Yahoo Lifestyle What’s Behind Australia’s Obesity Epidemic
The current National Health and Medical Research Council dietary guidelines recommend 30 per cent of a healthy diet should be made up of carbohydrates like bread, wholegrains and legumes. Image via Shutterstock.
Exercise alone won’t fix the obesity epidemic in Australia, an editorial released today argues.
The prevalence of diabetes increases 11-fold for every 150 additional sugar calories consumed daily, compared with the equivalent amount of calories consumed as fat, researchers say in an editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine published online.
"The public health messaging around diet and exercise, and their relationship to the epidemics of type 2 diabetes and obesity, has been corrupted by vested interests," the researchers say, likening the food industry's tactics to those that "Big Tobacco" used to obscure the link between cigarettes and lung cancer.
Dr Aseem Malhortra, one of the authors of the editorial, claims, “"In the past 30 years, as obesity has rocketed, there has been little change in physical activity levels in the Western population. This places the blame for our expanding waist lines directly on the type and amount of calories consumed."
The current National Health and Medical Research Council dietary guidelines issued in 2013 recommend 30 per cent of a healthy diet should be made up of carbohydrates like bread, wholegrains and legumes, a further 10 per cent of the diet should be made up of fruit and that fats should only be “used in small amounts”.
However, the researchers involved in the editorial say up to 40 per cent of those with a normal weight can have their health adversely affected by the high carbohydrate diet common in modern societies.
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A high sugar, high carbohydrate diet puts them at risk of hypertension, high cholesterol, fatty liver disease and heart disease even though they are not overweight, the experts claim.
Earlier this year, Dr Robert Lustig, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar and a paediatrician who specialises in treating overweight children, blamed insulin for 75 per cent to 80 per cent of all childhood obesity. Insulin is the hormone, he says, which causes energy to be stored in fat cells. Sugar energy is the most egregious of those, but there are three other categories: trans fats (which are on the way out), alcohol (which children do not drink) and dietary amino acids.
His claims are supported by a recent study in the open journal Plos One, of which he was one of the authors. It found that in countries where people had greater access to sugar, there were higher levels of diabetes. Rates of diabetes went up by about 1.1 per cent for every 150 kcal of sugar available for each person each day – about the amount in a can of Coke.
