I started my reducing diet yesterday and this conversation is making me hungry.
Spending a couple of weeks traveling, the latter part in Britain and Wales (home to splendid cask ales and huge plates of cheese) has swelled my paunch beyond my ego’s ability to cope. So I shall be hungry for a few months and do a lot of sit-ups. Then I will be less fat.
A thing that never ceases to amaze me: most people seem to think that a single dietary prescription exists that is suitable for all humans. I call it the nutritionist fallacy.
True enough – and yes, I should have said lactase occurs in a large population rather than proportion. I wasn’t arguing that we’ve been changing dramatically, though, but that there has been lots of time for that to happen, which is why I mentioned dogs too.
That suggests to me that we’re not actually tuned up to a Middle Palaeolithic world and failing to move on, but rather to a much more recent one, and if we haven’t changed much it’s more likely because there hasn’t actually been much pressure for adjustment. So saying our brain thinks it’s still 50,000 years ago greatly exaggerates how out-of-date it is.
Maybe that’s me pedantically arguing against a rhetorical fluorish in this case, but I think it’s an idea taken seriously, so I thought I might say something.
The question, though, is why we’re “eating so much” that we get grossly obese if we just let things go. 100 years ago, people didn’t count calories or limit portions, and obesity was rare. People just ate until they were full, and then stopped - and stayed thin.
That’s the real question - what happened to our internal “fullness” sensors. Something is broken, either in the food we eat, or in our bodies, or both, to screw up our internal calorie counter - and the solution to that is not calorie-counting or living in a permanent state of semi-starvation. The solution to that is fixing what’s broken so that we can eat the way most normal people eat - eat when we are hungry and stop when we are full.
I’m going to run out on a limb and suggest that some people aren’t only interested in diets to lose weight, but are interested in dietary changes to improve health. I’d suspect that strange diets are popular because people can’t separate the good advice from the bad, and because everyone has different allergies and intolerances and digestive issues.
Then your analogy was the wrong way around. As a society, we
didn’t take the benches away, we put benches everywhere.
But while “society" is composed of many single people and is in some ways more than the sum of these people, it’s still single people who have to make their own decisions.
Nearly everyone living in the Western world has the means to eat more healthy, indeed live more healthy. The details vary from county to country, though. If they don’t want to do that, that’s okay. They can also expect not to be mocked or ridiculed if they happen to be obese. But the constant excuses are not helping.
It never ceases to amaze me how everyone just KNOWS the cure for obesity. Surprising its such a problem.
Of course I just knew it too, despite the fact that I was usually obese and graduated to adult onset diabetes and metabolic syndrome. I guess I just felt my implementation was faulty.
Fortunately to me I read “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes (lots of youtube videos if you want it quick).
Now I’m lean for the first time in my life and my blood work is stellar.
Taubes simply looks at the science that has been completely ignored by the current crop of nutrition “scientists”. The bottom line is that, for susceptible individuals, over consumption of carbs is the problem. Exercise is useless in this case, as are diets, the only cure is reducing carb consumption below the threshold that cause disease in the individual.
Obesity is a disease! What a concept! There are no such things as healthy carbs, only less harmful ones. This is why I had high cholesterol (240 total) on a low glycemic, whole foods, noprocessed foods, pescatarian diet (13/15/72 % fat/pro/carb) and why my cholesterol dropped 75 points when I started eating bacon everyday (70/19/11 % fat/pro/carb).
It amuses me to no end to watch these food pros try to figure out how to get people to eat more fat without actually saying so. I guess they don’t want to admit that they (and the cheap carb ag giants who fund them) have created this mess.
But don’t listen to me or that gaunt, self righteous “I’ve never had a weight problem because of my own personal wonderfulness” true believer. Watch the video, read the book, try eating this way for 90 days. Hopefully you’ll experience what I have; disease remission and leaness with no starvation and no change in exercise habits (I’ve always exercised heavily, never made a difference).
To be more precise, though, it is single people having to make their own decisions in the environment that they find themselves in - an environment that is almost entirely constructed by people. Despite our illusions of ourselves, decisions we make have as much to do with things outside ourselves and things inside.
Strange/fad diets are popular because people want a quick fix for losing weight instead of changing their relationship with food. Not all that many humans are good at delayed gratification.
Yes, I understand our neolithic cultivated plants and animals are not identical to wild ones. But that doesn’t mean eating plants and animals is futile so let’s just go for the all-fructose, gluten and margarine diet because everything is ‘processed’ anyway.
That talk is an interesting mix of real science and weird vegetarian bias (“we have no fangs so meat is wrong”). What it certainly is not is the ‘James Randi exposes the fraud’ style debunking it sells itself as. I think it’s very telling that her own guidelines on how to actually eat healthy (eat a diversity of whole, fresh and in season foods instead of focusing on nutrients and calories, care for your gut flora) is much more closely aligned to the recommendations promoted in most real paleo approaches than the odd, supposedly ‘paleo myths’ she does debunk.
If anyone cares for a thorough, level-headed and paleo-minded response to that talk, I recommend the one below in either text or annotated video versions. Don’t worry, you can leave your skeptic’s hat on.
Yeah, but 100 years ago everyone walked several miles a day and nobody sat on their tuchus “surfing” the Internet. This is actually a quite sufficient explanation; if you walk three hours a day and never use a car, bike, computer or TV you’ll be able to eat whatever you want, too.
Obviously for many of us that’s not a sustainable lifestyle, though. We’ve structured our society and infrastructure to require vehicles and sitting down and discourage functional exercise.
Edit: I think Meepster and I both know that fat people did exist 100 years ago, and that not everybody walked everwhere (trains existed, the rich had carriages, etc.) but we’re both painting with a broad brush to get our ideas across.
In fact nothing is caused by diet alone except obesity.
Not true, obesity is caused by diet, lifestyle, genetics, medications and drugs, health, etc. But thanks for making that claim and proving my point.
You’re arguing like a climate denialist. “We’ve always had storms, that big storm doesn’t prove that climate change is real…”. The links between obesity and poor health are well and truly established. The links between obesity and many obesity related diseases are well and truly established. Does it mean that everybody that is a little overweight will be unhealthy or get Type 2 Diabetes or heart disease? No, just as some truly lucky people seem to live to 85 in reasonable health despite smoking a pack a day for most their lives, there are always people that just seem to have genetics that keep them healthy, just as there are some people who are highly disposed to certain illnesses.
This post is both interesting and kind of disgusting. It is shocking that it is being argued that the obesity epidemic may not be caused by sedentary lifestyles, but rather by overconsumption because our appetite controls systems are being tricked by carbohydrates and fats that mimic proteins. These certain proteins are much cheaper than the real thing and have made their way into the feed of livestock and pets. The fact that this has actually caused us to evolve appetite systems that are bad at judging when we’ve had enough of them is scary. It is mind blowing to think that the processed foods we have been eating have actually altered our bodies and are responsible for overeating and constant cravings. I understand that this substitution is driven by economics and the effort to produce things as cheap as possible, but at what point is it too much? I believe that point has come with the alteration of our appetite systems. Although it is appealing because the manufacturers get fatter livestock and the high cost of protein drives consumers to purchase cheaper processed food loaded with fat and carbs, this is having a horrible effect on our bodies and something needs to be done. If this can help reduce the obesity epidemic than it will actually benefit the economy in other aspect, such as reduced cost of medical bills.
You can make comparisons to climate denial, but I really don’t think causal relationships have been established. To me it seems much more likely that there are factors which tend to cause both obesity and obesity-linked diseases so obesity is merely a proxy. It is recognized that while the general population is less healthy when they are obese, there are subgroups of the population who are more healthy when they are obese. And then we use BMI as a poor metric of a poor proxy for health.
Here’s the thing: “Obese” means BMI 30 or higher. “Overweight” means BMI 25-30. Studies conducted linking BMI to life expectancy show a wide range of outcomes, including many studies that show you live the longest at BMI 27. And being underweight is actually much more problematic than overweight in terms of longevity. Right now there are doctors all over the country telling people to lose weight to improve their health when those people will have longer lives if they do not lose weight.
I am currently Obese (I want to lose some weight). However, I once got myself to the point of having a BMI of 25. I looked emaciated, I could count my ribs through my skin, people were concerned about my health. When I started putting weight back on, I had a specialist at a hospital advise me that my BMI was unhealthy and that I should lose weight. I had a BMI of about 28.
Cutting carbs is common advice, but it isn’t practical advice for everyone. In my case, I have allergies, intolerances, and digestive issues, so that [aside from the allergens] my body rejects proteins, fats, alcohols such as sorbitol, and certain sugars such as sucrose and fructose, if there aren’t enough other foods, carbs, with them.
It is true that obesity may be less of a cause and more of a symptom of a larger problem related to insulin resistance and other hormonal imbalances that lead to diabetes and other diseases. Some studies related to the ‘insulin hypothesis*’ popularized by the science journalism of Gary Taubes suggest that storing body fat is one of the body’s natural strategies for turning the toxicity of chronically elevated blood sugar levels into something more benign (the other main way of dealing with it being turning it into fuel when we exercise, if we’re the exercising type). This would explain why diabetes usually is preceded by obesity (the idea being it only becomes a problem after storing body fat stops being an effective enough defense) and also might have something to do with thin people with diabetes not living as long as fat people with diabetes.
BMI is as rough and simplistic yardstick anyhow, and may not be very useful with different body types, people with more muscle mass than average, etc.
(‘Insulin hypothesis’ being the notion that excess blood sugar from refined starches and dietary sugar is a main cause of both obesity correlated diseases, as opposed to the ‘lipid hypothesis’ that points to dietery fat and cholesterol as the problem and has been the mainstream for decades.)
The video you post is an odd mix of No-True-Scotsmen with a smattering of strawman, and some outright, “Did you even watch the video you’re criticizing,” level misstatements of her positions. He goes on an on about teeth. She didn’t say humans don’t eat meat. She said we were omnivorous and didn’t spend our distant past eating tons of meat. He practically accuses her of saying we’re herbivores. I hate to break it to you, but it’s not my job to police what Paleo dieting is. If you want to distance yourself from the popular books on the subject that sell very well- you better find another name.
Meanwhile. I hate to put it this way, but we tend to live past forty now. I don’t think gluten has exactly destroyed civilization.
