I lost my father to undiagnosed prediabetes, he had lived a healthy lifestyle in India but inexplicably gained about a pound of weight per year after arriving in the united states, no matter what exercise or diet he tried. My father was a scientist, both a statistician and a physicist, and he was highly disciplined. Like so many other people, he relied on the federal government healthy eating guidelines, shifting to a “healthy” low fat diet, and abandoned saturated natural fats for industrial seed oils. As he became progressively more overweight and metabolically unhealthy, his physician added the recommended statins, which only hastened his disease progression. He became a casualty of big food marketing, governmental policy and big pharma. At the time, I could see what was happening, but didn’t have the insight.
I also noticed that as I was becoming middle aged, I too started to gain weight, despite heroic physical activity. In fact, I learned of my father’s unexpected death while on an intense mountain bike trip in the canyonlands of Utah. Clearly something was wrong, and it wasn’t for the lack of physical activity.
