Last week's column began with a factoid you may have found hard to believe, but characterizes the out-of-kilter culture in which we live. U.S. fast food purchases now exceed grocery store purchases per year.

To show cause and effect, you also read about the CDC report that revealed U.S. citizens weigh far more than ever before, a communique crying out for more commentary, your consideration, but not necessarily an entire column. Therefore, this column will also feature two other factoids to help you enhance your health.What's up? Body weightEarlier this year, BMC Public Health reported that U.S. citizens now rank as the third heaviest group of people in the world. Only the inhabitants of two tiny Pacific Island countries weigh more.Possibly even more perturbing: how quickly average weight in the U.S. has increased. According to the CDC, the average woman in 2015 weighs 166 pounds, the same amount the average male weighed in the early 1960s.The average male now weighs 195.5 pounds, 29.5 pounds more than the average man in the early 1960s.To show how much heavier we are than the rest of the world, a Washington Post article noted that you need 20 typical inhabitants of Bangladesh to create one ton of body weight, but only 12.2 typical Americans.So why do we weigh almost 40 percent more than the Bangladeshis?While too little exercise and too much food are obvious reasons, more and more studies are suggesting that certain the types of food - or lack thereof - and certain types of additives exacerbate the problem.Fiber fights weight gainFor years, the logic behind filling up on fiber was as follows: fiber can't be digested, so it's in essence "free" calories. Furthermore, some dietary fat binds to fiber during digestion, creating another small reduction in calories.While those are reasons enough to make sure you're consuming at least 40 grams of dietary fiber a day (I believe you should ingest more than the typical health organization recommendation), a new study done at Georgia State University suggests that a lack of a specific type of fiber, soluble fiber, creates an environment in your gut that leads to weight gain.To conceptualize the best known benefits of soluble fiber, picture yourself making any gelatin-based desert. As soon as you add the boiling water to the gelatin, the liquid begins to thicken.Soluble fiber does something similar in the gut, and cholesterol easily binds to it. That's why eating a high-in-soluble-fiber food regularly, like oatmeal, can create a decrease in cholesterol levels.Now consider what occurs 60 minutes or so after a gelatin-based desert has been refrigerated. It's not yet solidified (that takes three or four hours); its consistency is more like a thick milkshake.If the simple sugars you ate commingle with that "thick milkshake," your body cannot process them as quickly as usual - which keeps your blood sugar levels from rising too quickly and your body from secreting an excessive amount of insulin to counteract the rise, an excessive secretion that usually means the simple sugars get stored as fat.The recent Georgia State University research adds another reason to ingest soluble fiber, a lack of it creates inflammation in the intestines, an inflammation that in laboratory mice led to a statistically significant weight gain.Sour news about sweetenersLaboratory mice were given the equivalent to the maximum daily recommended amount of the artificial sweetener, saccharin, for 12 weeks in a study performed at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and published in the journal Nature. Subsequently, these mice recorded unusually high blood sugar levels -aka glucose intolerance - when given a meal high in simple sugars.In humans, glucose intolerance is often a harbinger for type 2 diabetes and definitely makes it easier to gain unwanted weight.Compared to the control mice or the mice given other artificial sweeteners, the saccharin-fed mice had a different makeup of intestinal bacteria. When the researchers transplanted the gut bacteria from the saccharin-fed mice into healthy mice, they also developed glucose intolerance.A number of other studies have linked a proliferation of "good" gut bacteria with good health. Likewise, studies similar to this one have linked a predominance of "bad" gut bacteria with weight gain and an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes.Next, the researchers gave seven human volunteers the FDA's maximal dose of saccharin - 5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight - for six days. Four developed glucose intolerance. Three did not.Keep in mind that saccharin is the artificial sweetener that has created the most controversy. The fact of the matter is that artificial sweeteners are just that - artificial.Certain individuals handle natural substances poorly, so it's really no surprise that just more than half of a small sample group reacted adversely to a maximum dose of anything artificial.As in the past, I advise you to pay particular attention to the amount of each type of artificial sweetener you use and experiment with two natural alternatives, stevia and erythritol.