[MUSIC] The human body runs on food. Once, food shortage was the major concern.

After the Second World War,

technological advances in food production led to a new era that was
characterized by an overabundance of inexpensive food, and
relatively little physical activity. In the decades that followed, other socio-
cultural shifts continued to
contribute to the changing way we ate. Women who had previously controlled most
of the average family's food preparation, now enter the workforce
in significant numbers. And the processed food industry
began to capitalize on our need for fast convenient food. This meant that fewer
meals for
being cooked at home, and since convenient foods were generally
higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average persons caloric
intake increase dramatically. Academic studying
the intersection of food and health like Michael Pollan,
have written extensively about the implications of this cultural
shift on the way we eat today. >> To the extent, we outsource our food. First, we
eat less healthy food,
more salt, and fat, and sugar. But we also eat more food because
processed food is often designed as snack food, and marketed to us as
a way to eat continually through the day. >> The changes in the way, we,
as a society ate led to the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease
with well-defined health consequences, and medical recommendations were made to try
and address this growing health crisis. In the second half of the 20th century,
a lot of attention was focused on reducing saturated fat,
and total fat in our diets. And the processed food industry
responded by giving us what we wanted. But, they still had a vested interest
in selling their products, so they found other ways to make
the reduced fat products taste good. One way they did this was by
adding significantly more sugar, and other forms of sugar, like corn
syrup to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced
fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf life. So the food
industry had a huge
incentive to add corn syrup, and other sweeteners to packaged foods. The resulting
increase in our intake
of simple sugars fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. These shifts
in our food
consumption patterns have led us to a point in history
where our physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat,
has become maladaptive. The balance between food availability and energy
expenditure has been disrupted,
and its left us with an exponential increase in the incidence
of obesity over the past 60 years. An epidemic that
the World Health Organization has labeled a worldwide
public health crisis. [MUSIC]