Preventing Illness Is The Key To Abundant Health
Preventing your family and your kids with tails from becoming overweight means adapting the way your family eats and exercises, and how you spend time together. Helping kids and your furry friends lead healthy lifestyles begins with parents who lead by example.
Your pets are dying from the same grim diseases humans are. Most commercial pet food is over 50% grains, and 1 cup is about 500 calories. When you add all the pet treats made with peanut butter, grains, and all the other unhealthy junk, pets are getting fat, and they're suffering needlessly.
Add to that the preservatives, dyes, flavor enhancers, salt, sugar, and dead diseased animals you can see how your pets can suffer these diseases.
Commercial pet food is "fast food" for pets, and it's not a happy meal when you consider their suffering. These foods are not what your pets need to support a healthy weight.
It's not normal for us or our furry friends to die from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and all the other diseases that obesity causes. Here's just some of the medical problems and diseases that obesity causes:
- Osteoarthritis
- Insulin Resistance and Type 2 Diabetes
- High Blood Pressure
- Heart and Respiratory Disease
- Cranial Cruciate Ligament Injury
- Kidney Disease
- Many Forms of Cancer
- Decreased life expectancy (up to 2.5 years)
The American Heart Association Just Endorsed Subway As "Heart Healthy Food".
Really? If we use that model, then Mc Donalds, and the other fast fooder's should be endorsed by the American Cancer Society.
These are the foods your children are eating in school everyday. Go there and see for yourself, you have a right to visit your childs school at any time unannounced. I suggest you have lunch with them one day.
The children are herded through the lines like cattle, often schools try to feed 2500 children in three 1/2 hour lunch periods. They hardly have time to eat, and when they do have time to gulp down their meals, they're still hungry.
These high carb foods require the pancreas to secrete insulin to balance their elevated blood sugar levels.
Once the pancreas releases insulin, their adrenal glands are screaming for cortisol, cortisol increases blood sugar levels and stresses their immune system over time.
Since a principal function of cortisol is to thwart the effect of insulin—essentially rendering the cells insulin resistant—the body remains in a general insulin-resistant state when cortisol levels are chronically elevated.
Over time, the pancreas struggles to keep up with the high demand for insulin, glucose levels in the blood remain high, and the cells cannot get the sugar they need, and the cycle continues.
So within 30 minutes or so their bodies have run up and down three flights of stairs about ten times.
And they wonder why the kids want to nap during the next class.
Blood Sugar Imbalance and Diabetes
Under stressful conditions, cortisol provides the body with glucose by tapping into protein stores in the liver. This energy can help an individual fight or flee a stressful situation. So your kids are in a combat situation in a way, they're constantly stressed. Their bodies are ready to fight and take cover at the same time.
Consider that elevated cortisol over the long term consistently produces glucose, leading to increased blood sugar levels. A second way in which cortisol may be involved in weight gain goes back to the blood sugar-insulin problem.
Consistently high blood glucose levels along with insulin suppression lead to cells that are starved of glucose. But those cells are crying out for energy, and one way to regulate is to send hunger signals to the brain.
This can lead to overeating, and food addiction. And, of course, unused glucose is eventually stored as body fat.
Higher and more prolonged levels of cortisol in the bloodstream (like those associated with chronic stress) have been shown to have negative effects, such as:
Impaired cognitive performance
Suppressed thyroid function
Blood sugar imbalances such as hyperglycemia
Diabetes
Heart disease
Decreased bone density
Decrease in muscle tissue
Higher blood pressure
Lowered immunity and inflammatory responses in the body, slowed wound healing, and other health consequences
Increased abdominal fat is associated with a greater amount of health problems than fat deposited in other areas of the body. Some of the health problems associated with increased stomach fat are heart attacks, strokes, the development of metabolic syndrome, higher levels of “bad” cholesterol and lower levels of “good” cholesterol (HDL), which can lead to other health problems!
The Good News
So far, it may seem as though stressed-out folks are destined for failed health despite their best intentions. Fortunately, there is much we can do for our children, our pets (and ourselves) to reverse the path of destruction.
It seems the best approach to preventing childhood obesity and keeping your pets healthy cortisol levels at bay is mastering stress management and optimizing our diet.
If you're as passionate as I am about your children's health and preventing childhood obesity, chronic stress, and the grim diseases associated with a high carbohydrate processed diet please contact me, I'd love to hear some of your ideas and solution.
Comments
Thank you Angela.
This is an excellent and descriptive article Erin on the effects of high carb diets.. Thanks for sharing.