A study completed in the United States clearly shows that obesity rates are continually rising whilst more Americans have become more physically active.

Health experts say the key to reversing the obesity epidemic is all about what we put in our mouth.

The study by the University of Washington looked at three million Americans over the past decade and found increasing levels of exercise reduced death, heart disease and diabetes but did not put a dent in obesity rates.

Professor Bruce Neal, from the George Institute for Global Health at Sydney University, says the problem is the same in Australia.

“We’ve seen physical activity go up, but obesity continue to rise. What this basically says is that the cause is diet,” he said.

Professor Neal says even this can be hard to control.

“The reason people are eating badly is not because they have suddenly become sloths and gluttons, it’s because they live in an environment where it is incredibly hard to eat well,” he said.

“Vast amounts of food, fundamentally unhealthy, really large, really energy dense.”

He says food is now responsible for most chronic diseases.

It is clear from multitudes of other studies that obesity increases the risk of our modern day lifestyle diseases including type 2 diabetes. The situation today is so bad that we as a society have come to the point where we consider food that we find on the supermarket shelves as healthy.

This could not be further from the truth.

The reality is that these foods are not food. They are food like products that have been made in factories from extracted food components. Doing this defines a food as processed.

These food provide a lot of energy otherwise known as sugar but very little nutrition leaving our bodies starving for what we really need to sustain ourselves.

It is these foods that are causing the obesity epidemic. The consumption of an as grown plant based diet is known to reverse obesity and also many lifestyle diseases including type 2 diabetes.

The Australian ABC’s PM program reported a very interesting finding.

It seems that exercise is on the increase and so is obesity.

The conclusion is that it is the foods we eat that are causing obesity.

To listen to the report directly on the ABC follow this link