Well, if we can’t be number one in something, this would be it 🙂 But we can’t crow too loudly because they only won by one percentage point 🙁

The latest comprehensive obesity study has shown that 26 per cent of adult Australians – almost four million – are now obese, one million more than the last calculation in 1999.
The findings give Australia top spot as the world’s most overweight nation, ahead of the notoriously super-sized Americans, who have a 25 per cent obesity rate.

You know, since I’ve started reading the Abs Diet, I realize just how many calories are hidden in our foods. Take high fructose corn syrup, it’s been added to our food since the 70’s and it contains a ton of calories but your body doesn’t recognize them. According to David Zinczenko, the author of the Abs Diet (check out his before and after picture at the above link):

HFCS shut off your body’s natural appetite control switches, so you can eat and eat and eat far beyond what your body would normally be able to handle. You probably know people who can down a 2-liter bottle of Coke in a single-sitting. Well, guess what? Before HFCS was invented, humans couldn’t do that. Our natural control switches would kick in, detect the sugar we were consuming and say “No mas!” But by shutting off the switches that control appetite HFCS — a true junk food — is making America fat. By the late 1990’s, Americans were consuming about 62 pounds per person every year. That’s 228 additional calories per person per day.

I wonder if the Australians have been adding it to their food as well?
I think it’s time that we stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the food companies into overeating. We can consume more of their product because the sugar has been replaced by HFC. Check the ingredients of you favorite processed foods and you might be surprised to discover that HFC is the number one ingredient.
Since we started the diet we’ve been checking the products we buy for it. We found it in jams(all of the ones we checked). We finally found a jam, Smuckers that’s low in sugar (that’s the code phrase to look for to ensure that the product is HFC free). It’s the second ingredient in Minute Maid Lemonade (it’s after water) and it was even in my daughter’s Yoplait yogurt. I was trying to buy rolls for lunch today and found it in whole wheat sandwich rolls made by the grocery store’s bakery.
When I go shopping now, it takes me forever to buy groceries because I have to check for trans fat (which is another additive that the food companies have added to our food that’s bad for us), HFC, saturated fat and whether it’s made with whole wheat or grain.