Landstuhl CrossFit

Daily Workouts: 0500, 0600, 1630
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9-7-5 rounds for time of:
muscle-ups
squat snatches (135 lb)
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SWOD
3X5 Squat
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Food Consumption/Obesity in Pictures – What are we Doing to Insure Change?
I first spotted the following photos on the Halberg Photography Blog. They are part of a collection taken in 2007 featured in the book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, and were also published in a Time Magazine article – all photos are copyrighted by Peter Menzel. Each picture shows the weekly food intake for an average family in their country.
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I like the pictorial representation, because the vast amount of processed food we’re ingesting is absolutely shocking in pictures. No wonder our kids have difficulties identifying common fresh vegetables. And for a fantastic pictorial representation of how 52 weeks of food consumption adds up for the average American, get a close look at this graphic:
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Is faulty science and the resultant misguided dietary recommendations promoted by our government responsible for our obesity crisis? Dr. Barry Sears described our nation’s conventional dietary guidelines including the USDA’s food pyramid guidance as akin to manslaughter more devastating than anything Osama bin Laden could devise in this free video series courtesy of CrossFit Journal.
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But we are not the only country ingesting vast amounts of processed foods and drinks (as you can see from the photos shown above), and also (perhaps correspondingly) not the only country suffering an obesity problem. The International Association for the Study of Obesity provides an outstanding interactive graphic featuring the most recent obesity statistics for men, women, and children worldwide.

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It does seem possible that America is on the brink of a food revolution, as more and more scientists, researchers, medical doctors, as well as ordinary citizens armed with personal testimonies have started vocally advocating in favor of blanket reform of human nutritional research and practice. A multitude of scientific evidence and first-person reports have surfaced just in the last 5 years documenting a wide range of health benefits experienced following adoption of dietary lifestyles completely at odds with conventional dietary guidelines (the USDA’s food pyramid). An April 2010 evidence review from renowned researcher Frank Hu, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard’s School of Public Health and Dr. Ronald Krauss, one of the most prominent lipid researchers in the world, involving 347,747 subjects indicated that excess dietary starch and sugar and NOT saturated fat, bears most of the blame for America’s high rate of cardiovascular disease.
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The USDA Advisory Committee’s preliminary 2010 Dietary Guidelines don’t seem to yield many constructive changes on the old guidelines. Here is a critical critique of USDA guidelines (new and old) assembled by university scientists and researchers who comprise the Committee for a Healthy Nation (CHN).
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On July 8, 2010, the USDA opened its doors to anyone in the US who wanted to provide input into what should go into the 2010 Dietary Guidelines. Kendra Wyatt, Dr. Pramod Khosla, Sally Fallon Morell, Morton Satin, Dr. Richard Feinman, Adele Hite, Dr. Jeff Volek, Kathryne Pirtle, Linda Eckhardt (on behalf of Dr. John Salerno), Alyce Ortuzar, and Jimmy Moore all spoke in defense of the low-carb/low-sugar lifestyle (the transcript will be available here in Dec 2010), and those ten individuals represented 20 percent of the testimonies given.
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The following links are to groups of scientists/researchers and/or organizations presenting persuasive evidence in support of the inherent health in following a low-carb lifestyle.

• The Weston Price Foundation
• Steffan Lindeberg & Colleagues Research
• The Nutrition and Metabolism Society
• Track Your Plaque Heart Scan Resource Center
• The American Society of Evolutionary Medicine
• The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS)

There are many more scientists, researchers, and medical doctors supporting drastic change in conventional dietary guidelines who are speaking out individually from a personal “blog-roots level”, some of whom we link on the right in our “Nutrition Experts/Podcasts” section. Conventional dietary guidelines work for some, but evidently not for a significant proportion, perhaps most of our population.
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Change in American conventional dietary guidelines would also necessitate revision of the current Farm Bill, 90% of which subsidizes (our tax dollars) five crops: corn, rice, cotton, wheat, and soybeans. Think we’d see dietary reform if food and beverage products made from these crops (including high-fructose corn syrup) were no longer cheap at the consumer level? If the government no longer advised their consumption?
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Check out Landstuhl CrossFit’s previous Nutrition or Paleo Challenge posts for more information as well as specific guidance on how to adopt a non-processed foods/lower carb lifestyle yourself. Need motivation? Testimonials are just a google-search away, but here’s a recent one from Seattle CrossFit which I found particularly inspiring: Jules Marsh lost 160lbs in a year, and gives full credit to her Paleo diet combined with CrossFit.