How Obesity Became an Epidemic

Interviewer: This country has such a big obesity problem right now.  How did we get to this point in the last couple decades?  

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: You know, this is a guess but I think this is where a lot of people are thinking this is coming from, that probably it was the low fat craze that sort of came out in the Sixties, Seventies probably.  Maybe Seventies, Eighties.  And I think that that was probably one of the factors that led down that path.  You know it's very unclear.  There's probably so many other things that happened around that time too.  

Interviewer: Um-hmm.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: Just the exposure to fast food and processed food, probably around the same time.  But we started, you know, really thinking about fat is bad.  You know, there was some studies that looked at heart disease and they looked at cholesterol and they, you know, were trying to put like one plus one equals two so they said, well, if you have fat, you get cholesterol, you get heart disease.

And it turns out that that's not the case.  It's so much more complicated than just high cholesterol that causes heart disease.

Interviewer: Sure.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: So there was a lot of misinformation.  A lot of misunderstanding.  So everyone thought that well, if we go on the low fat diet, that's going to be great.  We're going to reduce heart disease.  We're going to lose weight.

But what happened was people didn't like the taste of food when it didn't have fat.

Interviewer: Um-hmm.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: And they were hungry.  So they wound up eating more calories to make up for the loss of fat, and they started eating carbohydrates to make up for the loss of fat.  And a lot of the food companies that were making these types of foods were, you know, adding in things for taste.  You know?

Interviewer: Um-hmm.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: So that was, you know, we were consuming more calories.  People were, you know, relying on processed food.  And I think that just sort of led down this path.  It's probably more complicated than that but that's my view.

Interviewer: Um-hmm.  Along that same time when everything went low fat or fat-free, soy was being pushed as a big, big health food too, and now it's starting to be reversed.  What, where does soy fit in in terms of, you know, that health craze and how good is it for us?  Or not good?

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: Hmm.  Yeah, I think people wanted to believe that, you know, this vegetarian-based, vegan-based food could solve our problems and could solve our heart disease and our obesity.  The problem with soy, on so many levels it's a problem.  Soy is very processed.  Most of the soy that's available in this country.  And in order to get it into the state where it's edible, it's been changed so many times.

Interviewer: Sure.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: And it's become very estrogenic, in the form that we are eating it.  So I worry about soy exposure, you know, in children and in women.  And even in men.  You know, we're being exposed to these, I'll call them xeno-estrogens.  They're estrogens that are not natural to our own body.  And that's wrecking havoc.  That's doing things that we don't know what it's doing exactly.  Soy's a problem on that level.

The other problem with soy is that it's genetically modified for the most part.  You know, there's very little soy that's available in this country that's not genetically modified.  And I think that's a problem.

Interviewer: Um-hmm.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: And the same goes to corn, as well.

Interviewer: Um-hmm.

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: Also mostly genetically modified.  That's a problem.

Interviewer: And that's bad, why?  Do we even know?

Dr. Tania Tyles Dempsey: You know, I think what we're concerned about is that, you know, when you change a plant, you introduce certain properties in that plant that we don't know how it will affect the receptors in our cell and what our body does do to those compounds.