If we truly are what we eat, no wonder junk-food addicted Canadians are getting fatter with every mouthful. Sun reporter Holly Lake spent two months looking at what's at the end of your fork, and what it's doing to you. The results aren't pretty.

If food is not on your plate, it's in your face. You can't avoid it," says Melisa Diamantini.

"There's a McDonald's and Starbucks every two feet, and the signs and ads are everywhere. It's a constant."

As someone who loves food and feels she eats too much, this toxic food environment poses a problem.

"Food is very comforting and it's very accessible," says the 31-year-old Ottawa woman. "It's a fast fix. Other people exercise, smoke or drink. But for me, food is a release."

Her social life also revolves around food. She and her friends gossip and console each other over food. "You work like a dog all week, you go for food," she says. "It's a reward."

No doubt about it. We're a nation that likes to eat.

Every year, Canadians each consume about 1,000 pounds of food and put away an average of 2,921 calories daily.

That's just a pinch more than what's recommended by those in the know. If you're a moderately active man, you should be consuming 2,500 calories a day. If you're a woman, about 1,800.

The evidence of our love of food is everywhere, particularly in our middle, where expanding waistlines tell the story. The real price will be apparent down the road when a whole generation raised on golden fries will be robbed of their golden years.

For those who think the health system is ailing now, it may be crushed by the looming weight it will be expected to bear.

Half of adult Canucks are overweight or obese. The same trend is increasing in kids at a staggering pace, with obesity rates up fivefold from 2% in 1980 to 10% in 2004.

That's not terribly shocking if you take a good look around. Round, waddling children are everywhere, often following parents with a similar shape and stride.

As to why we're in the shape we're in, it's easy to point the fork at our food. It's everywhere. There are fast food outlets on every corner, in every mall. They've even popped up in hospitals, airports and schools. You no longer have to leave your car to get a meal. If you're in a real hurry, you can gas up and grab a meal while you're there. Mmmm. Gas station cuisine.

While there's more food available than ever before, as well as exotic foods thanks to a food industry that's gone global, many Canucks aren't choosing the cream of the crop. They're hooked on the crap: calorie-dense, fat- and sodium-laden products the food industry likes to call food.

Diamantini admits her habits are poor, but says her relationship with food is not one in which she has time to invest.

"I'm always on the bus or at work, always running around trying to get things done. I have a lot of things on my plate and it's just one more thing to deal with," she says. "I should invest more time, but I don't."

In 2001, the National Institute of Nutrition found only 53% of Canadians cited nutrition as extremely or very important to them when choosing food - down from 66% in 1994 - while 21% rated their eating habits as fair or poor, compared to 15% in 1994. Most blamed busy lives and fast/takeout food.

"Our reliance on fast foods is in many respects dooming us," says Dr. Andrew Pipe, director of prevention and rehabilitation centre at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. "Canadians are digging their graves with their teeth."

No question the national palate could use some hefty refining. But not refining in the processing sense, as many people fear that's created a chemical smorgasbord diet of which no one knows the long-term ramifications.

So how did we get here? And how do we get back, because at this point, lives depend on it.

- - -

We may be victims of our own success, but it may not be entirely our own fault. According to Dr. David Katz, an associate clinical professor of public health at Yale University, we're much like polar bears stranded in the desert.

While they're beautifully adapted to a cold environment, they have no natural defences against heat. Take them out of the cold, and everything that makes them thrive there threatens their health in the heat, says Katz.

SOAKING UP THE CALORIES

Their ability to soak up and retain heat is not voluntary. We're every bit designed for a particular environment - one where calories are scarce and activity is high.

"We consequently have adaptations that make us very good at soaking up and retaining calories, just the same way polar bears soak up and retain heat," says Katz, who's also director of Yale's Prevention Research Centre.

So we have an obesity epidemic because we can. For the first time in history, we have more calories than we need and can avoid activity because we don't have to hunt for food. "Physical activity used to be what people had to do to survive," Katz says. "Now it's something we work into our day."

The pace of change in our environment has been nothing short of staggering, and that cannot be overlooked.

"We've gone from no cars to rovers on Mars in 100 years. Not only have our genes been left in the dust, our culture has too."

Left with no defences, "It's no surprise we're all getting fat."

Rewind 100 years and it's a much different picture.

At the turn of the last century, fast food meant a meal cooked in just over an hour. The food consumed was close to its natural state - unprocessed and unrefined.

There wasn't much in the way of technology to take out some of the steps of cooking, and at the time, two-thirds of the population was poor.

There was no disposable income, and social historian Wayne Roberts says while coffee might have been less than a nickel, his great-grandfather couldn't afford it.

People mostly ate what was grown in their gardens. The portions of food were small and the level of activity was high.

"There were no cars. They walked everywhere, and elbow grease was what made things move," Roberts says.

Activity was part of everyday life and almost every workplace had a sports team. Kids played outside in the fields and in the streets. Getting struck by a car wasn't a worry.

Less than 1% of the female workforce was married. While it would be unimaginable today, in the 1950s and even into the 1970s at some companies, women were automatically fired when they married.

The thinking of the day questioned why a family needed two incomes and saw that no woman should take a job away from a man. Roberts is quick to point out he's no proponent of that thinking, but at the time food and services were expensive.

"Your wife could save you more money by working in the home and cooking and cleaning than she could by working and paying for those services."

But in the 1960s, technology started to change, and services such as laundry became more affordable. Suddenly a woman could make more working outside the home than she could save by staying home.

CRUNCHED FOR TIME

Although the first Swanson TV dinner came out of the oven in 1953, it was the 1970s that marked the real birth of processed foods, thanks to new technology that allowed food to be manufactured cheaply.

Now families could make a burger at home for $2 or they could go and buy it for even less. With many women having left the home for the workforce, the choice of what to eat was a "no-brainer" for time-crunched flock. The rise of low-cost convenience foods saw them become a staple of family eating. It was no longer a treat.

Fast forward to 2004 where burgers and fast food are king. The fast and processed food industries have taken on a life of their own, thanks in large part to time-crunched families.

With time tighter than ever, boomers in particular are feeling it. Known as the sandwich generation, they're the first in history to have heavy demands on their time from three sides.

"They have children who are often right in the ages that are demanding a lot of time or anxiety, and they have parents who are the same," Roberts says. "My mom and dad only had me to look after."

His grandparents died around 65 and his parents worked 40 hours a week. Today, 50 hours are the norm. "We don't have a food problem," he says. "We have a time problem."

According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the time crunch confronting Canadian families appears to be a key barrier to heart-healthy living. With both parents working, double the income can mean half the time with family.

The foundation found that 53% of us felt quality of life was "dramatically" impacted by a lack of time for friends and family.

To make up for the crunch, people take time from the only two disposable areas they have: sleep and mealtime. That's in contrast to many European countries, where two-hour lunches have always been the norm.

"They would never think of calling that disposable time as we do," Roberts says. "We never learned to cherish family mealtimes and food as one of the simple pleasures in life."

- - -

It's fair to say that food was likely tastier for our ancestors because when it was fresh, it was fresh. The year was punctuated by celebrations of food such as strawberry socials.

"Farms were, at most, a few miles from the city," Roberts says. "It had that just-picked taste. They had that all year."

There were also many more kinds of chickens, potatoes and apples than there are today. Now, our food travels the world to land on our table. That's created a greater variety of exotic foods, but overall there are fewer varieties of domestic food.

Processing has left us with a greater range of manipulations of a narrower base of foods, says Rod MacRae, a Toronto food policy consultant. Now 90% of our food intake globally comes from 15 plants and animals.

"What has happened is that the food industry has taken these 15 basic ingredients and done all these things with them," he says. "Not only do we eat from within a narrowed range of plants and animals, we're eating a narrower range of plant varieties and animal breeds."

An example is apples. There were more than 30 varieties in Canada 50 years ago. Today's market is dominated by four.

"Now all apples have to meet a certain size. Potatoes are grown so that they don't go dark when fried," Roberts says.

Then there are the things applied to food as it grows and to extend its shelf life. Additives and pesticides have created a feast of chemicals.

"You didn't need a PhD in chemistry to eat food in 1900, but you do today," says Roberts, who's also the co-ordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council.

While better labelling is on its way, in the end, what's on those labels might not mean much to us. "I'm a reasonably educated person, but I can't figure out half the things in food," he says.

- - -

Just as our food has changed, so has what's killing us. In the early 1900s, contagious diseases were the big killers and people were relatively free of chronic disease.

We've marginalized the big killers of yesterday, like tuberculosis and typhoid, but have eaten our way to a whole new host of problems: diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

"We gained a good number of years in life, but we have not moved from bad health to good health," Roberts says. "We've swapped one set of problems for another."

Diamantini worries all the time about what kind of health she may be eating her way to, but she also feels bombarded.

"It's a constant struggle," she says of her weight. "If you're addicted to liquor, you can avoid it. It's not always in your face, but food is."