Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome back to snack cast.
So we got another kind of cool topic today. You brought this one to me the other day and I thought you may be onto something. After diving in, I’m like, holy cow. It’s interesting, right? So, credit where credit’s due. A guy named Jeff Nobbs that I follow on Twitter has a blog, I guess you’d call it and he wrote an article on chronic disease in America or something like that it was written in March 2020. You can go to his blog, check it out.
What stood out to me in the study of chronic disease was some of the data points on chronic diseases since 1930. That’s cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. And there was one more I forgot. It was up 700% since the 1930s. It was less than one in 10 and now it’s six in 10. Six out of ten people in the country, in America, have a chronic disease. We actually have that demonstrated here. I printed out a couple of charts from his article. This goes back to what looks like maybe 1935 or so. I know you can’t read the words, but everybody can see the trend line is obviously on a sharp upward climb ending at 60%. Like you said, six out of 10.
So one of the big takeaways from the article was that generally, it’s society stance, and statistically speaking, we’re actually healthier, right? Over time we’re exercising more, consuming less alcohol, and less tobacco. We’re eating better. One of the other interesting takeaways is obesity is up 40% from 1999 to the present. 40%. And that’s pre-COVID. You can slap what do we call it. COVID-19 slap another 19 pounds on the average human since COVID.
Why do you think that could be? What data did Mr. Nobbs give? One of the really interesting correlations he figured out was specifically soybeans and soybean oils. That was a really mind-blowing correlation. Now he talked about vegetable oils, particularly as it correlates directly with obesity trends and Chronic Disease trends, and then he goes and dives into what specific type of vegetable oils and when soybean oils exploded. Overconsumption exploded over the last, what, 30-40 years. Yeah, it started around the 1940s, I think that was when they discovered it or started making it. I know you guys can’t see the details of this. But this clump of lines all down here at the bottom are most of your other seed oils, your sunflowers or canola or whatever you’re sowing is the light blue line and right here under the dark red line is the soy. So vegetable oils are made up predominantly of soybean oil. I think really what you’re talking about is the oils in processed food. Do you mean the stuff that they put in your cookies and in your crackers? Yes, look at your ranch dressing. Yes, soybean oil is in everything.
We appreciate Jeff Nobbs for this really good article. I would encourage you to go check it out, and follow him on Twitter. My key takeaway, I think we say it over and over, is awareness of what you’re consuming. Read the label, and know what’s in it. It’s taking information like this, that Mr. Nobbs made available and kind of using it as an eye-opener. Our big food providers are doing anything they can to create margins, to reduce expenses. And that means keeping it on the shelf longer. That means keeping it simple as in cost-efficient, the right ingredients keep it on the shelf until it sells. We’re starting to learn, you know, cooking your own food. Yes!
We highly, highly, highly encourage you to read this article. I think you’ll start to make overlaps as I did Why does paleo work? Why is vegan working? Why does keto work? Oh my goodness. I mean, you start going and can see a lot of these things don’t contain oils. It is natural versus science.
Send us your ideas, thoughts, comments, and criticisms to Snackcast@yes.fit. Thanks, guys.