Why Is Everybody Constipated?

About every 10 to 15 years, Americans become obsessed with a macronutrient. Our current obsession with protein has Americans mass-constipated.

Imagine that about once a decade, the diet industry decides which macronutrient they’ll crown king, for now, and which one of them they’ll send to the gallows.

(This will all change later.) So the food and diet industries change up all the processed food ingredients, the packaging, the marketing–

–to reflect who is currently winning in the game of King of the Macronutrients.

So, for the past 15 years, Protein has been King. Some diet dogmas love Fat. But Carbohydrate is clearly wearing the dunce hat.

It’s probably tempting to think of this as progress, or science finally arriving at “the truth”--when really we’re just seeing a fad.

It may surprise many to know that virtually ALL diets actually supply sufficient protein.

And that excessive consumption of protein goes the same place that excessive consumption of carbs and fats do: it ends up stored in the body as fat.

If you eat too much protein, that excess becomes fat stores. Just like eating excess carbohydrates and fats become fat stores.

Here’s the yucky fact related to the Reign of Protein–or, the American consumer overvaluing protein, and fearing carbohydrates:

Everybody’s constipated. And hemorrhoids, liver dysbiosis, and bad breath are part of the obsession with proteins and fats, where we neglect and vilify the whole-food carbohydrate.

Protein has virtually no fiber. Whole foods that are mostly carbohydrate have almost all the fiber.

And that matters. A lot.

In fact, I’ve said this admittedly boring fact too many times to count:

The biggest deficit in the American diet is FIBER.

Boring, plain old soluble and insoluble fiber. Basically, your trusty sponge and broom.

As long as we keep vilifying “carbs,” we will remain plugged up, constipated, and at risk for many diseases.

A banana has almost no resemblance to a bagel. And yet they’re both labeled “carbohydrate.”

One (the bagel) will be gluey in the gut, has essentially no nutrition, and you’ll experience a blood-sugar crash an hour or two after eating it–especially if that’s all you eat.

The other (the banana) is full of soluble fiber and nutrients. You’ll feel fantastic 20 minutes after eating it.  No crash.

(Caveat: if you are diabetic, or have a very damaged metabolic system, insulin may spike even with healthy foods, until and unless enough fat is wrung from the cells that eating a high-carbohydrate whole-food diet is well tolerated.)

You might be old enough to remember how Fat was wearing the dunce cap in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Billions of dollars were spent every year, on a “low-fat” version of hundreds of different prepared foods.

Anyway, once you see it, you can’t unsee it:

How the diet industry aggrandizes one macronutrient, and vilifies another. And then changes it all up a decade later. And most of the public goes right along with it and doesn’t seem to notice.

You’re smarter than that, though.

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