关于饮食与健康的外文文章ozdiet.docVIP

The Oz Diet No more myths No more fads What you should eat—and why The first time I looked into an open chest cavity at a heart muscle working to pump blood through the body, I was brought up short by the tragic graffiti of atherosclerotic plaque. This waxy goo, often found in overweight people, builds up in the vessels surrounding the organ in which, philosophers tell us, the soul lives. But I quickly pushed any such distracting thoughts from my mind. I was learning to operate and was frankly thrilled at the prospect of harvesting a leg vein to bypass the blockage. Surgeons are trained to think that way, and rightly so. Do a good days work and a life is saved, a bad days work and a patient dies. No room there for anything but the job at hand. My objective was to heal with steel. That, in some ways, was the easy part. What confounded my colleagues and me was how and why our patients landed in our care in the first place — lying on a gurney, about to have their chest opened with a band saw. The biggest reason was often the simplest one: the food they ate. Our natural history as a species is a vast canvas of events whose peaks and valleys, successes and tragedies were often determined by the availability or scarcity of food — that is, until the 20th century. While famine remains a terrible reality in some parts of the world, most of us have almost unrestricted access to food. We produce a safe and abundant supply of fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy; we seal it, freeze it and protect it from spoilage and contamination. We even fortify it with vitamins and other healthy additives. (See photos from the exhibit Food and American Identity at the National Archives.) This was the kind of bounty early civilizations could only dream of. But our triumph of nutritional ingenuity has had an unfortunate inverse effect. A dietary free-for-all, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is producing not the healthiest generation in history but one in steady decline, with epidemics of obesity, ca