example, since 1976, the
increasing
use of growth promoting feed additives, selective
breeding and high protein diets, has reduced the amount
of feed
needed for broiler chickens to reach 2kg by almost
40%.
The way that most of these chemicals act is to greatly
improve food efficiency, in other words, they alter
the animals' metabolism so that less food goes much
further. Animals that eat these chemicals in their
feed
end up gaining more weight than untreated animals,
even when the untreated animals are eating more food.
It
makes total economic sense.
More animal weight for less food. Food bills are
reduced, and the income increases since the farmer
will get a
better price for them at market. And after the animals
are sold, guess what? We eat them, chemicals and
all.
Synthetic chemicals are making us fat
Our metabolism also appears to be affected by a massive
range of synthetic chemicals in a very similar way
-
with the 'fattening' effect intended for animals
in all probability working on us too.
These powerful chemicals achieve this in several
ways. Firstly they appear to damage our appetite
'switch'
so that we tend to eat far more than we actually
need. Another is by reducing the amount of food our
bodies
actually need by damaging our ability to burn off
food and so making what we eat go further. But possibly
the
most important way is by seemingly preventing our
bodies from burning up existing fat stores.
So in effect, synthetic chemicals appear to act by
poisoning our weight control system, effectively
putting it out
of action. What's worse, unless properly tackled,
the effect appears to be cumulative, dooming us to
become
fatter and fatter as long as we keep exposing our
bodies to these chemicals.'
Taken from THE DETOX DIET: Eliminate Chemical Calories
and restore your natural Slimming System by Dr Paula
Baillie-Hamilton, published by Michael Joseph.
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