As a nation, we are obsessed with food. Fast-food restaurants and their billboards clutter our city streets. Volumes have been written on the topic of food. Newsstands are littered with magazines about it, and there is even an entire television network devoted just to food. We savor it, discuss it, and even plan our lives around it. And we consume a lot of it. In the process, we’ve also managed to supersize our health risks dramatically over the past few decades.
The kind of food eaten has nearly as big an impact on health as the amount — and sometimes more. In fact, much of the malnutrition in the world can be attributed to unhealthy food or consumption of “empty calories” (highly processed foods lacking important vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients). Though it may seem surprising, many obese individuals are actually significantly malnourished. Continued…
