What’s causing the obesity epidemic?
They’re called excitotoxins.
These are Jekyll and Hyde amino acids.
On the one hand, they’re absolutely necessary for human
health.
On the other hand, they turn toxic/poisonous when more are
eaten than needed.
What damage do they do?
They damage the brains of vulnerable people.
People who have had head injuries,
People whose brains are not yet mature,
A newborn child,
A child in the womb: a fetus.
How can excitotoxins get to the immature brains of newborns and
fetuses?
Excitotoxins are eaten by pregnant women.
Pregnant women pass what they eat to their unborn offspring
(fetuses) through the umbilical cord and the placenta.
Nursing mothers pass what they eat to their babies through mother’s
milk.
Exactly what damage do these excitotoxins do to the brains of fetuses and newborns that brings about obesity?
They obliterate (wipe out) the neurons (nerve cells) in that part of the
arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus that would have played a role in
weight control, had they not been destroyed.
And although the empty space left in the brain when the neurons are
destroyed is filled in with other cells, the neurons are not replaced.
What excitotoxins do this?
The one known best from research done in the 1970s is glutamic acid
(a.k.a. glutamate).
Glutamate is essential for normal body function. There has always
been glutamate in food. Why haven’t more people always been
obese?
Until 1957, the glutamate in food (and there is glutamate in
essentially all food) was almost always part of something larger than
itself. It was a part of protein. Scientists who wanted to examine
glutamate had to break the protein apart before they could examine it.
(They speak of glutamate being “bound up” in protein: tied to other
amino acids in long chains. That’s still true.)
Glutamate bound in protein is not excitotoxic. Only glutamate outside
of protein causes brain damage.
In 1957, the U.S. manufacturer of excitotoxic glutamate (for use in
monosodium glutamate) revised its manufacturing process, and from
that point on, virtually unlimited amounts of excitotoxic manufactured
free glutamate (MfG) were produced. After 1957, there was sufficient
MfG in ultra-processed food (at least in the U.S.) to provide the
“excess” amounts of MfG needed to cause brain damage.
Then why didn’t the “obesity epidemic” happen in 1957?
1957 was the year that the new and improved method for fabricating
virtually unlimited amounts of the excitotoxic – brain damaging – MfG
was put into production. But 1960 was the year that increased
obesity began to be noticed. 1960-62 saw the first statistics kept on
numbers of overweight people.