Where’ve y’all been? Paleo’s been out for at least a couple of years, and we’re well into the post-paleo era. The writings of folks associated with paleo, like McEwen, Wolf, Nikoley, Sisson, etc., has definitely evolved over the last couple of years. Paleo is so very late-2000s now.
I agree to an extent but some obvious facts are more obvious than others. When it comes to diet, a huge number of people are constantly trying to sell you on this idea or that (the room is crowded because so many tall people are coming in, or because so many people whose names start with S are coming in). Stating bluntly the obvious fact can help to counter some of this nonsense. Maybe some of it isn’t nonsense, but some of it has to be.
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Maybe you only mean this as hyperbole, but I’ve never quite understood why we would suppose our brains are so antiquated. 50000 years ago chihuahuas were wolves. 50000 years ago there were no domestic cattle to milk, and yet a good portion of humans now have lactase as adults, more or less as an adaptation to drinking from cows. If there had been any selective advantage to it, that surely would be plenty of time for our preferences to adapt too, at least as far as basic agriculture.
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Stating bluntly the obvious fact can help to counter some of this nonsense.
Perhaps, but it doesn’t go anywhere near answering the question. We already know there’s a caloric imbalance. So "calories-in/calories-out’ is nothing but a naive restatement of the problem. A tautology. It doesn’t answer the question: ‘why?’
Why is there a caloric imbalance? What are the factors driving this imbalance?
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This is just based on my personal experiences as an outsider visiting the Midwest for a few months (which is obviously not the healthiest area of the US in any case) and cooking American recipes, but anyway…
If you compare an average supermarket (i.e. not one marketed as a place to find health food), you can see how much people’s tastes are skewed towards flavoured, refined, fatty, sugary foods. You can find salty and sugary snacks all around the world, but plain flavours look unusual on an American supermarket shelf and full-grain looks like a health food rather than a normal option. You have to look for a healthy, unsweetened cereal, while Germany would have a number of plain cereals and a selection of unsweetened or not too sweet muesli along with the sugary stuff. If I’m making an American cake, I’ll usually just use about a third or half of the sugar or sweetener and usually still feel that I could have taken some more away. The fact that I sometimes walked or cycled to the store when I had access to a car was weird (even though it was less than five minutes away on the bike). I got a few more odd looks when I took the kids around in a bike trailer. People tended to eat out or order in a lot more than in Europe, and the food tended to be less healthy (more and cheaper cheese on a pizza, larger servings, more occasions when ice cream or other overly sweet desserts were served). The food was sometimes really good, but if you’re used to healthier foods like salad with just a little dressing (or none at all), soft drinks rarely or never, less dairy etc., you wonder how people can have the diet they do.
Still, I gain weight every time I go because a lot of this is difficult to change as an individual (you get invited out for a meal, you need to be travel 20 miles in a short period of time because everyone is expected to be using a car, you get influenced by the local idea of a normal diet, etc.). I get that there are often quite complex reasons behind people gaining weight or being unhealthy beyond diet alone, but there were a number of people I’d hear going on about the HFCS making them fat and I’d be wondering if they were serious. It may be a factor, but that much of any sugar has to be bad for you.
(edited for structure - body is too similar, etc.)
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So the obesity epidemic is caused by carbs and fats imitating proteins, but presumably not imitating proteins [and fats] enough to cause vomiting?
Your brain, perhaps. I’ve never understood why some people crave protein, or meats, or nuts, or the like. or bacon of all things.
Such hate. Did paleo destroy your health? Or if it’s not double-blind peer-reviewed 20-year population study-approved it’s homeopathy-style quackery by default? There’s many areas where diet and exercise Science can’t help but move slower than small-scale real life experimentation. Personally I think focusing the emphasis on eating more of the crap we’ve evolved with and less of the crap we’ve engineered 100 years ago sounds like a very sensible starting point, considering how little we seem to really understand as a whole. And it does work for some people way beyond placebo.
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Paleo is like many other fad diets. A small proportion of people may significantly benefit from it, but there is no one size fits all, no matter how many advertising dollars get thrown at it. See also: Blood-type diet, South Beach Diet, Cross-Fit, and a wide variety of other regimes and products.
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Years ago I watched Penn & Teller’s Bullshit episode on diets. After going through a lot of wild diet crazes that having pretty much nothing to do with reality, they had their drummer for their stage performances reveal the secret of how he lost 90 lbs: “Just stop fuckin’ eating so much.” It isn’t that easy (and they know it’s not that easy and did later episodes on obesity) but it was a meaningful statement of the goal in a field where the norm is to talk absolute bullshit. Because of that, I think a “naive restatement of the problem” has a value here.
All the necessary information are on the nutritional label.
No, I don’t. Because no one took the benches away. All the healthy food is still available, along with the preprocessed stuff, the too-large fast food portions and all the candy you can wish for.
We just have to buy that instead of what makes us fat. And as far a I can tell this isn’t any more expensive than the convenience food in America as it isn’t in Germany. Nor is cooking rocket science.
It’s also not a matter of time. People still find hours each day to watch TV or play computer games or surf the web. They could easily find the half hour they’d need to cook.
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But it explains something. Most importantly, why people gain weight.
It doesn’t explain why they eat more, but as long, as a large group of large people - at least in my experience - deny that they eat too much for their level of activity, the question why they eat too much is pointless.
Which would be a fatal flaw in my analogy if it were impossible to sit in a hallway with no benches rather than merely more awkward or uncomfortable (last I checked, we can sit on floors). Minor inconveniences have effects on behaviour. Signals of cultural approval or disapproval of certain actions can as well.
It seems like if you look at one person who eats poorly and say, “You should make better decisions for your health.” But if you look at a whole culture where it is the norm, “Everyone should make better decisions for their health” is a real non-suggestion.
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A fine opinion. I think we agree on ‘no single True Solution’ (which is why I talked about a starting point to health experimentation, not a final word) and disagree on the relative merits of each ‘fad’ example. But that’s beyond the point.
That said, the blanket dismissal of things based solely on popularity (or ‘trendiness’) without a deeper look can be just as irrational as believing without question every new thing that comes along.
I commented on the usual pattern of comment threads related to obesity/diet/food. Frankly, I think it’s a good sign that specific fad diets haven’t been brought up thus far. It’s an improvement in discourse. Of late, paleo is the fad that has brought out the often irrational and most vociferous defenders.
At some point, western humans, and Usians in particular, will need to come to grips with the basic fact that diets never work. If you want to lose weight permanently, you have to commit to changing your relationship with food. Especially if your work/life schedule makes getting more exercise a desire rather than something you can attain.
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It is hard to take anything seriously based on the behavior of the most fanatic lunatic-fringe adherents. Unfortunately, by definition those are usually the most vocal and visible members of any group.
And yes, changing one’s relationship with food in a permanent basis certainly trumps any old try-it-for-a-while-then-go-back-to-what-you-did-before ‘diet’.
It’s a hard and uncertain thing to do and there’s many different and often conflicting ways of trying and numerous pitfalls along the way. But it’s worth a serious try for many of us, because the alternative is clearly not working.
correlation ≠ causation … or else we would think fat was contagious as there most certainly are cluster groups. 
the main problem with these studies is they want to find a single cause/source for a multifaceted condition.
lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle, over consumption, consumption of “cheap” refined calories, an unbalanced diet with too much of any group fat/carbs/protein, even genetic factors in some cases, all contribute to the overall issue.
but no one wants to state the obvious because that isn’t sensational, and doesn’t get any attention.
Obesity driven by overconsumption …
Was enough of a headline for me.
You bring up a good point, although it’s not completely accurate. The only human population group with a majority of adults who can digest lactose is Western European. Lactose intolerance is actually the norm in the world. People get used to the symptoms, eat yogurt and hard cheeses which are easier to digest than milk, concentrate on goat or sheep instead of cow dairy products, take a pill, and/or avoid dairy as much as possible. But you’re right: the development of the ability to digest lactose after early childhood HAS occurred relatively recently in human history. There’s a reason that example is always used, though: it’s one of the few examples we have of human evolution occurring within recorded history. Really, most of what makes us human has not changed in the last 50,000 years.
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