11 Ways The Modern Diet Let Us Down

It's hard to look away when history stares you dead in the eye.

Business Insider published an article by Kris Gunnars that shows 11 historical charts that will convince you to re-think how and what you eat.

The charts show the correlation with how our diet changed, and what disease epidemics soon followed.

Check out the full article, but here are the highlights of how the modern diet let us down.

Copyright (c) The American Journal
of Clinical Nutrition

1. Our Sugar Intake Has Skyrocketed. Nowadays it seems everywhere we go, sugar shows up. Sugar is like that "friend" that overhears your plans and invites himself along.  It has snuck its way into almost everything we eat. Gunnars shows us a chart that tracks how sugar intake skyrocketed in just the last 160 years...and obesity, "coincidentally," did too. At the....Exact. Same. Time. (Creepy.)            
2. Soda and Fruit Juice Consumption Has Doubled Since 1990. These two drink categories are just liquid sugar. (It's scary how recent some of these facts are.)
3. Average U.S. Calorie Intake Has Gone Up 20% Since 1970. We're not eating more. We're just eating more crap with more sugar in it. That's what cranks up the calories. Calories can be good, if they are nutrient-dense. Most foods with sugar simply don't have the nutrients the body needs. This is where the term "empty calories" was born.
4. Butter is Better. This chart is one of the most telling. It shows that the average American consumed around 20 pounds of butter per year in the early 1900's. Back then, heart disease and diabetes were not the epidemics we see today. Instead, during the decades since we were encouraged to replace butter with processed vegetable and seed oils, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes have climbed to be the killers that they are today.

   

   Copyright (c) Dr. Stephan Guyenet. The American Diet. 2012.

5. The Modern Diet Replaced Heart-Healthy Butter With Trans-Fat Laden Margarine. This is my other favorite chart. (Can you tell I like butter?) Butter produced from grass-fed cows actually has been shown to be heart-protective because of the Vitamin K2. Margarine may have fueled the heart disease epidemic.
6. Soybean Oil Has Become A Major Source Of Calories. It climbed in the 1950's, but really spiked in use in 1969. You'll find soybean oil in most processed foods. A good rule of thumb: Shop around the perimeter of the grocery store. That's where the fresh (real) food is...the produce section, deli, butcher shop, butter and eggs. The aisles in the middle of the store carry the processed foods.
7. Modern Wheat is Less Nutritious Than Older Varieties of Wheat. Basically, a new type of wheat came on the scene in a big way in the 1960s. It's called the Modern Dwarf Wheat, and it contains a lot less magnesium, zinc, iron, and copper than the wheat our ancestors ate prior to the '60's.
8. We've Decreased Our Egg Consumption By 33% in the Modern Diet. Somebody told us that eggs were high in cholesterol, and since the 1950's we've scaled back. But as the country got sicker, and our cholesterol got higher, we were backing off of one of the foods that actually raised our HDL Cholesterol, aka "The Good Cholesterol". Eggs. If you can find eggs laid by pasture-raised hens, you'll be eating one of the healthiest and nutrient-dense foods a human can eat. (Note: look up "pasture-raised". It is a big step above "cage-free". Not the same.)
9. People Are Eating More Processed Foods Than Ever Before In The Modern Diet. No surprise there. Again, when you see these charts for yourself, it's just amazing how all of these bad dietary habits skyrocketed in the 1960s and 70s.
10. We've Consumed So Much Vegetable Oil That It Has Literally Changed What We're Made of. We are what we eat. Our body composition has changed over a few decades compared to our closest relative, the chimpanzee. The chimp's diet has not changed, nor has its body composition.
11. The Low-Fat Dietary Guidelines Were Published Around The Same Time The Obesity Epidemic Started. This one is hard to dismiss. Like I said, history staring us dead in the eye. The modern diet, and its correlation to obesity, should make us pause.