There is a specter haunting America. It is the specter of obesity. According to the results of the 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an estimated 66 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese. The percentage of obese adults alone is estimated at 32 percent more than twice the 15 percent estimated approximately thirty years ago. In 2007, Colorado was the sole state with a prevalence of obesity less than 20%.

People who are obese have a greater risk of developing high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol or other lipid disorders, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers. One of the national health goals for 2010 is to reduce the prevalence of obesity among adults to less than 15 percent to levels that were measured thirty years ago. Will this goal be achieved? Don't count on it. We consume too much sugar and refined carbohydrates.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture "food availability" chart comparing weekly food consumption of the average American in 2006 with the base year 1970 found that our consumption of grains rose 42% to 2.6 pounds. almost 90% are refined grains. Fruit consumption is up 26% to 2.5 pounds. Nearly half of fruit consumption is in the form of juice. Added sugar, sweeteners rose 17% to 1.9 pounds. Consumption of whole milk plunged 74%. Low-fat milks replaced only part of it. Soft drinks and bottled water are now preferred beverages. Fats increased 59% to 1.3 pounds. Salad and cooking oils increased 190%. Butter decreased 14%. Lard decreased 64%. Vegetables increased 15% to 3.2 pounds. Meat and eggs rose 11% to 3 pounds. Poultry is way up. Red meat consumption is down a quarter pound to 1.25 pounds a week. Egg consumption went down 25% from 4 eggs to three eggs.

Why do diets fail?

The hard part of weight control is not about losing weight, but keeping the lost weight off permanently. Most diets are based on low-fat, high-carbohydrate foods. Calories are severely limited, and dieters are urged to engage in prodigious amounts of exercise. Most people can tolerate this sort of self-deprivation for only a short period of time before falling off the dieting wagon. They return to their old way of eating and gradually regain all the pounds they had lost.

What is the Eat the Fat of the Land approach to weight loss?

The Eat the Fat of the Land way of eating limits carbohydrates not calories. An excess of carbohydrates is the major cause of overweight and obesity. Carbohydrates raise blood glucose levels. This causes the release of insulin into the bloodstream. Insulin's primary function is to transport glucose into the cells to be used for energy. Insulin stores excess glucose as glycogen in the muscles and liver and as fat in the fat cells. Insulin is thus a fattening hormone.

On the surface of fat cells there are two enzymes. One is lipoprotein lipase which transports fatty acids into the fat cell and keeps them there. The other is hormone-sensitive lipase, which releases the fat from fat cells into the blood. Eating a lot of carbohydrates (sugar and starch) causes high levels of insulin, which can stimulate the activity of lipoprotein lipase, the fat-storage enzyme, and inhibit the activity of the fat-releasing enzyme, hormone-sensitive lipase, thus causing weight gain.

In order to lose fat, your body must use that fat as fuel. Your body will do this, if you deprive it of excess glucose by reducing your consumption of starches and sugars and replacing them with a source of a different fuel, traditional animal fat. By eating traditional animal fats, you will feel satiated and not hungry. Your body will change over naturally to using its own stored fats. Therefore, resorting to semi-starvation diets or engaging in prodigious amounts of exercise is totally unnecessary.

Traditional animal fats are good for you.

In 1956 the American Heart Association during a televised fund raiser recommended the Prudent Diet in which corn oil, margarine, chicken and cold cereal replaced butter, lard, beef and eggs. The famous cardiologist Dr. Paul Dudley White, President Eisenhower's physician, was one of the panelists on this show. When pressed to support the Prudent Diet of fat and cholesterol restriction he remarked, "See here, I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and never saw a myocardial infarction patient until 1928. Back in the MI-free days before 1920, the fats were butter, whole milk and lard, and I think we will all benefit from the kind of diet that we had when no one had ever heard of corn oil."

In the 1920s and "30s Weston Price circled the globe visiting traditional societies whose members followed their natural ancestral diets untainted by such modern commercial foods as white flour, sugar, polished rice, vegetable fats and canned goods. All these various diets provided at least ten times the number of fat-soluble vitamins available in the modern dietary prevalent in the United States at that time. Those traditional societies had an immunity to dental caries and a freedom from the diseases of civilization that run rampant in America today. Vitamins A, D, and K2 are found only in animal foods.

The Framingham Heart Study is the longest running and one of the largest studies ever made on the relationship between diet and health. The study began in 1948 and is still going on today. It included almost the entire population of Framingham Massachusettes (population 5,127). After more than 40 years of research, the director of the study, Dr. William Castelli wrote in the July 1992 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine that: "In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the lower the person's serum cholesterol....we found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least."

The conventional wisdom claims that people become fat because they consume too many calories and/or do not expend enough energy due to a sedentary life style. In reality people become fat because they consume too much of the wrong food. Only carbohydrates are fattening. By cutting down on carbohydrates and eating traditional animal fats in their place, you will lose weight and keep it off permanently.