Most people seem surprised when I mention that America isn’t actually the fattest place on earth. Don’t get me wrong, we are close. Ignoring for the moment a handful of small island nations, that dubious distinction goes to Kuwait. Hot on our tail are Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Qatar. The basis of the Middle …
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provides “Food Disappearance” data that lets us see how much food any given nation uses per person per year. This is not an exact dietary record because of course we have no idea how much is wasted. It also doesn’t count home produced foods that …
In my previous post I defined The French Diet as a diet where the staples are starch and dairy fat. Cornell Cooperative Extension produced a series of informational pamphlets in the thirties and forties with topics such as “The Clovers in New York” and “Simplifying Home Sewing”. You can peruse them in the Cornell Digital …
In The ROS Theory of Obesity, I mentioned that the french remained lean in 1970 on a diet of white flour, butter (think croissants), sugar and red wine. Although I can’t find specific weight or obesity records from France at that time, it seems largely agreed upon in the oral history that the French were …
Another interesting finding of “Diet, Life-style and Mortality in China” is that there was a huge variation in caloric consumption in different regions of China without a corresponding difference in body weights. This is the most notable in two neighboring areas – Nanan and Huian – two places on the Southeast coast of China with …
In The ROS Theory Of Obesity I stated without providing evidence that Chinese people in the 1980s were lean while eating a high starch diet. In the comments thread, it was suggested that perhaps the Chinese were thin due to lack of available calories. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around. When I wrote …
