"How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick"

From NPR. Wow:

"...In an essay published last November in Canada's Maisonneuve journal, physician Kevin Patterson described his experiences working as an internist-intensivist at the Canadian Combat Surgical Hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

"One detail he noticed: The Afghan soldiers, police and civilians he treated in Kandahar had radically different bodies from those of the Canadians he took care of back home.

"'Typical Afghan civilians and soldiers would have been 140 pounds or so as adults. And when we operated on them, what we were aware of was the absence of any fat or any adipose tissue underneath the skin,' Patterson says. 'Of course, when we operated on Canadians or Americans or Europeans, what was normal was to have most of the organs encased in fat. It had a visceral potency to it when you could see it directly there.'..."

They go on to note:

"...And the diabetes epidemic correlates to a strain on health care systems around the globe, says Patterson.

"'No country in the world has the resources to continue to treat diabetics the way that they're being treated now, if the prevalence rates increase at the rates that they're increasing for much longer,' he says. 'I worked in Saipan, which is in the Marianas Island in the Pacific, and there, the dialysis population was increasing at about 18 percent a year, all as a consequence of diabetes and acculturation — exactly the same process as what's going on with the Inuit.

"'When you look at the curves, it's clear how unsustainable it is. In 20 or 30 years, everybody on that island will either be a dialysis patient or a dialysis nurse unless something fundamental is done about the rise in diabetes. That's no less true in Canada and in Samoa and Hawaii, and even in Omaha and Toronto. We all have exactly the same problem when we plot out those curves.'..."

Well, we know how to fix it: eat a paleo diet. 

And to the folks who say that we don't have the resources for everyone to go paleo, here's a suggestion: we continue going the way we're going, and the survivors will be those who are paleo.

"...But obesity commonly underlies infertility in women, just as it also causes the growth of facial hair. And, in men, the growth of breast tissue. Adipose tissue secretes estrogens and insulin resistance increases levels of androgens. Diabetes is overwhelmingly the most common cause of male impotence in the developed world...."

As Jimmy Moore covered in a recent podcast, infertility and delivery problems are yet another side effect of the Modern American Diet.