The Modern Nutritional Diseases: and How to Prevent Them

Millions of people have been using the low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate diet that has been promoted in the mass media for last half-century for prevention of heart disease and stroke. During this same period, the numbers of new cases of heart disease and stroke have not decreased as promised, but increased, and type-2 diabetes and obesity, which were uncommon 50 years ago, have grown to become major epidemics.

In this book, heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, obesity, and cancer are among the numerous chronic diseases appropriately termed modern nutritional diseases because scientific studies and biochemical facts clearly point to the modern American diet as a major underlying cause. The heart-healthy diet is based on faulty science ? it is sugar and starch, not saturated fat and cholesterol, that are responsible for high blood cholesterol, type-2 diabetes, and obesity.

This book describes how the American diet has changed since the advent of farming and, in modern times, with advances in food technology. It presents evidence to show how these changes are implicated not only in causation of the modern nutritional diseases but also in other growing disease problems such as Alzheimer?s disease, osteoporosis, senile dementia, and depression. Caring for one?s health has become hopelessly difficult because the mass media, driven by advertising revenues, is the single most important source of health information for most Americans.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part defines the problem. The second part provides the science that documents the cause/effect relationship between the modern American diet and the current epidemics of chronic inflammatory diseases. The third part describes dietary modifications that constitute a primary prevention program that can reduce the risk of the modern nutritional diseases and, at the same time, improve one?s health and well-being. Alice and Fred Ottoboni, are both public health scientists who, prior to retirement, had worked for many years investigating and preventing diseases in population groups. Over these years they learned that diseases do not ?just happen.? Every disease has a cause, and once the cause is known, prevention is often a very reasonable and proper next step.

Alice Ottoboni earned a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Biochemistry from the University of California, Davis. Her professional career focused on nutritional biochemistry and the toxicity of food contaminants and additives. She is the author of The Dose Makes the Poison, a plain-language guide to toxicology for lay people, first published in 1984. The third edition, coauthored with Patricia Frank, Ph.D., is published by John Wiley and Sons. Fred Ottoboni earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and a Masters Degree in Public Health and Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His primary professional interest was the prevention of occupational diseases. He is the author of Korea Between the Wars: A Soldier?s Story,