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At least once every other month my wife Laura and I crack open the photo album of our 1996 trip to Tanzania where we spent three weeks camping in some of that country's most beautiful game parks. Flipping through the pages we marvel at the amazingly beautiful giraffes, hippos, buffaloes, impalas, hyenas and baboons effortlessly being part of the web of life in the Serengeti. We glance at photos of elephants, topis, crocodiles, wildebeests, rhinos and many others all living within miles of each other in the Ngorongoro Crater, surrounded by huge expanses of vegetation and water - a veritable Garden of Eden where nothing is lacking. When we look more closely, however, we're struck more by what we don't see in any of the photos. Even though these animals inhabit areas where their natural food is in abundance, none are overweight. Furthermore, there are no zebras calculating the percentage of fat they are about to ingest; no lions ensuring that they're "in the zone" before sinking their teeth into a Thompson's gazelle; no cheetahs too fat to climb to the top branch of their abode without the use of an elevator. Even more astonishing is that after we put down the photo album, and go out for an evening walk through town, we marvel at how few of the folks patronizing our local eateries are as fit as those animals. At least half of Americans are overweight, and about 27% of those are obese! Why is this? Why do these animals show no signs of either overweight or underweight (and count no calories), while we Americans are ballooning out of control as we spend millions of dollars on dieting and compulsively count calories? What went wrong in the last 100 years? VIEW ARTICLE AT VEG SOURCE

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