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The Obesity Epidemic — Is Medicine Scientific?
An anonymous reader writes "An award-winning science author, Gary Taubes, has written a book that pans the medical community's treatment of the obesity epidemic. What is interesting is that it looks like the medical community is behaving in a very unscientific manner. Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy — that consuming fat makes you fat and exercise makes you thin — has no basis in research. In fact, all the available research points in quite another, and more traditional, direction. Here's the (excellent) podcast of an interview with Taubes on CBC's 'Quirks and Quarks.' So, has medicine become a non-science? Is it mostly a non-science? Somewhat?"
Not more of this low-carb propaganda bullshit. Calories make you fat, regardless of whether they come from fat, sugars, or starches.
The laws of probability forbid it!
From personal, scientifically-measurable experience, I can tell you that gaining and losing weight isn't a matter of 'good calories' or 'bad calories'. It's a matter of calories. Burn more calories than you consume over a period of time, and you will lose weight. Burn fewer calories than you consume over a period of time, and you will gain weight. Yes, it's that simple. I suggest you all put down this claptrap, and read The Hacker's Diet by former AutoCAD developer and AutoDesk VP John Walker. It's done wonders for me.
My blog
Medicine as it is is normally taught and used as treatment has never been science. Doctors are not taught real rigorous scientific method, and many don't really understand what science is really about. Just because one may think they know about how something works doesn't mean that it is scientifically proven. It just makes me angry that some doctors spout that they are people of science when they are never really trained in the scientific method or really understand what that means.
I've been saying this for years. Eating does not make you fat. When people disagree, I say, "Sure, what could the skinny guy know about staying thin?" In a single meal, I'll eat a large Domino's Pizza, or about 4 McDonald's hamburgers.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
...At least that is what one pre-surgery disclaimer that I was required to sign said. I asked if I could weasel around with the same language if I was repairing the roof on the surgeon's house. That was not met with humor.
Still, the body is not very exact. Everybody is wired a little different, the chemical mix is a little different, and how we respond to our environment is different.
Sometimes it seems that medicine is more an industry that uses science as needed, but doesn't want to get bogged down with the details.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
Isn't this just a math problem? {Calories In} - {Calories Burned} = {Weight Gained/Lost}? Does anyone really still have a problem with this?
What you eat can lead to other health problems, metabolism factors in, but in the end, how much you eat, in calories, determines how much you weigh. Yes?
When it comes to the current thinking on nutrition, there is a definite point to what he's saying.
But to say that Exercise has no effect on weight loss is just plain wrong. Exercise changes the way your body processes the food you put into it (or, more accurately, your body adapts to the amount of exercise that you get). Building muscle causes you to require more calories in your diet to support that muscle. And building stamina causes you to burn a lot of calories in the process. And if you want to venture into the unscientific realm, consistent exercise helps to stabilize your mood and makes you less prone to food cravings (the cravings for sugary foods and for fatty foods are based in imbalances in Serotonin and Dopamine levels).
There is a dire need to re-examine everything we know about a healthy diet. People get so worked up about things like trans fats while completely ignoring the elephant in the room (high-fructose corn syrup). Everyone I know who's given up corn syrup, to the extent that it's possible in the US, has lost a minimum of 10 lbs.
But to suggest that exercise isn't a vital part of a healthy lifestyle is wrong, and potentially very dangerous.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Expend more calories than you ingest. How can you NOT lose weight if you do this?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
X - Y = Z.
If X > Y, Z is positive.
If X Y, Z is positive.
If X Y, Z is negative.
If X = Y, Z is 0.
There's money to be made. Stop interfering.
I lost 25 pounds after I simply cut out bread, potatoes, and sugar from my diet.
In the mean time, I added a gallon of olive oil every 60 days and a pint of cream a week.
Tho fit already (sports twice a week, regular walking and exercise) I started developing diabetes (of course my mom and grandparents had it so I'm kinda doomed there). Despite cutting out enormous amounts of carbs and sugars (I was previously drinking 1,000 calories of soda a day), I continue to slide in the bad direction on my blood sugar. It's not diabetic yet but it is just a matter of time.
My diet consists of large amounts of vegetables, meat courses, almost no grains (2-3 ounces a day tops).
I think people have different needs based on their genetic history.
I agree that a lot of "science" these days is opinion, hysteria, or someone's hidden agenda.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
what about eating in moderation with exercise? Why does it have to be so extreme, i.e. no sugar, no fat, "no" something?
The recommended amount of exercise is 30 minutes per day -- it's actually a fair amount, if you're biking or jogging 30 minutes per day, and eating in moderation, i.e. let's say within the FDA guidelines for diet, and you're still overweight, then you might have a medical need for weight treatment. Otherwise, try all of those things first.
stuff |
To answer the questions of the summary, I don't think it will ever be an untainted science so long as the government, businesses & religion stick their noses in it. Couple that with the difficulty of applying the scientific method to humans (average life span of 75 years and ethical problems) and I think you'll see why medicine is a 'non-science.'
Patents, legislation & belief in what is good for you are what ruin medicine. Look at all the Hindu medicine that was ignored by the West for the longest time because it was
Medicine will continue to be a non-science no matter how hard the community tries. The public's assumptions and beliefs that "Since I can eat McDonald's every day and be thin, everyone should be able to" merely exacerbates the situation.
I eat whatever I feel like and I'm in great shape. This is not the case with the majority of Americans.
My work here is dung.
"For 50 years, the advice on dieting has been very clear..."
Um, hardly. This kind of sentence attempt to draw the reader into a sense of agreement from their most-remembered anecdotes so that the rest of the premise is seen as new. But in reality, fad dieting advice is all over the map and has been since it was part of pop culture, which goes back a *long* way. Spoonful of mercury, anyone?
The only good dieting advice has been through a good understand of one's own body. Allergies, lifestyle, location, education, economics, etc all play roles in what chemicals you put in your and how you burn energy.
This book's position is just another in the lineup of positions taken about the human GI system and energy usage. There are many strategies, both workable and not. Unless you know yourself well, no change is a worthwhile change - its all so much guessing.
Additionally, one has to ask the philosophical question...is the goal to eat yummy/available food or live [potentially] longer lives? There's no one answer, really.
OK, who doesn't recommend whole grains and avoiding sweets for overweight people? The quacks are all over the place, but I think we know (and have known) that vegetables & whole grains are the way to go.
-Dave
The medical community has used a scientific methodology to diagnose patients in the past thousand years. You can find old journals of doctors using a basic scientific approach to diagnose. I believe technology, and money, have spoiled this for the medical community. A doctor no longer has the attitude to properly document specific problems with patients. ON A DAILY BASIS, thousands of people are under diagnosed because of waiting times and per capita salaries. The find something with similar characteristics, and prescribe antibiotics. In an HMO structure, it costs nothing to a doctor to prescribes drugs, but will cost you an arm to forward that patient to the appropriate specialist who may properly diagnose. It's sad, the amount of unidentified diseases ( i understand there are a lot ) brought infront of a doctors and then are pushed through the revolving door.
...and I have a feeling neither do they.
Look, we've all been told quite a few different contradictory things when it comes to health and diet. Milk was bad, milk was good, milk has lots of carbs, etc. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, egg yolks are bad but egg whites are good. Cholesterol issues -- have less meat, focus on vegetables and carbs. Diabetes and obesity -- must cut down on carbs. Going strictly vegetarian may make you deficient in certain things only found in meat. Coffee is bad for you, coffee is good for you. Chocolate bad, chocolate good. Wine bad, wine good.
I think the only constant I have heard is that exercise is good for you and that eating things in moderation is probably a good thing.
You know, there's a bit more to "medicine" than just magazine articles on dieting...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's been my observation that your "size" has a lot to do with your eating habits, and only a little to do with exercise.
Exercise gets you fit. (Healthy & Sensible) Diet makes you skinny.
I don't have time to LTTFP, but I know what worked for me. I was morbidly overweight, and I tried a number of things to get rid of it, including the traditional low-fat + exercise regimen. What finally worked was to eliminate or drastically cut high-glycemic carbs from my diet (rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, sugar, and the like). That, coupled with moderate exercise (walking 1 or 2 miles) helped me to drop 90 pounds in about a year.
I believe there is a relationship between high glycemic carbs, blood glucose spikes, and insulin, which will cause certain body chemistries to convert and store much of that intake as fat.
Wish I had discovered this 15 years ago.
Proverbs 21:19
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Calories in greater than calories out => gain weight.
Calories in less than calories out => lose weight.
At least, that's how I thought it worked. I decided late last year, as a new years resolution, to start Operation Flab. My weight had crept up, ours is not a physically active field to begin with, and middle age (I'm 46) didn't help.
I've made some healthier choices in my diet, cut back on portions, exercise vigorously 3 times a week, and have lost significant weight. I feel 100% better. There is no magic: I didn't gain it overnight, and I'm not going to lose it overnight either. Heroics never work, because too great a lifestyle/diet change will never last.
I didn't bother with a health club membership or anything like that. My sole expense was an MP3 player.
...laura
doctors are the high priests. they even have the white robes.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
So, has medicine become a non-science? Is it mostly a non-science? Somewhat?
You think this article is about "medicine" in general? This is about a tiny branch of medicine dealing with nutrition and public health.
The practice of medicine long predates the development of what we currently understand as *science*: the methods of empirical analysis of theses. In particular, there is no time or means for treating each syndrome disclosed to a GP as an object of empirical study. The GP does not form more than a general hypothesis regarding etiology and treatment. Typically the treatment determines the diagnosis.
For example, it is the season of upper-respiratory infection, caused by a host of bacteria and viruses with very similar effects. The means are available to test phlegm samples and determine an exact diagnosis, but the costs are prohibitive. The GP compares symptoms to the run of illnesses she is seeing recently, prescribes in light of that insight and hopes for the best. If the AB is effective, it was a bacterial infection.
The practice of medicine, as opposed to medical research, has never been particularly *scientific* in the common sense of the word.
illegitimii non ingravare
It's extremely simple. Burn more calories than you intake, period. There is NO reason to make it more complicated than this. Don't give me bull about how obesity is a conspiracy by X, nearly everyone knows exactly what you have to do and they don't do it. There was an article in the Courier Journal (newspaper in Louisville, KY) not long ago and obesity, there was quotes by students from the University of Louisville that basically stated "I know exactly how bad for me it is, but I don't care. It tastes good and I like to eat it."
I lift 3x/week and run 5x/week and watch what I eat and drink. I drink no soda and I don't eat fast food. Guess what, I'm not overweight.
Imagine that.
Gone!
Aww, c'mon. Do we have to post stories to slashdot with an affiliate program codes in the links? This stuff should be removed by editors before posting, because it encourages people to submit links for profit. As far as obesity goes, it's caused by sitting in front of a computer 12 hours a day, seven days a week while subsisting on Twinkies and Coca Cola.
FTA:
For the last thirty years, medical advice on obesity has been very clear. Eat less and exercise. But what if that was all wrong, a big fat lie, as Gary Taubes would put it? or In fact, according to Mr. Taubes, everything the medical profession advocates, in terms of eating and exercise, is at best a waste of time, and at worst, may actually be killing us. Of course medical advice is clear. Exercise does make you healthier and stronger. It helps your immune system and metabolism. It is true that you should only exercise the amount you are able, and that over-exercising can put added and unnecessary strain on important organs which can be dangerous. One thing that the medical field is learning though is that a good portion of your body shape is due simply to genetics. The "medical community" has not been caught up and derailed by the "diet and exercise" bandwagon. They are currently doing more and more research into the amount we are affected by our own genes.
There are some doctors who do not have the absolute latest information and they will sometimes claim that diet and exercise are the only thing that is making someone larger and there are (of course) a few scam artists trying to make a buck off the "simple little pill" or "this is the only piece of equipment you need to be thin" commercials and insatiably people will fall for it.
The point is, the medical field is right in giving this person that advice. He should eat less, he should exercise. It WILL make him healthier. It may not make him look like Brad Pitt, and he (probably) always be larger than normal, but just because a component of obesity is genetics does not mean everything to do with obesity is genetics. It also does not mean the "medical community" is stuck in the stone age with "non science."
The original generic sig.
It is simple.
ENERGY-IN > ENERGY-SPENT = GAIN WEIGHT
Either stop filling your face and/or start exercising!
I think that 60 minutes just had a good program on recently that I was watching via yahoo news about how a subway sandwich meal had 1,300 calories. The shocking thing is that the people that they talked to had no idea that they were consuming that much food. This is the central problem with most diets and why most people fail. They have no idea how much they are consuming. They don't measure it and there is no good way to measure how much energy you expend on a day to day basis.
The basic formula as many have pointed out is energy consumed - energy spent = energy stored/consumed from body. But one thing that is not true is that all energy that your body gets from your body comes from fat cells. Depending on your diet and eating habits, your body will not use fat for energy, but rather muscle or other tissues first. Maintaining the proper balance of hormones, fats and carbs in your system to ensure that you lose the proper amount is also hard.
Science is simply not being used to measure this I think. Most diet programs just seem to be of the type where they tell you to eat stuff and hope that you don't eat more. Then the people that actually follow their plan (or so they say) are held up as examples of the diet working.
Take a look at the Bernstein diet, where the doctor takes your money, about $1000, gives you weekly injections of vitamin B6 and B12 in liquid form, and YET openly acknowledges that there is no medical or scientific evidence proving this helps you burn fat. He does put you on a diet of less than 1000 calories per day, though, which is a no-brainer.
Technically, he's not being unscientific, since he acknowledges the lack of evidence, but you have to admit he's exploiting the public's inability to figure out the subtleties - they think the magic is in the injections. So I'm sure part of the problem is the general public and media.
By the way, there's no denying the obesity epidemic, it's so bloody obvious. Just scan the crowds at a Canadian or US football stadium and you'll notice vast differences in the average spectator size between the countries. Not very scientific, but still valid as an observation.
Heh, I just read this article before - apparently, if you're fat.. I'm sorry.. obese, you are not only unhealthy and the focus of some estranged witch doctors, but you're also not allowed to immigrate into New Zealand! - So those of you fed up with your corrupt governments - better check your weight before moving to the Kiwis ;)
Huh? The "medical establishment" says a very simple thing: IT'S THE CALORIES, STUPID! Eating more calories than you burn makes you fat. Burning more calories than you eat makes you thin. Every diet study ever conducted boils down to this one simple principle (which could also be derived from thermodynamics, et al).
Doesn't matter if it's calories from fat, or calories from carbs, or calories from protein. Doesn't matter if it's direct exercise, or breastfeeding, or lugging equipment around an office for 8 hours. The only differences are which types of food enable you to feel full at a lower calorie level, and which types of activity get you to expend the proper amount of energy.
I mod this article Score:0, Flamebait.
Not more of this low-carb propaganda bullshit.
I understand your anger, but the issue here is whether the low-carb propaganda is really bullshit or not. It is a matter that should be investigated, otherwise those dismissing it as bullshit would effectively act as anti-low-carb zealots, instead of following the scientific method.
Also, we have to wonder why the US (the country where the Food Pyramid originated) is also where the "fatness" phenomenon originated, and why the countries that start to follow the "american way of life" (fast food, sedentary life, high-calory carb snacks) tend to follow american's fatness. This phenomenon, at least country-wise, behaves like an epidemic.
"A waist is a terrible thing to mind."
/. quotes at the bottom of the page, IIRC.
One of the
I was 145 lbs my whole life (6'0") and after a "break" the doctors decided I needed several medications which I did not want to take, however my wife insisted. I gained 90 lbs in 6 months, and I now weigh 270 (2 years later). The entire time I was gaining weight DANGEROUSLY rapidly the doctors said NOTHING, just keep taking the medication. So let me just say that I have sympathy for people who have been victims of the medical system and I am now extremely sceptical of "professional medical advice."
The drug companies and Monsanto are doing this to increase profits.
They are issuing us drugs which are not regulated by the FDA and which are now being exported.
As soon as we hold companies accountable for their externalities obesity will go away.
a) How old are you? I used to be able to eat 12" pizzas in single sittings and Mcdonald's 4 times a week and not gain a pound as well when I was in Univeristy 4 years ago. Trust me - it will catch up with you.
b) This is the big one and the one these books NEVER talk about. It isn't all about looks. Those foods you are eating, regardless of fat or caloric content, are loaded with LDL cholesterol which is clogging up your arteries, even if you can't notice any outward weight gain. If you don't start eating better someday, you will probably die of a heart attack before you hit 50.
Yes you can, for at least 11 years.
And probably even longer: the guy in question still has an active homepage and a suitable mailadres: jamboy713@hotmail. com!
I use the Physics Diet.
It has to work, because it's physics.
What you've stated cannot be over-emphasized. Health is not all about body weight.
Perhaps protein doesn't contribute as much to you gaining weight as carbohydrates. I'll stay agnostic on that question. However, protein contains amino acid groups which break down into ammonia and have to be removed by your kidneys. Eating too much protein leads to kidney damage. Let's assume the good doctor is right that eating fewer carbohydrates is primary. Well, if you eat fewer calories overall, you'll probably consume fewer carbohydrates, too—especially if you maintain a healthy diet while doing so.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Umm, TV & Video Games make you fat. America did not have a fat problem before we had 2+ TV's and Consoles in your home. Basically now that people are not obtaining the exercise level of the pre electronics age we have become fat. Food intake plays a part but regardless exercise plays a major role in maintaining a non-obese state.
I walked about an average of 6 hours a day for 30 days while in Italy September '06. I was eating 3 meals a day and the meals were larger than I eat at home (I was raised to empty the plate) and I ended up loosing 35lbs while there. In a normal day I only walk 15-20 minutes a day and have gained back about 25 of the 35 lbs lost last year. W/o changing my diet and can loose considerable weight at a fast rate just by increasing my exersize level.
Cholesterol doesn't clog your arteries unless you are suffering from inflammation (most of us are) and low carb diets have been know to normalize weight since at least the mid-19th century. William Banting published a book about this way back then. William Banting
Check out the Weston Price Foundation for tons of material on these subjects. Weston Price Foundation
He makes the extraordinary claim that Official Nutrition has been getting it wrong for the last 40 years. However, he provides and discusses a solid body of relevant and eminently respectable (Lancet, JAMA, NEJM, etc..) citations to support his claim. Color me 95% convinced.
He notes that the application of the first law of thermodynamics (the slogan is "A Calorie is A Calorie") to a homeostatic dissipative system like the human body is beyond simplistic. It is simply wrong.
The core of his thesis is that a cellular-level metabolic disorder caused over time by consumption of concentrated and rapidly available carbohydrates, and the insulin spikes they provoke, is the cause not only of obesity but also of type II diabetes. Briefly, fat cells become too good at extracting glucose from the blood and storing it. This results in cellular-level semi-starvation in other body tissues, expressed at the organismic level by eating more and exercising less.
He depicts the high level of investment in the competing "gluttony & sloth" model of obesity which exists in our medical establishment and in our culture. Indeed, from his portrayal this viewpoint is very close to being an ideology rather than a theory, in that dissenters are cast into outer darkness rather than refuted.
He discusses the personalities and politics involved in the alleged disastrous wrong turn, and points up some interesting coincidences involving what research gets funded, and what research doesn't get funded, by for example sugar producers.
I'm intentionally being very brief. If you have a personal stake, read this book and form your own conclusions.
--
phunctor
I listened to this guy on CBC this weekend being interviewed. It was interesting, and I'm intrigued to read his book just for the sake of hearing more about what he has to say. I'm not a doctor (although I come from a family of doctors), and I'm not a dietitian (again, some in the family however), but I think there's something to it.
But lets be honest - north america is so immersed in carbohydrates, wouldn't simply levelling out our calorie intake be enough? To my understanding, the standard "healthy" intake of calories across the spectrum is 50% from carbs, 30% from protein, and 20% from fat. My question is, given our culture, how many of us actually adhere to that? i started counting calories a few months back and realised that while my fat intake was super low, my carb intake was through the roof at around 70-80% (which is actually an argument that the author makes during the podcast - you supplement your low fat intake with a higher protein or, in most of our cases, higher carb intake). So instead of stripping carbs out and treating it like fat, shouldn't we simply strive for a better balance? Everything's fine in moderation, but when crap gets out of whack, bad things happen.
In any case - the real point to my post is this question here: Having low amounts of fat is all fine and dandy, but one thing I didn't hear the author address (and maybe I missed it) was the cholesterol factor. I've known a few people that are pretty skinny, but their cholesterol levels are out of this world - so much so that their doctors have told them that, at the age of 27 and 29, they have to scale back or put themselves at severe risk of a cardiac arrest by the time they're 30. So while this whole "drop the carbs lets get skinny!" thing is all fine and dandy, I'm more curious as to whether or not that actually makes you healthier.
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Because they were consuming fewer calories. That' all there is to it, no magic or voodoo or pixie dust, just fewer calories.
This essay is probably my favorite I've seen on the subject.
I'd couple any dietary changes with regular exercise, especially cardiovascular.
My rule of thumb is that if I model my diet and exercise to humans living a thousand years ago, I'll reap the benefits of millions of years of evolution. If I eat weird stuff and sit around all day, I'll have to wait for a few hundred generations of humans to adapt before my distant offspring can benefit.
Here's a link to an article by Taubes that originally ran in 2002, and sounds like it was the seed for this book.
"What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63
It's long for a NYTimes article, but it's an interesting read. I'm sure the book updates much of the data.
This is absolutely true. You can't dispute the fact of this statement taken in isolation. In isolation.
However, it's a fine example of blinding yourself to the causes. The questions at the heart of the debate between low-carb and low-fat diet proponents are the following:
So just saying calories are calories is like saying BTUs are BTUs and putting heating oil in your gas tank in the hopes of getting better MPG.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Eat anything you like, provided you do it while walking to the south pole, towing all your food for the journey behind you on a sledge.
Expect to lose weight.
How to fight obesity: Invent the holodeck. People won't sit in front of computer screens anymore, typing away their day at a keyboard, only to finish, drive home (another sitting activity), sit on the couch, and drink a beer. In the holodeck, computer work will become much more interactive and visual, utilizing objects like those with which we interact every day. For example, computer programmers debugging a program would don chemical safety suits and chase down monster-size holographic cockroaches with holographic bug spray. More difficult bugs would be searched for in a role-playing Sherlock Holmes mystery case. Microsoft Windows would be implemented as a holographic custom window store. UNIX would be implemented as a group of lurking demons in a fiery hell. Video games, especially first person shooters, would require running, jumping, ducking, etc., all of which would cause our kids to be thin and muscular, not to mention great fighters. eBooks would be physical holographic books that you could read all day long, but not remove from the holodeck. (Recall that matter in the holodeck ceases to exist outside the holodeck's borders.) Emails would appear as physical envelopes. Those with big attachments would arrive in large UPS packages. While doing office productivity work, jumping through bureaucratic hoops would mean just that: Jumping through fire rings at a circus. Security would consist of physical barriers. A firewall would be implemented as a large, thick stone dam, with allowed services leaking in through holes in the dam. Users would wear condoms to avoid getting viruses while in the holodeck (although holographic viruses will cease to exist once taken outside the holodeck). When logging in, you would knock on an old wooden door that has a small eye-door built in to it. A burly man inside would ask for your password, which you would whisper. Get it wrong and he'll kick your ass (this doubles as a video game). Hackers would show up with a gun. I think that computing in general would make a lot more sense, and it would certainly keep people thinner.
The recommended advice of replacing fats with carbohydrates was repeated so often and so forcefully by everyone, that it's now printed on the back of almost every box of food in the country, in the form of the "USDA food pyramid". It was so often repeated that when I was a child (in the 1970s) things like wonder bread with a bit of margarine were considered health foods (lots of carbs, no saturated fat).
I had always assumed that the medical community had done large-scale long-term studies demonstrating that such a diet led to an increase in lifespan, a reduction in disease, and a loss of unhealthy pounds. Apparently, such studies were never done.
But then the massive Harvard Nurses Heatlh Study was performed, ending in the mid-1990s. In that study, researchers followed 40,000 nurses for decades, in what was the largest and most comprehensive study on human nutrition ever. The study found that replacing fats with carbohydrates had absolutely no effect on longevity or disease. Furthermore, replacing butter with margarine (the standard dietary advice for decades) led to no benefit either. IIRC, the only nurses who lived longer and had less disease were those who ate nutrient-dense monounsaturated fats like almonds and cashews.
As a result of the Harvard Nurses Health Study, researchers in nutrition quietly dropped their assumptions about dietary fats causing disease.
I still can't believe it. The standard dietary advice from 1960 to 1990 must have been the single largest pseudoscientific load of crap in modern history. What a colossal embarrassment. If the USDA publicly admits that it was mistaken then it will be a long time before people trust it again.
When I drink beer, I gain weight. When I don't, I lose weight. Damn.
I tend to agree with the simple formula
/. community seems to think that everything should follow simple math.
But, I do think there is something to this glycemic index stuff.
I wouldn't be so quick to say it's calories in - calories out only. The
Maybe the kinds of calories in affect the calories out? (metabolic rate)
I can feel the rush of carbs into my body if I eat a high carb meal. it wouldn't surprise me to learn it affected chemical processes related to weight gain.
Not that it's incredibly crucial to your point, I'm pretty sure real Thai iced tea is made with sweetened coconut milk, not heavy cream. I think the jury is out as to which kind of fat is worse for you, but IIRC they're a bit different, nutritionally.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Is medicine science? Sometimes.
Being married to a medical student who's going through a year of trying different specialties has been very illuminating. Some specialties, like pathology, are almost entirely scientific. Others, like orthopedics are largely mechanical, as are most surgical specialties. Specialties like family practice and pediatrics involve a fair bit of science, but also depend heavily on personal interactions. And of course every physician, just like every person, is subject to their bias.
My wife and her fellow medical students frequently talk about how for your first two years of medical school you're taught science, and for your last two years of medical school you're taken through the hospital and told how everything you just learned is useless.
If medicine could be reduced to a set of scientific rules, it could be practiced by robots. Until that happens, we're stuck with our un-scientific doctors.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
When it comes to dieting though, I'd agree it's a matter of burning calories, but different people may need different practices to do this. Some can eat right and exercise, some don't have the willpower and need gastric bypass surgery, or avoid carbs to prevent hunger. But there's been good science concerning trans fats, but the problem is that the food industry keeps creating new chemicals to feed us, and it takes awhile for science to catch up. High fructose corn syrup could be a large culprit of American obesity, and it was invented in the 70's and is now in pretty much everything we eat. The food industry has found better and better ways to deliver us unto calories.
As for myself, I play video games and forget to eat because I'm so entranced.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
By increasing my exercise, hitting a minimum of 10,000 steps a day, consuming less "sweets" and smaller portions of food, I have lost 20+ over the last three months. I have worked to lose the weight in a manner that creates a sustainable eating and activity style for life.
This has been working for me. Who knows about you, but I suspect that with some self-discipline and a change of habits, most people could lose weight.
On this point, I read a great humorous book (true story) about a man's effort to lose weight: http://conservativebooktalk.com/2007/10/22/one-third-off-by-irvin-s-cobb/
An empirical experiment to determine the cause? Seems scientific to me. Viruses and bacteria - what we understnad about them, and about the usefulness of antibiotics and the very few antiviral drugs we have is not based on rumour and folklore, it is based on science.
Using what we know has elements of art and the softer sciences, psychology and sociology, but it is firmly based on a scientific background.
BTW, there are not a host of bacteria to confuse with URTIs, they are viral infections, occasionally followed by bacterial superinfection, and phelgm comes from the lungs, the body fluid you should have in mind is what we doctors mostly call snot.
I'd say that there is far too great a reliance on statistical correlations without substantiation. But then, they don't have a helluva lot else to do. You can't induce illnesses, or remove all other variables (food, air, etc) in a study because that would kill people.
So that's all well and good I suppose, but then doctors, as well as the media start treating covariant variables as having a direct causal A->B link, and sometimes this will be wrong. And sometimes the correlations are not even that strong, but since it's in the research papers etc it's treated as truth.
There is a sort of reverse superstition at work, where the probable becomes absolute.
but the difference is miniscule compared to the effect of just eating everso slightly less. If you can control your eating it's very easy to lose weight with the Hacker's Diet.
HAND.
Nor is he a research scientist. He is an author, and his goal seems to be to sell books, not to add anything to the scientific community.
I have found that if I eat more calories than I burn, I lose weight (and vice versa!), no matter what kind of calories they are. When I go on long hiking trips, or field exercises with my military unit, I'm very active and burning more calories than I take in, and I lose weight. Conversely, when I sit at home for a week and eat turkey and watch football, I gain weight.
Incidentally, if you have a problem with your plumbing, then it's clear that an auto mechanic probably won't be able to give you good advice; if you have a problem with your plumbing, you should talk to a plumber. In the same way, if you want information about your body, you should probably get it from your doctor, rather than some random person who had a Bright Idea and wrote a book about it.
There was a spat in Reason years ago about exactly this.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Really enjoyed that article. I used the Physics Diet for a number of years and it really does work.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
That's most likely because your body decided you were starving to death and went into a self-preservation mode.
A less radical calorie reduction would probably have produced better results. Couple that with light exercise and you should see better results.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If public health research functioned like some of the harder sciences -- high energy physics being the one I know best -- then researchers would be ridiculed and perhaps even run out of the field for over-interpreting their evidence or publicly presenting the results of sloppy experiments or basing claims on premature evidence and none of this would have happened. The researchers would have been be so scared of screwing up that cascades would never have been allowed to start (string theory, perhaps, being the exception to the rule).
You can think of this kind of brutal response to bad science as an immune system that serves to protect reliable knowledge from infection by the infinite number of bogus but compelling ideas that are out there. The last place you want a science to find itself is where obesity research is today, with hypotheses of causation that can explain none of the pertinent observations, but yet are believed so fervently that no one can challenge them without being ostracized or declared a quack.
So, by sitting on my ass all day I will lose weight? YES!!!
Cos there are some carbohydrates for instance that the body just can't metabolise. They show up as calories when you burn them in a lab though.
Deleted
This is, AFAICT, not the current "medical orthodoxy", but a strawman. Sure, most medical practitioners, dieticians, etc., will advise people who want to lose weight to cut down on fat (its the easiest place for most people to cut down without losing necessary nutrition, and has other, non-weight health benefits when cut) and to exercise more (because it keeps your body from slowing down when you cut calories, making it more practical to maintain a calorie deficit, and because it has other, non-weight health benefits) if they want to lose weight, but I've never heard one say either that "eating fat makes you fat" or "exercise makes you thin".
Most seem to say the same thing: calorie surpluses make you gain weight, calorie deficits make you lose weight. The advice they give is on how to maintain good health and a calorie deficit simultaneous, so that you can lose weight and improve health. And while less fat and more exercise are common parts of that (since they are appropriate for most people), they aren't the only advice given, nor are they given to everyone (because what is appropriate does, in fact, vary based on what the person is doing already, their other health conditions, etc.)
I do four sessions of aerobic exersize a week, one hour each. In between I lift/pull/push a lot of weight around, typically 90 minutes per session.
I eat small portions, my meals are based on instructions of a dietary specialist. No more than 1750 calories a day, and only out of "good" foodstuffs. This gets checked regularly, every three months I spend a week in a clinic where *everything* gets monitored.
I have done this for more than the last two years. In that time, I've not broken my diet or lost a day of exersize, not even once. Really.
I'm still fat, I haven't lost a single pound. In fact, I gained 7 pounds.
Imagine that.
Huh ? I thought that current medical orthodoxy was "consuming more calories than you burn makes you fat". The above can probably found in tabloids, but not in actual medical literature.
I started drinking my gallon or more of water per day, lost 5 lbs in a week. Ended up getting used to it and now only drink water, nothing else, feels good aside from going to the bathroom as many times a day as my grandfather. Stopped eating junk food, went low fat, traded out carbs for protien, and of course added an exercise regiment, and I magically dropped 60 lbs. Some foods my body can process better than others, but it's common sense for the most part what is junk and what isn't. Sure you may get too many carbs or natural sugars eating healthy, but compared to fats and empty calories from junk? If common sense was that common, everyone would have it, problem is it's too easy to be lazy, and most people aren't willing to change diets to something healthy, and adapt to a lack of McDonnalds. I'm still overwieght a bit, and when I eat fast food instead of cooking (you can eat healthy and still eat fast, just have to find the right types of food, and it can be just as cheap), or skip going to the gym, I can look at my spare tire and it's no mystery. There are a million little tricks, like take the same amount of food from three healthy courses, and split it up to 6 smaller / spaced meals, and you'll loose more weight, but the end result is still to burn more than you take in, just as stated in almost every post before me.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Speaking as someone who is currently in medical school, allow me to put forth the falsifiable claim that you don't know what you're talking about.
The vast majority of medical school applicants come with degrees in scientific fields (usually Biology or Chemistry). To be considered for admission they must to do well on the MCAT, a difficult test which stresses scientific knowledge and reasoning abilities. Once in, they are drilled for the first two years with what's called "basic" sciences, where they are expected to gain an in-depth understanding of a wide breadth of information all directly based upon accepted scientific literature. Mastery of this information is tested via the USMLE Step 1--again, another very difficult test.
So, please, enlighten us as to where you're getting this idea that modern medicine is taught unscientifically, because as far as I can tell your notion is not based in reality.
The funny thing is, a common argument that I hear on a frequent basis is that because medical school is taught by PhDs and not MDs, it is focused too much on scientific details and not based on clinical reality. There is no point in training a family doctor to be able to draw out the TCA cycle or recite G-protein signaling transduction pathways as such information has no impact on treatment or diagnosis.
-Grym
How much of a "diet plan" is simply a substitute for what the human body really needs: Someone to pay attention to it. Pay attention to yourself, how much you eat, poop, gain, lose, and crave. Alter it based on what works and do not follow it to a T. Simply put: If what works changes, change what you do.
.. you may have heard of them. They grow, almost magically, independently from the food industry you talk of. They are not filled with MSG, High Fructose corn syrup or Hydrogenated Fats.
Stop buying shit in cans, tubes, packets and aerosols and pick up something not sheathed in plastic for a change. Pick some of the low carbohydrate ones from (random google) here: http://www.iloveindia.com/nutrition/carbohydrates/carbohydrates-in-vegetables.html
I know I can't expect much personal responsibility from a country which gave us aerosol cheese, but FFS, just but something that didn't require a factory to make it.
Medicine is a non-science? Wow. I whole heartedly invite anyone who believes that line to go take a gander at any clinical trial design for any drug, device, or procedure.
As for the book, I haven't read it but I did read both the Amazon and boingboing summary and listen to the podcast. Taubes main points seem to be:
1. Replacing fat with starch is a bad idea
2. High fat diets don't have as much of an impact on cholesterol counts as we believe and that triglyceride levels are a better indicator of heart disease risks
3. Exercise isn't as good an idea for weight loss as we might think. (Because people might consume more calories afterward than they expended)
4. Atkins is a great diet plan.
Look, you don't sell a diet book or any book titled, "Stop eating so much, jackass!" What does sell well are systems that help us accomplish that goal and books that tell us why what we're doing is wrong.
Put simply, excess calories make you fat; it's basic thermodynamics and can be (and has been) proven with the simplest of experiments. It is easier to eat excess calories in a diet high in carbohydrates for a number of reasons. For many people, cutting those excess carbohydrates needs to happen because they aren't eating a proper diet. I've seen studies that indicate that the average American eats 3800 Calories in a day, and I'm sorry, but most of us aren't doing that with baked potatoes, whole-grain bread, or pasta - we're getting there with coke, chocolate, "coffee" drinks that might once have contained a coffee bean, and candy.
If you need a book to tell you to remove carbs before you'll start watching how much you eat, then I hope you buy that book now. If you need to be on a partcular diet scheme to force you to check the caloric value on a box of pre-packaged food, then I hope you start that diet now. If you want to build a strawman based on decades old medical advice taken out of context of what has been the constant recommendation for a balanced diet with a quantity of food suited for your activity level, then please, write that book as long as it helps people lose weight.
While there is some variance from person to person, a diet book that was two pages long could easily satisfy nearly everyone on earth. It would essentially say:
1. Burn the amount of Calories that you take in.
2. Guess what? You're probably eating way more Calories than you think you are.
3. Don't believe us? Track what you eat everyday for a week. Yes, that includes snacks. Yes, that includes really measuring how much of a given food you ate.
4. See, we told you you ate too much.
5. Stop drinking your Calories, dammit! Coke doesn't fill you up at all, but it's an easy 10% of your daily intake per glass.
6. If you sit around all day, non-stop, then you're going to need to cut back more. If you want to eat more, go get some exercise.
7. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
8. By the way, you'll probably start using fewer Calories as you get older. If you find this difficult to follow, start again at step one.
Technically, the basic principle of calories in - calories consumed still applies, but some foods affect both sides of the equation.
The so called "body mass index" is the real bullshit, you're obese if you don't match the ridiculous values on the "BMI". I'm getting fed up trying to explain to MDs that 6'4" tall and 37" wide at the shoulders with a 30" inseam and a 40" waist and 54" chest is not obese at 310lbs! And that by bringing in one of their colleagues who is close to my hight and letting me stand behind them just to illustrate the stupidity of their position.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
With all this focus on calories, and calories from this and calories from that...
It is the material derivative that is important. It's all about the m-dot. Mass can only accumulate if more enters than leaves. Therefore, the cause of fatness is eating too much and/or not pooping enough.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"According to his research, eating fatty foods doesn't lead to heart disease, cholesterol levels aren't something to worry about, and exercise doesn't help you lose weight."
Exercise doesn't help you lose weight? Then how would he explain that my weight goes up like a rocket (about a pound per week) when I can't run due to an injury?
Yes, eating fatty foods doesn't lead to heart disease. Being fat does, and you can get fat from any kind of calories.
Cholesterol levels aren't something to worry about, but LDL to HDL ratios are.
I guess pandering to a lazy public is how you become an award-winning science author.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Good thing we are all taking sound advice from someone who has had no formal training in nutrition or medical science. Brilliant
Yeah it is. You believe in treating in a very mechanical way. You have developed things like anti-depressants, muscle relaxants, sleeping pills etc without considering its side-effects. More for these side-effect there are again different kind of medicines. For every unsolvable disease there are thousands of medicines and thousands of surgeries. A doctor eventually suggest all these medicines and surgeries until the person dies.
Live naturally, everything will be okay. Allow diseases to heal as naturally as possible (ofcourse with some medicines).
You've got it all wrong.... Really it's very simple... Type A = Will always be able to eat whatever they want... and NEVER get fat. Type B = If your not Type A then, like me, that's to farking bad. For the rest of us, the rule of Calories in - calories burned = Weight loss/gain. It will always require effort to lose/maintain your weight. It does not matter what you eat. Just follow the rule. However, if you value your health, you'll eat things that are at least nutritious for you. And maybe if you like energy or would like to burn it a bit faster... you'll exercise, as this does boost your metabolism a bit. No amount of exercise is going to make you skinny if you continue to eat whatever you want! If your hungry all the time and/or have a big appetite, you can even do one better and eat things that are low calorie and filling, like vegetables and fruits. That way you at least feel full at the end of every meal. These rules apply to everyone that is not Type A. Though Type A should be warned that just because you CAN eat crap does not mean that it's ok. It will catch up with you, some day. Now I know I'm going to hear from someone that disagrees, but thats because your either fat and don't want to do anything about it, or your 'skinny for life' and have no experience in this regard.
Calories in less than calories out => lose weight.
At least, that's how I thought it worked. I decided late last year, as a new years resolution, to start Operation Flab. My weight had crept up, ours is not a physically active field to begin with, and middle age (I'm 46) didn't help.
I've made some healthier choices in my diet, cut back on portions, exercise vigorously 3 times a week, and have lost significant weight. I feel 100% better. There is no magic: I didn't gain it overnight, and I'm not going to lose it overnight either. Heroics never work, because too great a lifestyle/diet change will never last.
I didn't bother with a health club membership or anything like that. My sole expense was an MP3 player.
Portions and calorie values of most fast foods are huge too, restraint food i just as bad. A big mac with cheese is 705, I should be taking in ~1700 or so the big mac is ~2/5 of my calories for the day. A soda is 190 for a "can", a big bottle is about 400. Fries have about 350 for a "small". thus a big mac meal is almost as much calories I should eat in a day. I shudder to think how many calories a Greek platter of potatoes, lamb, pan fried vegies, and greek salad is. Especially since My favorite Greek place gives portions for 3 people in every plate.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Everybody says "Eat fewer calories and you will lose weight" but no one asks the question "How is caloric content determined and does it apply to digestion?"
The fact is that burning food in a closed bomb bears little resemblance to digesting and absorbing food. The figure of 9 calories per gram for fat is great if you are burning it, but it doesn't necessarily translate that that is the number of units of energy that your body is extracting from it. Our bodies use energy to process everything we eat and some foods require more energy to process than others.
After having read the majority of the threads it seems that everyone on Slashdot thinks they are a nutritional expert. Somehow I don't think that is the case.
What you call propaganda meant success for me.
My weight crept up, and my health suffered. I started having sleep apnea. I had no energy. My doctor saw signs of insulin resistance. I resolved to give Atkins a try.
I was shocked that I was losing weight considering all the "fattening" things I was eating. I never went hungry. My LDL dropped like a rock. I was stunned considering all the meat and fats I was eating on a regular basis. I dropped about 50 pounds in six months and reached my goal weight.
You can scoff at low carb all you want, but I am living proof that it works.
Nope. There has got to be some magical way where people can eat whatever crap they want and never exercise and still look as good as the models that spend 2 hours a day lifting weights at the gym.
That's what this is all about. People don't WANT reality to be reality.
They WANT "science" to show them how to get everything
A balanced diet makes you big, fat and healthy.
An unbalanced diet makes you small, thin and unhealthy.
A lot of exercise combined with a balanced diet makes you big, may make you either thin or fat and healthy.
Your choice.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
One cup of raw carrots does not react in the body in the same fashion that one cup of cooked carrots does. The human body will process more calories more quickly from cooked carrots than from raw carrots. They are measured to be exactly the same calories though.
This is really germane to me today, having just come from the doctor's office. I have been struggling for years with weight, high cholesterol, and high triglycerides. Taking dietitian's advice hasn't helped much. Eating far more fruits and vegetables and cutting down on fats hasn't done a damn thing. I exercise as much as I can. The only thing that significantly helps cholesterol for me is medication.
Now, the really aggravating thing is that the doctor's advice today in some ways directly contradicts the dietitian's advice that I have been trying to follow. Some fruits and vegetables are bad, at least for me. Carrots, potatoes, and bananas are apparently bad for me, but they are things that were strongly recommended to me.
The upshot is that medical science is in its infancy. It is strongly based on generalized statistics, not specific cause and effect.
A guy studying obesity, and his name is pronounced, "Tubbs?"
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That difficulty is only a logistic difficulty, how to track a large number of people over a long period of time. But it is possible to overcome this difficulty, as is shown in the ERGO research project, where 10.000 people over 55 have from the Rotterdam district 'Ommoord' been tracked since 1990 (including yearly MRI scans of every single person). Since last year they've expanded this research to people over 45. This research already led to an astounding numbert of publications.
And indeed, some ethical issues, even by just following normal seamingly healthy persons: what do you do when you find abnormalities during the MRI brain scan? Dutch article with a picture and English article -that's not very useful is it- for subscribers only.
Which is just as silly as using Hindu medicine because it was ... well, ignored by the West.
There are a few problems here.
People mistake individual testimonies about the efficacy of a particular diet for scientific proof. All of the testimonies by people who have posted here saying "I ate less and exercised more and lost weight!" have, in their postings, just as much scientific weight as if I had posted "I stopped exercising, ate a pound of potato chips every day and lost weight!"
Second, there doesn't have to be a violation of the laws of thermoynamics when talking about low carbohydrate diets here. First, most people following a low carb diet do, in fact, eat fewer total calories since protein and fat take longer to digest and metabolize, leading to longer-lasting feelings of satiety and don't cause insulin spikes that starchy foods do (which often result in binging). Second, fat, carbohydrate, and protein all follow different metabolic pathways.
When scientists determined the amount of energy (kilocalories, or Calories) protein, carbs, and fat have, they did so by physically burning them and determining how much heat was released. The human body, however, is not an incinerator. Fat, protein, and carbohydrate all have different metabolic pathways. The process of converting fat to energy is less efficient than the process of converting protein or carbohydrate.
"Normally," on a high carbohydrate diet, the body produces its energy through glycolisis, using glucose as its primary fuel. Diets like Atkins, in their initial phases, force the body into a state of ketosis - NOT the potentially dangerous state of ketoacidosis for those who keep confusing it. This state should really be referred to as lipolysis, since fat is being burned for energy and it avoids the whole ketosis/ketoacidosis confusion. In other words, you're burning fat directly as a fuel.
Beginning around the 1970s, people in the medical field saw Americans getting fatter and begin the thought process that this was a new "epidemic." They calculated how many calories the average person would need to maintain his/her body weight, added in enough protein and fat to keep the average person healthy, and made up for the rest with carbohydrate. The recommendations for filling this gap with mainly carbohydrate was arbitrary.
Throughout most of human evolution, we've been eating mainly protein and fat with some fruits, vegetables and nuts/seeds. With the advent of agriculture, we began eating more grain-based foods. It's simply not what the human body has evolved to eat, and the current DIABETES/SYNDOME "X" (not necessarily obesity) epidemic we're seeing is, I think, the result.
What is suspicious is that the message is too simple, and it is the type of thing the fat public would like to hear, a simple, painless, low-action recipe to be slim again, rather than working hard to fix a bad life style (poor quality food, stress, lack of physical activity).
I propose that MY body teleports most of what I eat into the sun.
How else could I eat 6 pounds of delicious lasagna, 2 loaves of garlic bread, and a 2 liter bottle of Coke for dinner, and wake up 2 pounds LIGHTER in the morning?
That's over 10 pounds of mass in, with no mass out in the traditional ways.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm cheese.
It tells you that you can eat whatever you like as long as you walk 20km away from your home and run back. Do this each day with a backpack weighing half your body weight. I can guarantee that you won't be obese with that diet.
Ok, so I made it up myself. Still, I think it's better than the glycemic-something method.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Taubes accuses the medical community of locking onto oversimplified solutions, and yet when he talks about diet, he doesn't consider ANYTHING but weight. On Talk of the Nation: Science Friday, he questioned in passing the recommendation of eating lots of fruits and vegetables, and only frames it in water/carbs... not vitamins and other nutrients essential to overall health.
He also says cholesterol is meaningless, but while a high LDL level in itself may not be the problem, as he mentions research on varying kinds of LDL, it is shown that HDL is beneficial.
Most of all though, I'm uncomfortable with the way he ignores the brain's requirement for glucose in advocating total abstinence from carbohydrates.
I love how thinks he can harp on what science is yet claims you only need five people to make a representative sample.
The more I learn about medicine, the more I learn it's based on money and urban legend.
Circumcision, tonsillectomy, lobotomy, having women lie down during birth: these are all fads, past or current. Circumcision alone is apparently a $600,000,000 industry of unnecessary, painful, irreversible cosmetic surgery on infants who cannot give consent. Why are we practicing medicine based on fads and not science?
Then there are the stories about how much lobbying and marketing affects diagnosis.
But I have always wondered about fevers. I thought a fever is the body's way to fight an infection, yet doctors always want you to lower your fever. Who is wrong? I sure hope it's me...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
A flame fest sounds like it would be tasty way to burn calories!! ;--)
That you need SCIENCE to figure out what to EAT?
... etc etc.
Are we as a species so stupid that we don't know how to keep ourselves alive?
My theory is that each person, deep inside, knows exactly what's right for themselves, based on their genetic history.
Think about it.. do most fat, lazy, unhealthy people really think they are *healthy*? No, of course not. In most cases, they know what they need to eat, and how much to exercise, BUT THEY DON'T DO IT.
All these people with diets and "controversy" want to sell their books. They add nothing to the discussion except more confusion. So the fat lazy idiots not only ignore their own little voices, they start ignoring everybody else too.
My other theory: each person is different, and these scientific approaches are INTERESTING, but will NEVER be conclusive. They will definitely NEVER be 100% appropriate for YOU, so don't take them too seriously.
Here's what I do: I keep a spreadsheet that keeps track of what I eat along with my weight and strength gains (carbs, protein, total cals, etc). I TRY DIFFERENT DIETS.. different ratios of carbs/protein/fat, different amounts of calories, different combinations of foods, each for 1 month, and tracked my weight loss and rate of strength gains.
My best results are on a pretty "normal" diet, which is what I instinctively eat anyway: 65% carb, 20% protein, 15% fat.. the carbs were mostly "slow carbs", whole grains, etc, except after workout when I would eat lots of "fast carbs" like white bread and sugar. The fat is mostly vegetable fat. Low dairy. No red meat. On some weekends I "cheat" and eat junk food. Nothing exciting here... No "revolutionary breakthrough" that "turns conventions on its head" or other bullshit. And I ate about 300 calories/day less then my maintenance level (which I also determined via similar experimentation) With this diet I lost weight steadily (1.5 lb per month), but I also made strength gains, had plenty of energy, and as long as I ate small meals 4-6 times a day, I was never hungry. During wintertime, I instinctively eat more carbs, I've also noticed.
I would suggest getting out your spreadsheet and doing the same thing. Don't say a word about a diet or routine UNTIL YOU'VE TRIED IT FOR AT LEAST A MONTH. Your needs are different than mine. You might want to lose 200 lb, not 40-50 like I did. Your body might not like so many carbs.. you might like red meat (it makes me feel sick)
*THAT* is the best science. Not reading a study involving 100 people who are not you. Not buying a book written by a guy who wants to sell books. Do experiments on yourself.
Whatever you do, don't just sit there eating a shitty diet, taking up space, and being fat and lazy (both intellectually and physically), quoting stupid fad diets or web sites. DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR LIFE.
PS: The mantra of exercising regularly and eating less calories than you burn is EXCELLENT advice, as a first approximation. Sure, you need to refine it according to your needs, but it's better than nothing. Think about it like this: If somebody wants to be rich, what's the best ONE SENTENCE advice you can give? Spend less than you make! Sure, it's not going to make them rich overnight, and there are a ton of variables that need to be looked at, but it's an excellent STARTING POINT.
high calories "carb" snacks? WTF? Find me *one* that is a snack not a drink.
Everything in snacks is either high fat, and saturated fat at that (chocolate, chips, fries, etc.), or high in the "So Great for You" high-fructose corn crap. The only high carb thing available are the soft drinks and "juices". Or people started eating high carb snacks like apples, oranges, bananas, pineapples? The calories in those are mostly all from carbs!
Fatness is from one thing and one thing only - eating too much *calories* and not getting enough exercise.
The low-carb propaganda just leads to
* depression (you need sugars for seratonin)
* kindey failure - switching your diet to high protein puts a heavy load on kidneys, and thus problems
* low energy (no carbs! guess what?!)
Carbs are really *needed* as long as you use them up! If you take a 800 calories shot of carbs from your McLarge Cola and then sit on your couch, you'll end up either fat or with diabetes or both. 800 carbs consumed => 1600 calories burned in exercise and you'll be fine and feel good. And no, diet drinks are even worse for you.
But then this the problem - people are inherently *lazy*. They will chose to die than get off their couches. At least that's what 60% of Britons would do. I bet it may be even worse in US.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6994632.stm
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Maybe medicine isn't and never was science to begin with. Modern day medicine just happens to apply lots of science. Medicine is not science, but rather medicine. Healing and human health.
if health was just about profits, american doctors would be effective
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Several scientists are furious about the way Taubes mis-quoted them and there's a lot of science that says he's simply wrong:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28714.html
My hypothesis: He simply sold out. Book contracts, maybe consulting with Atkins & co...
thegodmovie.com - watch it
What annoys me is low carb stuff tastes bad, so they up the salt content, or put more of other things that improve the taste but make it bad for you in other ways.
I'd just like to point out that this is very true of low-fat stuff too. Remove fat, add sugar. Compare the labels on ranch dressing, low-carb ranch dressing, and low-fat ranch dressing sometime and note just how much fixing one problem leads processed food manufacturers to splurge on the other.
The simple solution, as one of the points you make states, is not to eat pre-packaged food whenever possible. "Low-fat" and "low-carb" are just words co-opted by food manufacturers to disguise the complete unhealthiness of the latest junk food they're peddling. It's just trading corn (starch/syrup) for soybean (oil).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not quite true. The food you ingest only becomes calories when it's digested. And that's dependent upon the bacteria in your gut. I'll bet that once the research is done, food and nutrition will be seen in a greatly different light.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I'm sure we can also blame the lifestyle of convenience. Wasn't it the US that spawned this abominable creation known as fast food? Fry everything because it's cheap and quick. I'm only twenty something, but I remember hearing my mother chide me when I would 'super size' something... She would tell the story that in her day a regular adults meal was about the size of a kids meal. Why did it change? Possibly because we're such a consumerist society that if we don't literally see more value for our dollar, we wouldn't buy something. So the chains had to reciprocate? Or because the competing chains needed to give you more value and the American never really protested to having a bigger burger on their bun ("Where's the beef?!)...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
While it may be some time before we learn if his position is correct, the book is an interesting read, even just from its reviews of prior conclusions. It is certainly not a book written in the style of "buy my diet book so I can get rich".
A review of his position can be found in a an article written in 2002: "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=%7B367127E3-4395-4DB8-90E0-AC52B2D86AF4%7D, though it written in a firebrand style, which the book is not.
Medicine, as an academic field, is very scientific. It's the common practice of medicine that gets caught up in politics and some areas of medical practice are more political than others. Nutrition has always been very political because there are large commercial interests in selling food to people. The government can't change regulations to fit new scientific understanding without there being huge amounts of money at stake.
Taubes is extremely biased in his presentation of available evidence. For a scathing critique of his abuse of science see this article.
Additionally, exercise doesn't make you thin, but it does keep you from getting fatter than no exercise but the same other behaviors. Exercise can make you musclebound, which is obviously not "thin." Would we say Ahnold in his prime was "thin"? Fuck no.
Thus, how are either of those points "medical orthodoxy."
Also, my girlfriend is in med school, and she sure isn't learning this "orthodoxy"!
Therefore, I conclude with: bullshit.
The link between obesity and world hunger has been proven. The only thing we should offer these Fat fucktards is a fucking razor so they can all slit their fucking wrists. Once all fat fucktards are taken care of, then there would be no problem of hunger again.
Certain fats change chemically when heated, some fat is bad and some is lethal. A few fats and oils are excellent, i.e Olive oil. In our society fat is easy to aquire and in nature it isn't. High fat and protein diets are DANGEROUS for extended periods of time without an equivalent amount of fruit goodness and fibre. Fruit is the human beings best friend making up the majority of the orangutan and native human diet, want to loose fat - eat more fruit, sendentary lifestyle - eat LOTS more fruit.
But you have to excercise. Our bodies were designed to walk a minimum of 35-40 Kilometres a day - there is no other way to explain our legs in an evolutionary sense (our ancestors had to hunt and gather food) and this guy trys to wriggle out of that. I excercise a lot - train a number of different martial arts, played soccer, run and swim not to stay thin (I'm 96 kilos or 211 pounds and pretty fit) but to keep that black dog (depression) at bay and be a better coder. For some, food is a replacement for something else in their lives and they will eat lots of processed foods, not excercise and wonder how they got fat. I think obesity and depression are linked as I have seen many examples of one leading to the other, so (for me at least) the consequences of not excercising are too serious to risk.
The bottom line is it's too easy for us to get a hold of processed foods in our diets, The key to knowing is by asking yourself "How processed is this food?". I suspect the industrialisation of our food processes will be held up as the cause of Obesity and Depression sometime in the future when we stop looking at food as just broad set of components and look at it as a whole. Mass production of food stuffs have served to lower the nutritional content of all foods, and how do we know that the cruel treatment of food animals isn't introducing toxins and poisons into our diets that make us sick? Taubs is just swinging the pendulum the other way, not explaining that there are several pendulums to co-ordinate.
Now, I'm going to polish off this rockmelon before I go for a swim.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
1. Muscle must be fed. Fat doesn't. Strength training builds muscle, which if nothing else consumes calories all the time, just much less at rest.
2. What goes in must either be used or go out. If I eat 6 pounds of food a week, and manage to consume 3 pounds of that as energy, eliminating 3 pounds as indegestible waste (you know what I mean), I neither gain or lose. If I work harder, or replace fat with muscle, I need more energy. It comes from somewhere.
3. If I eat less, I will eventually lose weight. The key word is 'eventually'.
4. If I work more, and don't change my diet, I will eventually lose weight.
5. The equation is, eat less, work more, and be patient. My body may well try to hoard resources in response to the apparent famine or starvation of not so much food.
6. Keep a balanced diet. Not feeding your body nutrients, especially calcium and trace elements, is very bad.
7. Portion control. Just do it.
8. Keep at it. Patience.
9. Drink plenty of water.
10. Read items 1-9 regularly and heed.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Everything you list there simply says that doctors are required to know stuff. Ostensibly that stuff is derived from scientific studies, but knowing a fact derived via science is not at all the same thing as knowing how to do science.
Science is about observation, forming hypotheses, building good experiments to validate them, performing those experiments, and using statistical methods to reason about the implications of the results of your experiments.
Just because you remember a bunch of things you are taught doesn't mean you know science. If you don't have some backbone of researchers doing science to verify the stuff you think you know, it's not science, it's just stuff.
Despite obesity and all that, life expectancies are generally up.
Science would be to actually test how well diets and/or exercise work on a group of people. And over and over for decades such studies have shown that the weight lost is very small, and what weight is lost isn't maintained. That goes for studies of animals too. That's science. And it is true that most clinicians ignore that science and give advice based on a hypothesis that has been for the most part falsified by in vivo studies.
The reason the hypothesis fails is because the system that's been blackboxed regulates fat homeostatically. Just like hydration, carbon dioxide levels, and temperature are regulated - fat mass is also regulated - largely through hypothalamic monitoring of circulating leptin and insulin levels.
What most people don't understand - because they don't plug numbers into the equation - is how closely the body has to maintain the energy balance. A 1 or 2% overage or underage will rapidly lead to massive obesity or death by starvation. So there's a very powerful and very finely tuned system that controls how much we eat and how much we expend by monitoring our fat mass. This is true of the very fat and the very thin. It makes sense when you think about it, but most people don't.
So the body aggressively tries to maintain homeostasis - that is keep fat mass within a given range - by adjusting appetite, metabolism, the relative deposition and breakdown of lean mass and fat mass, and the various forms of physical activity. You have some conscious control over some of these factors, but when you start falling outside the comfortable range - whether or not you are still "fat" - you are fighting homeostatic controls that are very hard to keep at bay long term.
(Generally people who are well below their comfortable range feel extremely hungry, tired and slothful, cold, depressed, etc. And most of all they become obsessive about food. As you can see these are all the body's ways of trying to encourage a positive energy balance. And it's no way to live.)
This kind of mechanims is why it would be very difficult to maintain dehydration indefinitely without drinking. And this is also why it's easy to hold your breath for 10 seconds, but not 3 minutes.
Most fat people - like most thin people - are staying within their range - and most who aren't trying to lose weight and thereby weight cycling maintain remarkably stable weights - just higher weights than we would like.
The real long-term solution to obesity will probably come from finding ways to manipulate the set point so that individuals with dangerously high weights don't have to live their entires lives battling (for the most part futilely) powerful internal regulatory controls just to maintain a weight loss. It is possible that the set point can also be prevented from going too high - but that too is just a hypothesis at this point, and how that can be accomplished isn't clear.
But that understanding among obesity researchers is why most of the focus on obesity is now on prevention in children. And why the research is targeting earlier and earlier ages - including the prenatal environment. I'm not entirely sure that that's a clear-headed strategy because as of yet there have been no interventions shown to be successful at preventing obesity in children either. But there is less evidence than in adults that the project is futile.
What do you do to tell how to feed an animal that you want to keep in a zoo? You study how it eat in the nature. Why is it the perfect way to eat for the animal? Simply because he evolved eating that way and his body perfectly adapted to it.
Only 10 000 years ago we were in the nature eating the way we always did, the way we evolved to eat and that was the optimal way. If you don't agree with that you're throwing away the evolution theory and while it might not be perfect, we don't have anything better, unless you prefer FSM.
And look at it any way you want but humans were getting very little amount of carbs in the nature. Forget about the grains and potatoes that was not available. Our diet was mainly made of fat and proteins. Carbs were so scarse that our body developed a way to store them very efficiently as fat for later use.
But of course the human is also made to make lots of exercise and even if you eat what I consider the 'right way', with little carbs, if you eat more calories than what you spend, your body will store it as fat.
Inuits that are still living like their ancestors have a diet of about 98% of meat and animal fat and only 2% vegetation, yet they don't have any of our westerners illnesses. Now tell me about the food pyramid BS. That pyramid is only there to make the economy move in many ways and is certainly not there to help any of us to be healtier.
You know why we're all getting fat?
We've lost our parasites!
That's not an indictment, it's a fact. Engineering isn't a science either. That doesn't mean you don't find smart, hard-working people in medicine or engineering.
There have been many famous cases of "generally believed medical fact" that have been proven wrong with careful scientific research.
That being said, medical hunches often turn out to be true.
Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy -- that consuming fat makes you fat and exercise makes you thin -- has no basis in research.
This guy just sounds like a nut. Exercise by itself doesn't make you thin - it makes you thinner than you would have been without exercise. Otherwise, you are violating the laws of thermodynamics, and you can't do that.
There are many, many rigorous scientific studies proving the value of exercise in losing weight. If you want to argue about the correlation between losing weight and general health, now things get interesting.
Force yourself to eat nasty whole foods for a week, I guarantee you won't accidentally get too many calories. Egg whites, plain fat-free yogurt, lean ground beef, regular oatmeal... UGH! I'll pass on seconds.
I think you can blame most of this problem on a less-than-stellar track record on scientific reporting in the media.
Consider the perennial reports that "a glass of wine a day is good for you," followed shortly by "any amount of alcohol is bad for you."
Here's how those statements came to appear in the newspaper:
Scientist 1: "I have just finished a 20-year study that indicates that alcohol causes liver disease and increases the risk of several other specific health issues."
Scientist 2: "I have just finished a 20-year study that indicates that moderate drinking lowers the risk of heart disease. We did not look at any other effects."
Newspaper 1: "I talked to scientist 1, and he said that alcohol is bad."
Newspaper 2: "I talked to scientist 2, and he said that alcohol is good."
The scientists are specific, but the reporting on the issues are often in nonspecific generalities. Almost nothing in life is so simple that we can simply declare "it's good for you!" or "it's bad for you!" Unfortunately, optimizing what people eat in real life is a complex problem that involves a wide array of simutaneous upsides and downsides that have to be balanced.
That said... weight loss isn't rocket science, it's just hard. "Why can't it be easy?" is the part that's rocket science.
Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story.
No. For one thing, the strains of rice eaten in Asia have a lower glycemic index than those in America, which may affect things. More importantly, though, can you think of any other significant difference between Asians and "us"? Could it be...genes? Excess calories make you fat. That's a law of physics; I have no idea why some people dispute it. It's like arguing with the law of gravity. The only question is whether calories coming from different sources are absorbed more slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same unless you're exercising to stay in shape. A calorie is a unit of energy and if that energy is not used, it must be stored. Energy doesn't just disappear into thin air; when you consume it, you either use it or you store it. No. Eating a lot of excess calories would very likely make you fat, but that does not mean that if you're fat, you got that way by eating more calories than those around you. And yes, energy can disappear into thin air--in particular, it can be "wasted" as heat, as the result of futile chemical cycles, etc. Not rocket science. And we've got all the knowledge we need. No, it's not--it's a lot more complicated than that. If it were even reasonably simple, the solution would have been figured out by now. It's a very complex problem.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It was an interview with the author of Mindless Eating. It's a very interesting book and really nails how it's so easy to overeat unless you have strong cues that you're 'done'. Small plates and 'sandwich' baggies are your friend.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
...if it were, we would still be testing whether aspirin really treats headaches or not.
Good scientific practice requires disproving one's own hypothesis; if someone has cancer, would you really want your doctor to try disproving ALL other possible conditions before starting a treatment?
For practical necessity, both research and clinical medicine appear to be more of a cross between engineering and voodoo. Sometimes underlying mechanisms are (thought to be) known, and treatments proceed accordingly; other times, weak correlations between proposed factors are taken as causation and treatments are tried willy-nilly. As understanding ever-so-slowly progresses, medicine ever-so-slowly changes from voodoo into engineering.
Quote? Source? Who exactly are you referring to? The Matis Indians from the Amazon? Tibetans? French from the South? Fins from the North? Han Chinese? Mongols? Please, educate me. I can guarantee that I'll shoot your theory of "long lived good health" to pieces.
Who exactly are we referring to? The working miner? The working secretary? The working accountant or tailor? Where? Berlin? New York? Yorktown? I can tell you what my grandparents ate in 1900, and it'll scare your pants off. Lots of cabbage, lots of dairy, industrially produced bread, and very little meat and fruits. Why? Because fruits and meat were very expensive, and they flat out couldn't afford it. To this day, I don't understand why ox-tail soup is a delicacy - it was what my grandparents had when they couldn't get any other meat.
There are some good things about looking at how our diet has changed over time. But to argue though that the olden times were the golden times just because they were the olden times only demonstrates that you weren't present in the olden times. Instead, understand that the human body is a complex system, and that we are currently the closest we've ever been to understanding it. Anything else, and someone's trying to sell you their book, video or diet supplement.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
They say avoid fat to stop blocking your arteries, getting heart disease and a greater risk of cancer.
"Soft drinks sweetened with High Fructose Corn Syrup are up to 10 times richer in harmful carbonyl compounds, such as methylglyoxal, than a diet soft drink control. Carbonyl compound are elevated in people with diabetes and are blamed for causing diabetic complications such as foot ulcers and eye and nerve damage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup
Soda Warning? New Study Supports Link Between Diabetes, High-fructose Corn Syrup
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/532433/
Diabetes fears over corn syrup in soda. New Scientist (04 September 2007)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19526192.800-diabetes-fears-over-corn-syrup-in-soda.html
Theresa Waldron Sugary Sodas High in Diabetes-Linked Compound
http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.asp?docID=607536
Bantle, John P.; Susan K. Raatz, William Thomas and Angeliki Georgopoulos (November 2000). "Effects of dietary fructose on plasma lipids in healthy subjects". American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72 (5): 1128-1134.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/72/5/1128
Whey Protein and Fructose, an Unhealthy Combination. Enerex Botanicals. Retrieved on 2007-1-17.
http://www.enerex.ca/articles/whey_protein_and_fructose.htm
Jurgens, Hella; et al. (2005). "Consuming Fructose-sweetened Beverages Increases Body Adiposity in Mice". Obesity Res 13: 1146-1156.
http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/7/1146
Faeh D, Minehira K, Schwarz JM, Periasamy R, Park S, Tappy L (July 2005). "Effect of fructose overfeeding and fish oil administration on hepatic de novo lipogenesis and insulin sensitivity in healthy men". DIABETES 54 (7):1907-1913. PMID 15983189
http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/54/7/1907
Your brain is one of those places that fat "hides". I suppose your trainer wouldn't steer you in to overly dangerous territory, however.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
My Korean mother knew more about nutrition than this bunch of scientists... -No dinner, you too fat! And I learned from her a new encouraging technique for exercising: -Run one more lap, or no lunch! And I learned about Work Ethics as well: -If you no work, you should not eat. You fail school, no food. Ah, the wonder years...
On the hand, Taubes says that the medical establishment has gotten it wrong for the past 40 years. On the other hand, the medical establishment is exactly where he is getting his data from. Finally, his thesis about the cause of Type-II diabetes is how Type-II diabetes is defined.
I'm not saying that he is wrong - I'm saying that a good chunk of what he says is bog-standard medical knowledge couched in grandstanding and misappropriation. To me, this smells like someone who is trying to make money off of other people's work. In which case, it's nicely done. He's hit the "Seekrit Nollij!", "Conspiracy!" and "Live long and prosper!" buttons, and should entice enough people with them to make a good living. Congrats. I hope I never hear from him again.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Americans' caloric consumption increased 12 percent, about 300 calories, between 1985 and 2000. The idea that this is unrelated to the fact that Americans are getting more and more obese is an extraordinary claim; advocates of high-protein diets have produced no extraordinary evidence to back it up.
My shiatsu teacher once noted that it's easier to get people to change their religion than it is to get them to change their diet. Probably true - if early Christians had made Gentile converts keep kosher, Jesus of Nazareth would likely be historical footnote today. The way that high-protein diet advocates cling to their beliefs is just another example.
As for the broader question of the scientific basis of medicine, most medicine is based on observation and experience, not controlled studies. It's hard to experiment on human beings in a controlled fashion, after all. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not scientific - astronomers don't get to do controlled experiments on stars, either.
But it is true that a lot of accepted medical "knowledge" has little evidence to back it up. It's interesting that many "skeptics" who demand double-blind studies of, say, acupuncture, are likely to have no qualms about undergoing a surgical procedure which has undergone no such testing. Medicine has the look of "Science" even when it doesn't have the substance. (More about science and Chinese medicine here, if anyone's interested.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Go lookup how calories (really kcals) are determined for foods. They figure out how much thermal energy they get by burning the food and then apply fudge factors for the type of food. For example wood burns great but is scaled down as it's not terribly absorbable into the body. In somecases, they simply look at the food content and make estimates based on the percentage of fats and sugars. The set of fudge factors used is probably not a bad estimate for most people. However, it's entirely likely that this model doesn't fit a significant portion of the population. Some folks might be really good at storing sugars or fats, in which case that 300 calories marked on the box might really mean 600 calories for this person.
So while it is true that calories_in minus calories_out is true, it's not that simple. You have to account for absorbtion efficiency and how many calories end up in the toilet.
My girlfriend happens to be a doctor, and currently works in a 'obesity clinic', and she is going for a PhD in public health, with a focus on obesity, and she left me with the impression that:
- Real medicine never was a 'real' science. It's absolutely shocking how many publications, treatments and diagnosis are based purely on 'gut feelings', or incoherent theories. Just pull up any statistics on malpractices, and be shocked. No other 'science' could get away with so many errors, after such a long time of experimenting. This happens in part because medicine is a rather unique applied science: there're a lot of psychological factors, and incredible amount of measuring errors, a gigantic level of complexity and tons of historic 'baggage' that doctors have to face every day.
- Medicine is getting a lot better in this aspect - there seems to be a relatively new way of thinking (in the medical community, at least) called "Evidence based medicine", which, if i understood correctly, could be basically summed up as applying scientific principals to the medical processes
- Obesity in specific is extremely complex. Almost everything you do has some influence on you body-weight and composition. Of course the laws of thermodynamics apply to human beings, too, but there are a gazillion factors that influence just how exactly the body deals with excessive calorie intake, or lack thereof, ranging from genetical to psychological and social factors. Just a basic example would be that if you simply stop eating for a week, you usually lose LESS weight compared to if you start 'snacking' all the time, eating 5 little meals a day (basic theory behind this sems to be that the body switches to 'emergency mode' if there's no food around, trying to save as may energy reserves as it can)
- Most theories seem to me to be a wild mixture of anecdotal observations mixed with biochemistry, somehow resembling Freudian theories - they are coherent in them selves, but lack a level of 'scientific interconection' to other knowledges. So it's quite common for a specific theory in obesity to me contradictory to a theory of e.g. neuroscience. As long as both theories "kind of" work, it doesn't seem to be a top priority to resolve that discrepancy (in contrast to what i have observed in 'hard sciences'). AS far as I can tell, thee's no real proof or reason why Whiskey shouldn't be as bad as Vodka in a diet, yet (here, at least) it's common knowledge that whiskey's ok, but vodka will make you fat - and as long as this works, it doesnt matter that much why this happens, or if it happens at all.
1 Medical research is science because medical researchers are scientists.
2 Medicine is not research because doctors are not scientists.
3 What kind of fat? Some make you fat, some do the opposite.
4 Taubes is not a scientist and not qualified to accurately critique the research.
5 The statement about "all research" proving something other than what is generally accepted is proof that even if 4 were false, he didn't read the literature.
6 There is NO number six.
9 "I'm against all digits below and above the number 9. They, they all blasphemous." -- Early Cuyler
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The form that energy takes is vitally important. Coal has lots of energy, but you can't burn it in a jet engine.
The human body processes and burns different types of food differently. Carbohydrates, proteins, and fats require different chemical processes to be broken down into energy. Different foods may have the same caloric content, but the calories are utilized very differently in the body. A calorie of protein does not equal a calorie of sugar, for example, because insulin ignores protein.
Again, your blanket statement does not hold.
I was having a Trepanation.
Here is a model of how the human body works with respect to fat gain and fat loss. This is my summary of my understanding of the material in a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by a pro bodybuilder named Tom Venuto.
Your body is designed to keep you alive, even in hard times when it's difficult to get enough food. Thus, if you simply cut your calories back (say, to 1200 kCal per day) your body will store fat at every chance it gets. If you are really only eating 1200 kCal per day, yet burning more than that, you must burn fat (and perhaps some good stuff like muscle) so you will lose weight. However, your body will store fat any chance it can, so if you eat extra you can gain fat, and once you stop the 1200 kCal per day regimen you are almost certain to gain fat. Worse, it is likely you lost muscle during the 1200 kCal per day regimen.
So, the goal is for you to lose fat, without your keep-you-alive tricks kicking in and making your body stubbornly try to store fat. BFFM recommends multiple, smaller meals each day, rather than a few big ones. If you are eating every 3 hours, how can you be starving to death? Everything must be okay, so your body will let go of the fat. Also you need to get enough sleep, and try to avoid stress in general; stress is a signal that you are in hard times.
Muscle is your friend for fat loss. Muscle burns calories 24/7, so having more muscle means your daily base calorie burn goes up. This paragraph is important, so feel free to read it again.
The primary way to lose fat is through "cardio" exercise, aka aerobic exercise: running, bicycling, swimming, various gym machines like the elliptical or the stair climber, etc.
Another good thing is to eat a diet that fires up your metabolism. Imagine for a second that you had an entire mouthful of glucose, and you swallowed it all. That will pass straight out of your stomach and go straight into your blood as blood sugar, so it's just about 100% efficient as a food. For fat loss, this is a bad thing. How about a mouth full of vegetable oil? Pretty darn easy to digest, and it will be easily stored as fat since it's fat to start out. Imagine instead you have a mouthful of lean protein (skinless chicken breast, if you eat meat; non-fat cottage cheese if you are vegetarian, say). First of all you will expend some effort chewing, and then your digestive system has to work very hard to tear apart the proteins and turn them into something that can pass into the blood stream. If I recall correctly, you can burn about 30% of the calories in a serving of lean protein, just in the effort it takes to digest it. So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods. Corollary: if you want seconds of anything, let it be lean protein.
So, BFFM tells you how to calculate a good portion size, so you don't eat too much. (If my instincts were good and I naturally took a good portion size, I'd probably not need a book like BFFM.) BFFM encourages multiple, smaller meals, with a high proportion of lean protein, and as much natural whole foods as possible (eat apples, not apple pie). BFFM encourages working out to increase lean muscle mass, plus cardio exercise to actively burn fat. If you do everything in the book, you will lose fat, unless you are one of the fraction-of-a-percent people who have a medical condition that keeps them fat all the time. (And if you are, you have probably figured that out by now.)
Tom Venuto has nothing good to say about BMI. He points out that bodybuilders with less than six percent body fat might still have a high BMI, because muscle is heavy. Body fat percentage is the best indicator, and it's not that hard to get a useful measurement.
He also has nothing good to say about Atkins. Carbs aren't your enemy; you need some. And the idea that you can eat as much fat as you want is just insane. You don't need to go into ketosis to lose fat, and it's not all t
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
When it comes to your risk of dying, being fat- obese, even- but fit is much less risky than being thin and unfit.
If you look at studies like Relationship Between Low Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Mortality in Normal-Weight, Overweight, and Obese Men, or especially Lee et. al. in Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality in men, the results are that:
"In summary, we found that obesity did not appear to increase mortality risk in fit men. For long-term health benefits we should focus on improving fitness by increasing physical activity rather than relying on diet for weight control...our data show that fit men had greater longevity than unfit men regardless of their body composition or risk factor status. Obese men should be encouraged to increase their cardiorespiratory fitness by engaging in regular, moderate-intensity physical activity; this should benefit them even if they remain overweight."
The Lee et. al. study shows that the risk of cardiovascular disease goes up with obesity, but even there:
"fit, obese men had a lower risk of CVD mortality than did unfit, lean men"
All to say- first, get fit. Then worry about your weight.
It's as simple as that..
Carbohydrates are hydrophilic and retain water - both in foods and in the human body. (Unless they've been artificially processed into their pure forms such as sugar, etc.) This is why fats are used for energy storage, they are hydrophobic and can be stored as drops of pure oil in adipose cells. A lot of the initial weight loss from low carb diets is from glycogen stores being used up, and the water associated with them being removed.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_160062.html
22% overweight. So what's changed in the past 10 years? Is it increased affluence due to a booming economy?
I've known plenty of fat Asians here in Hawaii. Also on average the Caucasian population seems thinner than on the U.S. mainland. More excercise due to year round outdoor activities?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I didn't RTFA, but people mainly fall in one of the three soma types (ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph) and that is genetically pre-determined. You can not make a marathon runner from a sumo wrestler and the opposite is true as well. Just ask any hard gainer a typical skinny guy in a gym for example 5'11'' and weighing 165 pounds (( I can not be really sure for the US imperial system)the more correct example would be 178-180cm and weight 60-65kg)), so just ask the gay is it easy to gain 50-70 punds. Or in other words become 225 pounds from 165. I'll tell you it is not that easy.
Upss sorry replying to myself. I ment GUY not GAY. :-(((
English is not my native language.
First, they talk about Calories typically (big C). One Calorie is equal to 1000 calories or 1 kilocalorie. To anybody in the know, 1 Calorie = 1000 calories = 1 kilocalorie = 4,185.8 Joules. These sciences do "map" onto each other however complicated and poorly or misunderstood the process.
Second, and more importantly, any good college chemistry instructor will tell you that the body does not "release energy" from the chemical bonds in food. Chemicals form bonds because the bonded compounds are the lowest-energy state for those particles. In other words, it takes energy to break a chemical bond, not the other way around.
Do you have a reference? I suddenly don't trust you. A chemical reaction - the breaking or formation of a bond - can either release energy or absorb it. There are exothermic reactions (release energy) and endothermic reations (absorb energy).
Digestion allows us to extract energy from food because we break down certain chemical bonds and cause those chemicals to form other, different bonds -- bonds with an even lower energy state than the original form. Our bodies can then take advantage of the surplus (and exactly how is still another story).
Yeah, somehow the body releases energy contrary to the start of your paragraph.
If you understand this, it should be obvious that digestion can be a fairly complex process, not all food is equal, and you can't measure the "calories" in a food as if you had a gas gauge.
Damn near. It is called a bomb calorimeter. You put in a HoHo, burn it, and measure how much energy is released (releasing energy? again!). What you do with this energy is a mystery. You can crap your pants with undigested food (energy not utilized) or run a marathon. The fuck do I know, the fuck do I care but don't pretend like this is witch science.
yes, lets start eating lots of low GI food.
Your weight is based on how you respond to your appetite, not on how much you exercise. Fat and protein are low GI. So are most whole grains and basmati rice. It's the white flour and sugar (the primary non naturally occuring foods in our diet) that have the highest GI. Fructose (fruit sugar) is the only low GI sugar.
and for those who don't know, high GI foods increase your appetite by causing a spike in insulin levels which makes you hungry after the food you eat has been broken down.
First off, the scientific method does not offer proof. It offers varying degrees of certainty that the conclusion you make accurately reflects the truth in the universe.
Secondly, perhaps you might want to experience medical school before you make that sort of broad judgment. The med student's comments were quite accurate with regards to medical school. Although there is another issue that he brings up that needs emphasized: when people finish their training there is a temptation to neglect the science part of the equation, especially if you are a throat swabbing, boil lancing, pill pushing primary care doctor. However, from Family Practice as a specialty you get some of the best Evidence Based Medicine focused practice. The whole idea of EBM has been embraced by FP in recent years and the focus is on emphasizing on translating scientific rigor into clinical practice.
So it was there all along, but its becoming even more the case today in day to day practice.
It wasn't designed as a "diet" but...
http://www.webmd.com/diet/ornish-diet-what-it-is?page=3/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/399570/study_ornish_diet_weight_watchers_score.html?page=2/
Not exactly, he's cherry-picking the data that supports him and discounting the rest.
Unless, as I just stated, he's cherry-picking the data that agrees with him and discarding the rest. he is, so his conclusion is useless.
On this, at least, you are correct. That being said, a scientist worth his salt wouldn't do what this guy did because he'd be a pariah.
What annoys me is low carb stuff tastes bad
You're right, pre-packaged, refined low-carb snacks taste horrible and are most of the time equally bad for you than higher-carb crap. That's why one should avoid them, and eat natural, unprocessed low-carb foods that are home cooked.
Having lobster for dinner one night, pork chops the next, and a chicken ceasar salad the day after, is the opposite of bland, tasteless, bad-for-you food.
These are exactly the principles (*) by which bodybuilders and weightlifters organize their diets. See for yourself:
http://t-nation.com/
as it turns out, stress can determine how your body metabolizes it's intake.
AS well as your environment.
So it's a little more complicated then it would intuitively seems.
Exercise for your heart, and you'll be healthy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He espouses the notion that lower cholesterol levels are not healthier. That statement is so much total bunk that it is on the order and level of other statements like "Smoking doesn't cause cancer" "The earth is flat" etc.
Conclusive proven evidence shows that the lower your cholesterol or the more you *lower* your cholesterol, the lower the risk of heart disease related events etc. Not even worth our time to discuss. A frank waste of time and valuable intertubes!
Joel M Kauffman, PhD "Malignant Medical Myths" (Myth #2)
Christian Allan, PhD & Wolfgang Lutz, MD "Life Without Bread: How a low-carbohydrate diet can save your life"
Richard K Bernstein, MD "Dr Bernstein's Diabetes Solution"
Alice Ottoboni, PhD & Fred Ottoboni, MPH, PhD "The Modern Nutritional Diseases: heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, obesity, cancer and how to prevent them"
Michael Eades, MD & Mary Dan Eades, MD "The ProteinPower LifePlan"
James Braly, MD & R Hoggan, MA "Dangerous Grains: Why Gluten Cereal Grains may be Hazardous to your Health"
I'm a thermodynamicist. My Girlfriend is studying to be a veterinarian and was having problems with her nutrition class. I helped her with her homework and I can tell you for a fact that nutrition follows the laws of thermodynamics precisely.
Food energy in= Energy in Feces+ Energy in Urine + Body heat energy + Work
If you follow the above equation you will note that your digestive tract, kidneys, and cells are not 100% efficient. Veterinarians and farmers measure this in livestock very carefully to ensure healthy, lean animals. The calories in the feces and urine are measured to determine how efficient an animal is at digesting various foods. Some animals are better at digesting oats than hay for example. The same principles apply to humans.
Most fad diets today work on the principles that most people are less efficient at digesting proteins than carbohydrates and therefore lose weight. It does not work for everyone. But unlike animals, humans aren't willing to eat the same thing day after day. Most people aren't willing to measure the energy in their feces either.
I'm 6'2" and weigh 175 pounds - I can hardly imagine weighing 50 pounds more, much less 100!!!
Unless you are some sort of bodybuilder (which I assume you would have mentioned), I'd say the BMI is spot-on.
Listen to your doctors, lard-butt!!!
Personally, I'd love to reach Bjorn Borg's level of cardiovascular fitness; his resting heart rate was between 30 and 45 bpm.
That is a really big range; most people, with years of training, can get their heart rate into the 40s (I have measured mine as low as 39 and I am no gifted athlete, I have just been doing at least one marathon/year for the last 6 years), but it is extremely rare to have anything under 35... I find myself wondering which one of the sources cited in the wikipedia article to believe...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Remember the scene in "The Voyage Home" where Bones visits a 20th century hospital and is outraged by its barbarous practices ("What is this, the Dark Ages?")? I've pretty much felt the same way about medicine for all of my adult life, and it increasingly seems like others share Bone's and my opinions.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Fitday.com
I'm usually not one to post links, but for those of you who have no idea what you are eating (I was once one of you) this site will surely blow your socks off.. perhaps only initially, but it proves a point very quickly.
If your weight goes up or down depends strictly on eating more or less calories than you use. At least you understood that part.
But you are wrong because weight and fat are not the same thing.
You can gain weight changing for example the amount of muscle in your body. High glycemic carbohydrates make you gain more weight in fat that other kinds of calories. High glycemic carbohydrates give you more fat weight. Calories from tuna will make you gain more muscle weight.
For example: you can gain a lot of weight eating a lot of calories from fat and proteins, doing weightlifting, and almost none of that weight will be fat.
In other words: Eating more or less calories that you use will make you gain or lose weight. Depending on the type of calories you eat, with some influence from other factors like excercise or simply genetics will decide the kind of weight you will gain (or lose).
You can even lose more muscle than fat, if you do the wrong diet, and then when you add weight it will be even more fat and less muscle than before.
And this is the reason the BMI is a totally wrong measure of obesity for strong people.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
We can debate the specifics of various weight loss plans, but I think that most reasonable diets will work if they are followed. Less calories and more exercise will inevitably lead to weight loss.
However, following the plan seems to be the trick for many people, myself included. Are there any good resources on how to train your mind and will to stick to a plan? Any science on how exercise, types of food, eating schedules, stress, etc., affect one's mental ability to follow through?
I'm not looking for some moron's hyped up self help book, but something from a reliable and scientific source. This part of the weight loss equation seems to be continually neglected, and instead we get a succession of one new eating-plan-of-the-week after another.
I started running about 8 years ago...
I was a bit over 100 kg (230 lbs) when I started, now I am down to about 165 lbs (75 kg), and my pulse is in the low 40's first thing in the morning... My wife loves the way I look, I feel great, I eat just about everything in sight (4,500-5,000 Cal/day), and I write better code after my mid-day run break... Ask anyone who went from a sedentary lifestyle to an active one about how they feel, and how healthy they are, and you will find similar stories...
I can accept the premise of the article, that conventional wisdom on weight is unproven, but I think that is due to not having done the right experiment yet, not the falsehood of the conventional wisdom...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
... of the 'medical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex'. They just don't realize how their medical eduction was co-opted by said complex in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
:)
See 100 Years of Medical Robbery, the follow-up Real Medical Freedom, How Medical Boards Nationalized Health Care, and How The Cost-Plus System Evolved.
See my post on k5 for preview quotes for all but the last article: links on how healthcare became screwed up
anonymous 'cause I just spent a bunch of mod points.
In our resident clinic we look after people who typically don't look after themselves. We don't tell them to cut out fat and watch their cholesterol. But we are concerned after their hearts. A great percentage of them have at least three or four risk factors for heart disease: tobacco use, diabetes mellitus, high LDL levels, for starters. High-fat diets can increase LDL levels, as well as high-fructose diets, so cardiac patients are told to lower their fat content, although (and esp. in a resident clinic) in practice diet is rarely enough to get people to their goals for risk reduction. Eating habits can lead to disordered endocrine response, eg big insulin spikes, and over time can contribute to insulin resistance, so eating several square meals per day is helpful. Cardiovascular exercise is good for the heart, period. Already-lethargic cardiovascular systems don't cope as well with ischemic injury if a heart attack occurs.
So I don't know what we're telling people that's so wrong. Certainly, if all any of our patients ever come out of the exam room with is, "Eat less fat, exercise," we haven't done our jobs and we deserve castigation. But we spend time on this thing; preventive health is the most efficient health.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
Science found the answer after all http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY_sZyiCA6o
/put your favorite junk food here/. But it's far FAR better and won't get you fat.
I don't mean to troll. I LIKE food. I LIKE to eat. I love chocolate, icecream, you name it. Yet, I'm NOT FAT. I've spent the summer in the US - I come frome Europe - and it's just ludicrus how big everything is. You don't HAVE to eat THAT GIANT ICECREAM, you don't have to drink THAT FREE COKE (omg, the crasiest thing i saw was this "extreme gulp"; that's just plain stupid; don't tell me you have no idea how you got fat!?). Not to mention your sandwiches... I saw a sandwitch maid of an entire loave!? while the "Poor boy's" sandwich was enough for me. You get the picture.
Anyway, I didn't gain any weight while in the US. You know, they sell great ingridinets in your marts, far better than I get over here. Well yes, cooking just a simple pasta meal could be more expensive than eating at
Now that I'm thinkink about it I remember how confused I was the first coulple of days in the US. There was food all around, yet I was starving and just couldn't find anything to eat. I don't eat junk food at home (well, I like burek [http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/548041/2/istockphoto_548041_burek_a_greasy_meal.jpg] from time to time), rather I'd go to a quite inexpensive restaruant where i can get pizza, pasta, steaks etc. for like 4-5.
You are virtually surrounded by junk food, everywhere.
And.. walk people, walk! It won't hurt you to walk a few blocks (e.g. from a hotel to a metro station). And no, it's not dangerous. I felt as safe over there as I do in Europe.
Oh, and, btw, THIS is how coffee should be served http://www.gastronova.pl/images/stories/oferta/dla_biura/capuccino.jpg
But no, "small capuccino" in your term means something like http://nick.recoil.org/assets/2007/7/11/sbux_tall_short_cap.jpeg . That's just insulting to the coffee!
PS: sori gramar nacis, ie dazn't hev bilt in speling ceker
But to say that Exercise has no effect on weight loss is just plain wrong.
I once had plenty of time between jobs to explore this right after the dot-com crash. I went jogging just about every day.
Results: I lost about 5 pounds, had more muscular legs, and ate more (was hungry more often). Thus, my anecdotal experience is that it has a little affect, but dissapointing. Jogging was like a job that earns 50-cents an hour.
Now one could argue that such excercise is still healthy regardless of weight, but as far as weight loss itself, slimming myth mostly busted.
Table-ized A.I.
Carbs are bad. But exercise certainly does help you lose weight. It's sad because I just know a lot of over weight people will use this as an excuse not to exercise when there are so many positive benefits to it.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Imagine a potato chip. Instead of chewing on that potato chip, put it on your tounge for a minute with out chewing on it. What happens? Your saliva begins to beak it down into GLUCOSE (sugar). It will taste sweet. It's a carbohydrate. Complex carbohydrates take longer to break down, but they are all forms of glucose. That baked potato you ate? Half a cup of sugar, (I exaggerate to clarify).
Insulin is the reason people store fat. If you are eating glucose, you body will increase insulin levels in order to maintain blood sugar levels. If your cells are not using enough glucose,(energy), the glucose is stored as fat.
"A calorie is a calorie", or "Calories in>calories used=fat" arguments are not addressing the real problem here. A cup of sugar will cause an insulin spike in the blood. A baked potato will cause the same spike, but it will happen over a longer period of time thus slowing the insulin level increase. The resultant increase in insulin levels is the same. The same amount of calories consisting of protein will NOT cause an insulin increase. Fat does not cause an increase of insulin levels, and actually tastes good and satiates your body. When is the last time you had a richly marbled steak that tasted bad? Why does butter taste so good? 'cause it's made out of fat.
Fat is one of the most calorie dense foods there is. High fat mixed with high carbohydrate (glucose), will cause a increase in insulin. If you are not using that much energy it will be stored as fat.
Im a computer geek and work as a systems engineer. My work rarely demands any motion besides pressing keys and thinking( damn you ssh!). Because of this and the fact i started to grow sideways i started training half a year ago. It took me months before i could see any effects which i suspect is why so many diss it as a way to loose weight.
Its a fact that muscles burns more energy in a resting state than fat does. Training that builds muscles burns calories you can deduct from your daily intake. The higher energy consumption from building the muscles continues for about 24 hours after an excercice.
Because of this you can loose weight if you dont eat more than you burn. If you train hard its sometimes hard to eat enough, the market for gainers didn t come from thin air.
Fat contains high amounts of energy but you dont to avoid it. Just dont eat more than you burn. You could just as well get fat on carrots but you would have to eat most of the day. The problem
is the overconsumtion in conjunction with lack of excercise for most fat people. For the sake of the enviroment it would be better if people didnt eat more than they really need.
HTTP/1.1 400
The basic premise of caloric measurements is available energy. Fat gives almost 2x the available energy per gram than protein or carbohydrate. Energy can not be created or destroyed. What you eat goes in one end and comes out or stays in. Period. (.).
The argument that you don't metabolize all available calories applies to olestra, not greasy burgers. The consequence of indigestible fasts is called "anal leakage" mmmmm... Is that what low-carb is promoting? Lose weight through anal leakage? How charming.
The consequence of indigestible sugars is flatulence. Some of the sugars in beans are indigestible. Good for your heart, the more you eat them the more you fart. Lactose intolerant people can't digest milk sugar. Give them some and stand back!
If you are not achieving such entertaining effects, you are not achieving some magical result contrary to the medical orthodoxy by less efficiently metabolizing your food by altering the relative balance of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. That is, low-carb is a load. There's a reason why Atkins went bankrupt.
It is at least heartening to see the commentary following the Boing Boing article calling BS on it, especially after seeing the similarly anti-rationalists making their voices heard after that wired gadget article.
I hope you are not one of those who says that the BMI is a valid measure of obesity. It's totally wrong if you're a weightlifter.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
1. Buy a scale precise to at least the nearest 10 grams.
2. Download an energy density table for food. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/alt_formats/hpfb-dgpsa/pdf/nutrition/nvscf-vnqau_e.pdf
3. Every time you eat something, calculate the total calories.
4. Do that for a week, eating as per normal, so that you can calculate your equilibrium daily calorie requirement.
5. Eat to lower your daily caloric by 10%, check scales/mirror after 1 week.
6. If that doesn't work, lower it again.
The most important thing is to MEASURE calories. Otherwise you will ASSUME, which as all good engineers know, makes an ASS out of U and ME.
In the short term, there is water and muscle weight (including water involved with glycogen storage, bowel contents etc) that will throw you out, which is why you should only pay attention to weight/mirror over longer intervals.
There are a few tricks. Protein has an appetite suppressing effect, so increasing protein makes dieting easier. Also take a look at a table of exercise calorie burn rates.
http://health.utah.gov/lhd/tooele/Community_Health/CVD/Calories_Burned.html
Note that the MOST caloric intensive activity is 850 calories per hour, which is more than most people do when they exercise, and is difficult to maintain. Jogging is 600, and that's enough of a PITA.
Contrast that with the calorie intake side of the equation. I could easily eat 3 snickers bars in 5 minutes when I'm hungry, and that's restraining myself. That's 900 calories, very enjoyable, and more than 12 times the rate at which the body can burn energy over a reasonable length of time. Which is why attention to exercise alone is never a sufficient requirement to lose weight but attention to diet is, since you need at least 60 calories per hour to "idle", i.e. sleep or rest. Maybe less in starvation mode, but it's still sure as heck greater than zero.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Sorry, calories in, calories out is simply unscientific. We aren't talking about a simple machine here, but a very complex one with all sorts of feed-back loops built in, susceptible to viral damage resulting in obesity, etc. Eat less, and your metabolism will slow down and you will gain weight, because your body goes into famine mode. Some people do burn about what they eat, without energy storage. These are people with genes which would have killed them in past centuries, in any famine, or just in say, February when the larder was nearly bare. Then add to it that it turns out that the 'overweight' region on the BMI, which used to be regarded as the healthy range *really is* the healthiest range, even though there is more meat on the bones than in a bulemic runway model's body. But I am amazed that people who are capable of learning are unable or unwilling to learn, and just assume that the body is a very simple mathematical black box - just so that they can feel superior to other people.
No, a calorie is not a calorie, and you don't get fat from eating calories. There is increasing research evidence, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence, that carbs cause the weight gain, the high cholesterol, the diabetes, the heart disease. Exercise can help, but the basic answer is chemical. The calorie theory is outdated, and anyone who has tried it for the last 30 years knows it does not work. It is simplistic, and easy to conceive, but a physics lie. The new metabolic dynamic is just as simple and plausible, and by all accounts, far more effective. Scientists agree individually that insulin's primary role is to drive fat production, and carbs primary effect is to drive insulin secretion. So why not take the logical next step and treat fat by reducing carbs? Scientists can't seem to follow their own simple, straightforward logic. Taubes is not saying that exercise has no place in health. He is specifically saying that it does not directly cause weight loss. Taubes agrees with the other benefits of exercise and exercises himself. He is just making the point that medical claims need to be checked for validity by research, which they often have not been. Do not just believe what health "experts" tell you to believe. You should not listen to any doctor who still believes in the low-fat or caloric model of nutrition. Taubes is not a researcher, is a journalist. He is just honestly reporting what the research actually says, which has often been covered up, and the medical community is running scared. Taubes is asking for the research to be done, and the research community is desperately resisting it. Something is rotten in Denmark and Taubes is merely exposing it. For more information and reviews of the research, see the follwing medical and general info websites: http://www.weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/ (Regina Wilshire) http://rjr10036.typepad.com/askdrvernon/ (Dr. Mary Vernon) http://www.proteinpower.com/ (Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades) http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/ (Dr. Richard Bernstein) http://www.lowcarb-ca.com/ http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.blogspot.com/ (Jimmy Moore) Read the other reports by Taubes available widely on the web. Read the report by Dr. Ron Rosedale "Insulin and its Metabolic Effects" available widely on the web.
Jim Fixx did die at a fairly young age right after going for a run. What everyone neglects is that by making it to 52 years of age before having a heart attack, he went 17 years longer than his father did... Men in his family died young. period. He lived a lot longer than most of them, and many people attribute that fact to his running habit...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Sure, digestion is a complex process and, yes, the laws of thermodynamics don't explain the intricacies of why people get fat and stay fat, but if you search PubMed on obesity, the uniform opinion is that, regardless of what kind of diet you eat, consuming more (kilo)calories than you use will cause you to get fat. This surely is not where the controversy is.
And in particular contexts (specifically illness, extreme stress, and starvation, sometimes also known as dieting), the body does use fat, carbs, and proteins equivalently: they will generally all get broken down in order to replenish the body's store of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is the body's true currency of energy, and the amount of ATP generated is proportionate to the amount of energy released by the breakdown of these substances into carbon dioxide, water, and (in the case of proteins), urea. Whatever doesn't get used to make ATP essentially gets shunted into the production of fat.
The big unknown is really how much of what you eat actually makes it into the bloodstream. Some of the variables of interest include intestinal transit time (high carb foods tend to pass through the GI tract faster than fatty and/or proteinaceous foods), time of transport across the intestinal lining (the breakdown products of carbs and proteins are generally more easily absorbed than fat, although not all fat is created equal), the exact composition of your intestinal flora (since the various organisms that live in your gut create all sorts of breakdown products, some of which can get reabsorbed and still used by your body), and the amount of enterohepatic circulation (even if the liver didn't catch it the first time around, it can still get reabsorbed farther down the tract and still actually get used), to name a few.
But what this really boils down to is the fact that the ideal 2,000 (kilo)calorie per day diet is just as fictional as the ideal 70 kg man, and has no specific bearing on whether a pound of potatoes will make you fatter than a 16 oz sirloin. Each of us has an individual energy set-point where usage and consumption are at equilibrium. Running this budget in the red makes us lose weight. Running this budget in the black makes us get fat. The problem is that we don't have a good way of figuring out where this set-point is, and even if we did, the body will always try its damndest to make you break even.
3500 more calories then you need means 1lb of body fat.
3500 under what you need means 1lb of body fat lost.
no please pay me $20 for this in book form across 300 pages
I think this is a really good point, especially the last one. I've never really been overweight, but neither was I ever much for physical activity in school. For a long time I had a mental association between physical activity, sports, and the asshole/bully types in elementary and middle school. I hated competitive sports because I've never been any good at them, and I associated sports with testosterone-laden assholes. And let's face it, it sucks to lose all the time or be picked last all the time. So I found various ways to write off exercise altogether in a nice self-reinforcing mindset. But at one point, I just decided, "I want to look good." Kinda like Kevin Spacey's revelation in American Beauty.
Breaking those mental barriers down took a lot of effort and a long time. I started by breaking the link between physical activity and sports. I found a good gym and went in with the attitude that I wasn't competing with anyone else in there, and as it turned out everyone else was, in fact, worried more about their own exercise than comparing themselves with me. I learned from my uncle how to use the machines properly. I kept a notebook in which I had a rigid schedule, 4 days a week, and the types of exercises to do (which varied, some days I did pulling and others I did pushing exercises). I also tallied the amount of weight I had set the machines to, more to keep myself from forgetting and setting it incorrectly: I set it such that I could do 8-10 reps without letting the weights down, then a 30 second break, three times in a row. I didn't spend a long time in the gym each day, just 12 minutes on a stationary cycle to get my heart rate up and then about 20 minutes of whatever the book said to do. And I told myself I'd keep to it for at least two months.
It didn't happen overnight, it was hard work, and the first couple weeks I felt sore as hell, but the amount of weight I set the machine to doubled over the span of those two months. I felt great, stronger, somehow more physically confident, and I actually started to look pretty good too. But the biggest hurdle for me was working through the (apparently irrational) fear that others would mock me, breaking those mental blocks and stepping through the doors of the gym the first couple weeks. I'm still not going back to the abuse of competitive sports, I've decided that's not for me, but the self-competitive power-leveling nature of the gym seems to fit. And contrary to my brain's association, despite all that exercise, I have not turned into a testosterone-laden jock.
Having been to both Spain and the U.S., and living in neither, I can confirm without any doubt that if anyone's food is "objectively disgusting" it's the food in the U.S., and Spanish food was generally quite pleasant.
For example:
- extensive use of fresh produce (Spain) versus pre-processed goop (U.S.)
- most things grilled/shallow fried/cured (Spain) versus most things deep fried (U.S.)
- variety of spices, herbs and types of flavour (Spain) versus sugary, somewhat Mexican-y uniformity (U.S.)
- average coffee (Spain) versus terrible, terrible coffee (U.S.)
- beer (Spain) versus Budweiser and Miller (U.S.)
- serving sizes designed for normal humans for one single meal (Spain) versus servings for giant humans for multiple days (U.S.)
I will, however, grant you the following:
- New York pizza is one of the best things I've ever eaten
- Bagels in the U.S. are like croissants in France - they just don't taste as good anywhere else
Read Pynchon.
I think one of the problems is that medical school curricula typically ignore the entire field of nutrition. Sure, they teach the biochemical reactions in which fats, proteins, and carbs are involved, but with regards to how this knowledge might actually be used to help patients, there is often a vast silence.
Add to this the fact that, in general, the medical establishment is extraordinarily conservative, and you end up with clinical practice that lags behind the basic science, and didactics that lag even farther behind clinical practice. So what you learn in med school is like 10 years behind what people actually do in clinical practice (although you may actually get pretty decent basic science if your school happens to have a lot of NIH grants, but, again, this is pretty useless if you actually intend to use this knowledge to treat people) and most clinicians tend to wait 10 years before they start believing anything that basic science and evidence-based medicine tells them (and that's if they even bother to read the big journals.)
Whew! Glad we got that settled because society's beliefs about food have resulted in something rather Malthusian: epidemic diabeties, obesity, heart disease, some cancers and hypertension.
Well, I don't know, I tend to think of medicine more as an applied science. It may not meet the definition of pure science, but it still does rely on advances in the pure sciences, it utilizes rational principles and logic, and there are a lot things about it that are reproducible and verifiable. Sure, it suffers from the interference of special interest groups that have other agenda, but I think it's still a far cry from completely non-scientific. And what science is free from such interference anyway?
One of the huge problems is that there are experiments that are doable that will never get funded, especially since there are various industries that have a vested interest in never discovering the answers to certain questions.
Except that it's the main reason why most people end up having to see a doctor in the United States. It is estimated that one out of three children born in the U.S. today will develop type 2 diabetes. Diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, cerebrovascular disease, and even infertility and impotence are all conditions that are often associated with obesity.
It's getting to be such that the practice of internal medicine in the United States is mostly the treatment of the complications of obesity.
My family taught me something when I was young and came to America, and miraculously became pudgy... "they have sugar in EVERYTHING here", so we cooked at home, and ate at home a lot, and bought mostly the basic building blocks of food, and... (ding ding) made it at home. There was never a shortage of sweets in the house, or of food. And once we dropped the soda pop and store bought cookie fads, our fat content dropped.
:) Salads, etc. My diet is as varied as it gets, and yet I'm in good shape and I've lost weight. Interesting? I was shocked. I have had two to three week breaks in my exercise routine, and yet no weight gained, and I lose little to none of my conditioning. (First day back I usually run half a mile, but I can get back to two to three miles a day the next day... shocked the life out of me since I was so used to what the idiots in school taught us. Seems almost everything school teaches can be thrown out once you graduate... preferably before. Including the lack of a good warmup before exercise, which is what destroys so many people's joints.) Strangely enough, I have "healthy levels" of the following. "Blood Sugar", "cholesterol", "blood pressure", "heart rate", with no murmurs, no palpitations and roughly no issues whatsoever.
Here's the catch. I work out and jog (swim, bike, etc, that's beside the point), but I do it to keep myself physically strong and resilient. I don't exercise to lose weight. It didn't really work, all it did was convert some of the fat to muscle. The rest went away as I began to eat regular healthy meals and cut down on the crap food to once a week or less. (Never cut the nasty stuff completely, or the cravings will find another way to surface, psychologically speaking. We're human and we're tempted, find a way to replace your cravings with something less nasty, that'd be it.)
My secret? I eat at least an egg a day, regular tea and hot chocolate, sausages or meat once a day
Rule #1? Live a good, healthy and complete life, stop struggling for shit you don't need, and stop fighting battles that don't gain you anything, not even satisfaction (which is more important than people think.)
Rule #2? Stop living with fear. Fear is the only thing you should fear, if anything at all. If something you do makes you "afraid", find out why, and get rid of the problem, don't just suppress the symptoms. Oftentimes fear will simply be some choice you make that you don't understand. Fear is among the worst stressors out there, yet few realize this. Getting into a fight with your boss and walking out of a job without fear is better than living each day at that job constantly afraid that you'll lose it someday and that you won't make payments on that brand new SUV you didn't really need (or want) or that three story house that only you and several ghosts live in (or whatever it is that keeps turning on the lights each night.)
All in all, remove fear by understanding what causes it and deal with it. That and discover the things that satisfy and please you, and surround yourself with those things. Often they are cheaper than you can imagine. Short of hunting and fishing, I have VERY few expensive hobbies. My garage is bigger than my house, as is my shop. Most of my "toys" I built myself, and will continue to do so. I use my life as an example, merely because I've been through all the problems many complain about, and have found ways to complete the needs behind each problem without rushing into a marriage or running into the arms of the nanny state or going on clinical drugs. Do I still have issues? Hell yeah. If I was perfect, I wouldn't be human.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I did the hackers diet... I lost weight. And I can tell you as fact that it's not that simple.
Stress, nutrition, and types of exercise alter each of your variables in important ways.
So you start exercising, and modify your diet to reduce calories... Say you ditch sugared soda, and cut your portions in half; you also get a gym membership and start lifting and running. Sure, you're burning energy. Where is your body getting that energy? Metabolizing fat? If you're lucky... But it could be muscle if you've kept your stress levels high and don't have a balanced diet; or if you excercise improperly.... This leads to injury when you exercise. You lose weight, but not fat, then you're injured and can't exercise anymore. Great job! Soon the weight comes back, but not as the muscle you lost; instead it comes back as more fat. You may weigh slightly less than when you started, but you're less healthy, and you feel it too. Great job!
Claiming that the (calories in calories out = weight loss) is all there is to it is just bad. Very few people who have any experience with losing weight would tell you it was that simple.
And the surest way to high triglyceride levels and bad cholesterol is to eat starchy carbs and sugar.
And it's also shown that you're less likely to die of a heart attack if you have a high cholesterol level.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
Journal of the American Dietetic Association Volume 101, Issue 4, April 2001, Pages 411-420: Abstract
Objective To examine the association between a range of health and nutrition indicators and popular diets.
Design The Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals (CSFII) 1994-1996 data were used to examine the relationship between prototype popular diets and diet quality as measured by the healthy eating index (HEI), consumption patterns, and body mass index (BMI). The prototype diets included vegetarian (no meat, poultry, or fish on day of survey) and non-vegetarian. The nonvegetarian group was further subdivided into low carbohydrate (less than 30% of energy from carbohydrate), medium (30% to 55%), and high (greater than 55% of energy). Within the high carbohydrate group, participants were classified as having Pyramid or non-Pyramid eating patterns. The Pyramid group was defined as 30% or less of energy from fat and at least one serving from the five major food groups in the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. Finally, the non-Pyramid group was further subdivided into low fat (less than 15% of energy from fat) and moderate fat (15% to 30% of energy from fat). In addition, a review of the published scientific literature was conducted; all studies identified were included in the review.
Subjects 10,014 adults, aged 19 years and older, from the 1994-1996 CSFII were included in the analyses of extant data. More than 200 individual studies were included in the review of the literature.
Results Analyses of the CSFII indicate that diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for the high carbohydrate Pyramid group (82.9) and lowest for the low carbohydrate group (44.6). Energy intakes were low for the vegetarians (1,606 kcals) and high carbohydrate/low fat group (1360 kcals). BMIs were lowest for women in the vegetarian group (24.6) and the high carbohydrate/low fat group (24.4); for men, the lowest BMIs were observed for vegetarians (25.2) and the high carbohydrate Pyramid group (25.2). Review of the literature suggests that weight loss is independent of diet composition. Energy restriction is the key variable associated with weight reduction in the short term.
Conclusions Diets that are high in carbohydrate and low to moderate in fat tend to be lower in energy. The lowest energy intakes were observed for those on a vegetarian diet. The diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for the high carbohydrate groups and lowest for the low carbohydrate groups. The BMIs were significantly lower for men and women on the high carbohydrate diet; the highest BMIs were noted for those on a low carbohydrate diet.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/1969924.htm
"The question is why does exercise work in obesity? Because it burns calories? That's ridiculous. Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie, I mean you can't do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to work that off, that's not the reason that exercise is important, exercise is important for three reasons exclusive of the fact that it burns calories."
"Some people say, I've heard obesity experts say, well it's surprising that will all the ready availability of food that we're not fatter. In other words that we are actually controlling our appetite pretty well given that we've probably been evolutionary designed to eat anything that goes, and there's anything that goes all around us, so why aren't we actually fatter?"
"If you look at the Atkins diet, the Atkins diet was no-carb, high-fat, no-carb and it worked. We look at the Japanese diet, high-carb, no-fat, it also worked. When you put them together you get something called McDonalds and clearly that doesn't work. So the question is what is it about the Japanese diet, even though they eat all of this white rice, that still allows this phenomenon to be OK?"
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I don't have a membership to access the full text, so it's hard to analyze. However, the groups were divided up by caloric intake of the carbs, not their composition with respect to their complexity. In short, the study doesn't test the proposition that Taubes is suggesting in his book
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
"Ok, here's your scientific study:"
No, that's an uncontrolled situation without controls. You may be right, or you may not be right. You haven't done any kind of scientific study to reach your conclusions.
The problem here isn't what makes us fat (well, it's not the core problem, anyhow). It's that Americans don't understand science, and that, in particular, Americans with MEDICAL DEGREES don't understand science (or willfully ignore it in their quest for media attention). This, coupled with the urge to publish controversial articles, whether they be good studies or not, by the medical profession's journals, as well as the urge to publish anything juicy at all by the lay media means that we have:
1. A plethora of bad studies.
2. A body politic who can't tell a good study from a bad one.
3. A food industry and media industry who thrive on the confusion and a shifting pattern of "conventional wisdom".
We're badly educated, and we're being farmed.
Oddly, the cure for the above is science, but the people who fund and do such studies are better off when no study is ultimately convincing.
--
Learn what a bad study is. Try to teach those around you what science is. Make noise and don't buy what bad studies sell.
I'm listening to the podcast and there's many many bugs in his thinking.
He's also an annoying person with a huge ego - par for the course for author of all those "weight loss books" he's trying to replace with his own.
No sig today...
Though the risk of certain cardiovascular diseases and incidents increase with cholesterol, it is not true that a lower cholesterol protects against all forms of cardiovascular problems, injury, or even death. What is a "heart attack"? It's when a clot, lodges in the lumen of a cornary vessel, usually stenosised because of atherosclerotic plaques. Without this clot, there is no heart attack. One thing you might understand if you had basic medical education, is that the ability for the blood to clot, is strongly influenced by inflammation. That is to say, when the body is in a pro-inflammatory state, the body shifts to increased blood clotting. Asprin, for example, works by inhibiting the synthesis of arachidonic acid into certain proinflammatory chemicals. In doing so, it reduces the cardinal signs of inflammation (like swelling and pain), while also thinning the blood. With me so far? Okay. Insulin levels correlate with both inflammation (positive) and cholesterol (positive). Insulin is increased on a high carbohydrate diet, especially a high carbohydrate/high calorie diet. What does this mean? If you eat a diet high in carbohydrates, you make more insulin. If you make more insulin, your body is more inflammatory, and if your body is more inflammatory, you are at a greater risk for blood clots, and blood clots cause heart attacks and strokes. You also probably have a high cholesterol, since the influence of insulin on inflammation, also promotes cholesterol synthesis and fat storage. The cholesterol is not causing the atherosclerosis (more on that later), and the cholesterol certainly isn't causing the clots that lead to vascular accidents/MIs. The cholesterol is a marker for metabolism, and it is the metabolism doing all of these things. Statin drugs work not by reducing cholesterol, but by reducing inflammation, simialr to your handy 2 dollar bottle of asprin. Cholesterol is a material that the body uses to repair cell membranes and tissues. Without cholesterol, we would be dead. It's a key component of brain cells, and hormones. Atherosclerosis tends to occur in those populations who sustain a high amount of tissue damage; the elderly, smokers, people who eat sh*tty diets high in carbs (thus hyperinsulinemic), so on. An increase in cholesterol, tends to occur any time the body sees an increased need for tissue synthesis and repair. For example, cholesterol (as well as clotting ability) will increase during pregnancy (for obvious reasons, increased blood clotting and cholesterol levels are a boon for pregnant woman and child and were selected). Cholesterol causes atherosclerosis, like white blood cells cause infections. The problem is the primary insult which is promoting inflammation and tissue damage (example, smoking: hypoxia and an increase breakdown of tissues with inefficient repair). Those things which decrease cholesterol, tend to be those things which also decrease insulin OR inflammation depending on where the intervention is targeting (and remember, anything that reduces insulin usually reduces inflammation too). Is any of this making sense to you? Cholesterol, while being a marker for certain metabolic derrangements (thus diseases) is ultimately passive. Therefore, drugs / interventions which target cholesterol specifically are misguided. Those things which lower cholesterol also tend to reduce inflammation and insulin, and it is likely this way they are theraputic. ...and, since cholesterol is only a marker for certain metabolic derrangements, and these are not absolutely conclusive with the TOTAL cholesterol or even the LDL cholesterol, a "lower is better" attitude is not justified.
Oh, and, it's also not true that less cholesterol/inflammation is better. Just as a highly inflammatory state with very high insulin tends to cause atherosclerosis and fatal clots... it's also true that starvation, very low cals, thus low levels of insulin and inflammation promote an insufficient inflammatory response which promotes increase risk for death from accidental
I know EXACTLY what you're talking about. My hat off to you.
I'm willing to bet that you probably don't consume (or severely restrict) the mother of all American junk foods diets ----- Television.
Yeah, that's dead on. As I posted elsewhere in this topic, the big problem is that people expect results from a level of activity that's really insufficient.
A few hours of aerobic exercise a week just made me cranky and frustrated, and eventually discouraged. Seven hours, on the other hand, (with the same couple of hours of weights and 1400 Calorie diet that I was doing earlier), got me losing weight steadily - to the tune of about 60 pounds over 6 months. Exercise does work, it's just that the level required is much higher than what people expect it to be.
I credit The Biggest Loser with setting a reasonable expectation of the effort required - this is not something you can just casually do haphazardly, it's a real commitment.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
(This is the same as my previous post, except formated with HTML...Sorry didn't realize this forum didn't auto-format).
...and, since cholesterol is only a marker for certain metabolic derrangements, and these are not absolutely conclusive with the TOTAL cholesterol or even the LDL cholesterol, a "lower is better" attitude is not justified.
Though the risk of certain cardiovascular diseases and incidents increase with cholesterol, it is not true that a lower cholesterol protects against all forms of cardiovascular problems, injury, or even death.
What is a "heart attack"? It's when a clot, lodges in the lumen of a cornary vessel, usually stenosised because of atherosclerotic plaques. Without this clot, there is no heart attack.
One thing you might understand if you had basic medical education, is that the ability for the blood to clot, is strongly influenced by inflammation. That is to say, when the body is in a pro-inflammatory state, the body shifts to increased blood clotting. Asprin, for example, works by inhibiting the synthesis of arachidonic acid into certain proinflammatory chemicals. In doing so, it reduces the cardinal signs of inflammation (like swelling and pain), while also thinning the blood.
With me so far? Okay.
Insulin levels correlate with both inflammation (positive) and cholesterol (positive). Insulin is increased on a high carbohydrate diet, especially a high carbohydrate/high calorie diet.
What does this mean? If you eat a diet high in carbohydrates, you make more insulin. If you make more insulin, your body is more inflammatory, and if your body is more inflammatory, you are at a greater risk for blood clots, and blood clots cause heart attacks and strokes. You also probably have a high cholesterol, since the influence of insulin on inflammation, also promotes cholesterol synthesis and fat storage. The cholesterol is not causing the atherosclerosis (more on that later), and the cholesterol certainly isn't causing the clots that lead to vascular accidents/MIs. The cholesterol is a marker for metabolism, and it is the metabolism doing all of these things. Statin drugs work not by reducing cholesterol, but by reducing inflammation, simialr to your handy 2 dollar bottle of asprin.
Cholesterol is a material that the body uses to repair cell membranes and tissues. Without cholesterol, we would be dead. It's a key component of brain cells, and hormones. Atherosclerosis tends to occur in those populations who sustain a high amount of tissue damage; the elderly, smokers, people who eat sh*tty diets high in carbs (thus hyperinsulinemic), so on. An increase in cholesterol, tends to occur any time the body sees an increased need for tissue synthesis and repair. For example, cholesterol (as well as clotting ability) will increase during pregnancy (for obvious reasons, increased blood clotting and cholesterol levels are a boon for pregnant woman and child and were selected). Cholesterol causes atherosclerosis, like white blood cells cause infections. The problem is the primary insult which is promoting inflammation and tissue damage (example, smoking: hypoxia and an increase breakdown of tissues with inefficient repair).
Those things which decrease cholesterol, tend to be those things which also decrease insulin OR inflammation depending on where the intervention is targeting (and remember, anything that reduces insulin usually reduces inflammation too).
Is any of this making sense to you?
Cholesterol, while being a marker for certain metabolic derrangements (thus diseases) is ultimately passive. Therefore, drugs / interventions which target cholesterol specifically are misguided. Those things which lower cholesterol also tend to reduce inflammation and insulin, and it is likely this way they are theraputic.
Oh, and, it's also not true that less cholesterol/inflammation is better. Just as a highly inflammatory state with very high insulin
Here's some unconventional wisdom for you, in order to get fat, it takes insulin to move the glucose from your blood to inside the adipose tissues, if you are doing weight bearing exercises (anything from walking to weight-lifting), your muscles become more sensitive to the insulin and your body requires less to maintain a proper blood-sugar levels and less insulin means less fat! That's why you've lost the weight and why calorie restricted diets normally fail. Sure you can lost weight on a "diet" but it always seems to come back if the dieter isn't exercising.
So what you are saying is that exercise increases your muscles appetite for fuel, or in other words your metabolism... fascinating, you really turned that conventional wisdom on it's head!
My take on calorie restriction is that it is substantially harder than exercise. Exercising requires you to be good for a few hours a week, while calorie restriction requires you to be good 24/7. Both exercise and eating right are lifestyle changes, for just about everyone, exercise is an easier one to maintain, and it has other health benefits.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
We are quite some time away from real scientific medicine, the human body (or even drosophila) is far too complicated for chemistry and physics to fully analyse yet. Thus the band-aid approach of biology and its top-down approach to an exercise in nomenclature and memorisation with little to no real knowledge or scientific understanding of what is happening.
Medicine gives science a bad name. People tend to think that real scientists are a vacuous and artificial as medical researchers and doctors.
Real science is very different from medicine.
The author's talking about lower dietary cholesterol levels. You're talking about lower blood cholesterol levels. There've been a surprising number of studies that show that dietary intake doesn't directly correlate to blood cholesterol levels.
In some people who strictly ensure a super-low dietary intake, their bodies will actually make up the difference -- they'll internally manufacture cholesterol from other things in order to keep the blood cholesterol level high! Genetics is a big factor here. In fact most of your cholesterol is built by your body, not taken from your food. It appears that diet is not the major factor for most people. Read more at the American Heart Association, which I would consider a pretty reliable source... http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3046105
Presumably in some people with heart disease, limiting saturated fats helps. But for other people, saturated fats might HELP, apparently (!). Read here:
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/80/5/1102
I'd consider the AHA and Journal of Clinical Nutrition to be rather reliable sources (as opposed to all those "Cholesterol MYTH!" Web sites that take some of these ideas and run with them...)
And it serves two purposes, videos (DVD, VHS) and playstation :) And of those things I don't partake nearly as much (they mostly save as discussion to see where the social programming is being done or what message is being passed onto the audience, which makes for heated discussions, and enjoyable ones at that.)
Strangely, since I reduced that "junk diet", I have discovered I have several extra hours available during the day and more sleep every night than when I watched TV. Interesting dillema... vegge out or get actual restful sleep... what a boggle!
Life is not only "stranger" than fiction, it is often much better... but to discover that, we actually have to live it.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I haven't read every post but I have yet to see any of the high-modded posts mention a crucial aspect to any weight-loss or health-improvement plan:
:-)
Get enough sleep!
This is a pretty common failing, especially among geeks. But getting plenty of sleep is essential to both physical and mental health.
This is especially true if you're stepping up your excercise level. Your body will not be used to the extra work and will need more time to recover at night. Also, being well-rested means you'll be more alert and happy during the day, and therefore less likely to snack compulsively, and more likely to make your gym appointment.
Yes, I see the irony of posting this at 1:30am.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The only problem with running is that it puts a lot of stress on the knee joint, so by the time you get to 50 or so your knees will be smashed. That's why cycling is another interesting option.
I'm 5'11", 150lbs, and have a body fat % south of 15. And I'm not in my 20's anymore.
I don't eat fatty or junk foods on a regular basis (sometimes, pizza is just too hard to resist) and I exercise (rock climbing these days, and about to start snowboarding).
If I eat more (or really, the same amount as I do now w/exercise) and exercise less, I gain weight.
Not rocket science.
- Roach
Telling fat people that it isn't their fault is a multibillion dollar industry. People are actually starting to believe it. I work in a clinic where we treat a lot of fat people. We tell people they are consuming more calories then they are burning. A shocking number of people don't believe it. They really think that you can sit on your ass all day long and stuff your face. If you get fat it is because of your genetics.
I really think that physicians get away with too many things. I don't about the US, but here in Australia, most "doctors" are people with a bachelor and masters degree, no doctorate. Still, they have their mouth full of calling themselves Dr whatever. Even dentists (for which you study a bachelor degree) here call themselves Dr whatever. I just don't get it.
"As for being fat. If you eat like a predator, you'll have a body like a predator. If you eat like a herbivore, you'll look like one."
No, this is so wrong and pigheaded. Many types of predators will show many types of bodies. Is not the vampire bat a predator? How about the hyena or the dingo? And the blue whale? You have chosen your conclusion, "be like a lion or eagle" or whoever you think is admirable in body type. And then you created your logic to support that goal, "eat like a predator". Well, that is the whole problem, thinking that eating transforms you into anything other than you are. It is in "doing" that you are transformed. Not in the eating. So go out and catch your game, that is how to create a predatory body.
And I can think of many vegetarian animal herbivores that are not fat like cows, can't you? Beautiful and muscular Horses for example, and also goats, mice, and rabbits! And there are plenty of examples of healthy people who have been vegans. Variety of diet is my choice. And variety of exercise and experience, and plenty of love for your fellow human beings.
I myself have struggled with my weight for a number of years. Both of my brothers were tall, skinny and naturally excelled at cross country running. I was the fat one. I never seemed to be able to figure out why.
I tried a number of things: brute force calorie cutting, the yogurt diet, and even (largely because I was still in hs and my parents were doing it) the Atkins diet.
I managed to lose weight with each of those and, I will admit, I lost the most weight on the Atkins diet. However, there was one hitch; I was *constantly* tired. The lack of carbs was killing me, but the weight I was losing motivated me to stick with it. I lost about 25lbs and was able to keep it off for roughly a semester before going back up to gaining back about 10 pounds and eventually getting back to where I started Sophomore year of college. I decided that I needed to lose weight again, but I wasn't sure where to start. So I just decided to make it simple: no fries, no sodas, no candy, etc. You know, just cutting out the obvious junk food. What I did differently this time was added exercise to the mix. Thanks to following 'this plan, I went from being 5' 9", 190lbs and unable to run a mile to being 5'9", 165lbs and able to run 5k at a clip. I still have a ways to go, but the point is, introducing exercise into the mix helped more than I ever thought it could and it made losing the weight easier and more fun than I ever though it could be.
The guy in TFA seems to be too narrow in his focus; it's not just about manipulating numbers on a scale. If people paid more attention to getting good quality exercise and measuring the results each week, I think many would be surprised at how well they can do without any fancy talk about glycemic indices and so forth.
As the great Stephen Fry once commented (paraphrased): it's not about what you eat, it's how much of it you eat, and if you say "that's too simplistic, it doesn't work for me" just look at starving people in Sub Sahara Africa then try saying that again. Then again, that's an admission that people have to make about themselves, and people would prefer to blame other things.
Cheers, ~ Ruben
People spend lots of money in hospitals while the answer is simple just eat less.
You wont find fat people in countries where there is no food.
In other words with (perhaps) the exception of some fat people are FOOT JUNKS.
Worse most of them know this to, but ignore it.
Ignorance is a shame, look in the mirror thats how you look, it reflects how you live.
The problem is most of you think you're ill and cannt help yourself.
But it is you who has to change and it will save you even a lot of money too.
No hospital or docters required..
Every time you take a snack; think of yourself as a mass consumer and this world balance isn't right as other people dy from starvation. It's a shame to behave like eating all the time.
Obesity is not an "epidemic". It is not contagious. Being fat is not a disease. It is a by-product of poor nutritional choices and poor lifestyle. Some people have a predisposition or even illness that can cause obesity, but they are a tiny minority. If you eat Cheetos and sit on your sofa all day, you're going to get fat. And it's YOUR fault.
Treating fat as a "disease" is the typical victim mentality that's so prevalent these days to try to shirk responsibility. I'm not fat, I have a disease. I am not an alcoholic bum, I have a disease. Whether or not one tries to reclassify the word to include behavioral dysfunction, the fact is that it is self-inflicted and people would rather play victim than stand up for themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and stop cramming themselves full of cake or booze or heroin or whatever.
Cancer is a disease. If someone kept injecting themselves with malignant cells of their own will, would you have any sympathy for them?
No it isn't. You've misunderstood the arguments being presented.
It is you who are wrong.
Part of the reason for the increase in degenerative diseases is that we're living a lot longer than we used too. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf (detailed tables #10) 22,960 75-year-olds were alive in 1900, compared with 65,717 in 2003. Since we live longer than we used to, any diseases that are more common in the elderly are more common. Some of these are heart disease and cancer, dementia, alzheimers, etc. So it's really not all that surprising that as we get more 75-year-olds, we see a lot more degenerative conditions. Some of this may be food related, but I think there's also the cruel twist of evolution. Evolution cares whether you have and successfully raise children. Once you've reproduced and your children are grown, evolution doesn't care about what happens, so your body isn't designed to last much past that. Sure we can slow down the aging using tricks and modern medicine, but eventually you reach the upper limit of how long a human being can live.
Given that virtually anyone is still transmitting 4:3 ratio and every new widescreen TV I've come across defaults to showing it in 16:9 mode it doesn't surprise me that everyone thinks we have a fat problem.. :-)
Insert
Listen up folks! If you are fat, at least read Atkins' book (new diet revolution). If you think it's crap after you've read it and learned a bit about how insulin works, fine. You don't need fancy Atkins foods or vitamins, just read the book. I think you owe it to yourself to give it a read. An important reason why low-carb diets work is that you are less hungry because insulin is better managed. This really helps a person eat less (duh!).
Before deciding who is the real quack here, perhaps we should look at some actual data. Here's a summary from an AP story: http://www.locarbrecipes.com/atkinsresearch.html Many of these studies are easily checked more rigorously online. I challenge the other side to come up with real studies.
The tired notion that a calorie is a calorie is demonstrably false. If it were true, we wouldn't worry about the efficiency of the machines we build! In the case of humans, if we encourage the inefficient use of calories, we can lose more weight while eating more calories. This is not just armchair stuff, it's been empirically demonstrated in more than one study. A few are mentioned here: http://www.locarbrecipes.com/atkinsresearch.html The myth that "A calorie is a calorie" is a matter of thermodynamics is rigorously debunked here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=506782
I can't become overweight, because I seem not to enjoy food as much as chubbier people do.
They seem to cum on it.
Hence I don't blame fat people - if only I could experience their intense orgasm followed by some zen-like nirvana peace every time I gobble down a meal, yeah i would easily become one of the fatsos.
The parent is very much oversimplifying a complex issue. It's like saying addictions are simply about willpower. The fact is, choice and willpower are only one rather small factor. Other factors include biology, the food supply, and the social context. Willpower and choice are probably the least important factor in this list.
We live in a short span of time, biologically speaking, in which too much food is more of a problem than too little. Our bodies know, from millions of years of evolution, that a famine could come any time and we'd better be ready. Storage of fat reserves is a winning strategy historically speaking. We are therefore programmed to do this, and everything about our food system is designed to make this the default. Try willing yourself to be shorter and see how far that gets you. It's much the same.
Perhaps "disease" is the wrong term for obesity, but "syndrome" is probably right. There's a combination of factors that taken together create a chronic condition that most people do not have the "will" to fight effectively. By changing the food supply and the social context you give yourself a much better chance, but even then, and even with a strong will, it's a tough battle. Hence, biology is probably the dominant reason for obesity. To say it's "your fault" is just as ignorant as saying being gay, or being black, is your fault.
This is the best summary of taubes book I've ever read. Taubes book is definitely something a person who struggles with weight or their health ought to read... and please read it with an open mind or else you do yourself a great disservice.
Hi, What you must understand is that insulin resistance (the primary underlying pathological change resulting in type 2 diabetes) does not occur in an egalitarian fashion. Muscle cells lose their ability to absorb and metabolize glucose before fat cells... possibly due to the greater energy needs of muscle cells.
So when someone says "fat cells become too good at extracting glucose from the blood and storing it", what they mean is that insulin resistance changes how food is metabolized, so that foods that yeild a lot of glucose are preferentially stored as fat, as opposed to burned in the muscle for energy. This creates a paradoxical condition of obesity, while the individual still expresses signs and symptoms of starvation observed in type 1 diabetes (type 1 diabetes, due to insulin deficit, is classic starvation with emaciation; type 2 diabetes, which is caused by a cellular-level defect in glucose metabolism, results in paradoxical obesity with starvation of tissues). The polydipsia, polyphagia, and polyuria are all signs of starvation and hyperglycemia... and all diabetics express them, because diabetes automatically implies cellular starvation (to be diabetic means glucose is not being metabolized for energy, which results in starvation; body fat need not be liberated, as just the *smallest* amount of fat-cell insulin sensitivity with insulin production will prevent ketoacidosis).
Or to put this another way... imagine a body, with a LOT of insulin receptors on fat cells, but the insulin receptors on liver, and muscle cells were sluffed off and dulled. A normal body has an appropriate balance of insulin receptors, on fat, on muscle, on the liver. This insulin-receptor damaged person eats a bagel. The polysaccharides in the bagel are broken apart, and glucose rapidly enters the blood. Insulin rises, a lot, because they have less insulin receptors therefore have a really difficult time clearing out blood glucose. Insulin causes hypoglycemia in a dose-dependent relationship, therefore compensatory hyperinsulinemia results to try to keep homeostasis of blood sugar. Blood sugar is elevated, but starts to decrease a few hours after the meal.
What do you think will happen to this person's level of energy and weight?
Remember, the ratio of insulin receptors are unbalanced. Most of them are on the fat cells, less of them are on the muscle.
Also, I should introduce an additional concept: High insulin suppresses fat burning very strongly. Considering the insuiln resistant (less receptor) person needs to make a great deal of insulin to mobilize blood sugar, and because suppressing the liberation of fat from fat cells requires less insulin than does mobilizing blood sugar into the cell in insulin resistance, this creates an imbalance in fat storing vs fat burning. Due to hyperinsulinemia, all carbohydrate they eat is stored as fat preferentially, meanwhile all subsequent body fat tends to be retained in the cell.
Ironically the type 2 diabetic usually can burn fatty acids for energy much more effectively than glucose, because fatty acids require very little insulin to mobilize into muscle cells.
Summary:As a result of insulin resistance, people store carbohydrate as fat vs burning it off as energy, producing a paradoxical state of appearing obese yet actually being emaciated and starved at the cellular level (and the health of an insulin resistant person, underneath this "fat coat", is very similar to a starved food deprived person: they have no immune system to speak of, no ability to repair tissues, etc).
Due to compensatory hyperinsulinemia, fat is kept in fat cells vs being liberated at a disproportionate rate. The insulin sensitivity of fat cells is reasonably well preserved, so when fat cells see extremely high insulin, they respond logically: store food, don't release fat. The rest of the body is dead and dumb to insulin, and it wastes away, while adipose grows. This results in the hallmark signs of diabetes (the three P's previously mentioned). These individuals eat and eat and eat, and only become more lethargic and obese from it.
Make sense?
Statements that weight is merely a matter of calories in/out demonstrate a misapplication of the laws of thermodynamics as they operate within the human metabolism. The human body actually regulates its total caloric expenditure based on availability of fuel to cells, which is primarily affected by the types of food eaten and the action of insulin to sequester blood lipids within fat cells. More available energy leads to higher metabolic rates, greater activity and lower consumption of calories. Consumption of excess carbohydrate causes excess insulin response which leads to greater fat storage and weight gain and lower calorie availability. One of the more interesting implications of this research is that people with elevated insulin levels are actually starving on the cellular level, with too many calories being stored away in fat and too few calories available for the body to utilize. Cell starvation leads to hunger which leads to additional eating and/or low activity levels and decreased metabolic activity. Hence, weight gain. The calorie in/out equation oversimplifies the processes at work here. The title of Taubes's book is meant to challenge this oversimplification, and the text bears out with copious evidence that the quality of the calories you eat is in fact more important than the quantity when it comes to what makes us put on fat.
The belief that total cholesterol has any bearing on health whatsoever rests on science now more than fifty years old that has been completely superseded by more refined techniques and additional studies in the intervening years.
When cholesterol was first isolated we lacked the technology to separate it into its different striations. We've gotten marginally better over the years; now we have LDL and HDL cholesterol, VLDL, IDL, Chylomicrons, and now even small dense LDL vs. "fluffy" LDL. (The very latest research, by the way, seems to implicate the dense LDL as being associated with [although not necessarily causative of] heart disease which is prescient given it is primarily formed through fructose metabolism in the liver...)
In any case, I encourage the writer to read the work of Ronald Krause. He's considered by many to be the nation's leading researcher in the field of cholesterols and their various and often divergent associations with health.
What if it's more than just hunger pangs? What if even though you ate hearty meals all day, you still feel like you're going to pass out come dinner time? Or just irritable and woozy? What do you do then?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I really can't eat less, as I get dizzy spells and feel like crap when I do. Only thing is to add extra exercize, but I'm not looking forward to that as I expect my body to get used to that also. And when I ever cut down on exercize, you know what will happen: I'll gain weight like there is no tomorrow.
Next year, we will mainly focus on certain chemicals in my blood, to see if there are specific foods I should avoid. So far, the initial tests show no real promise in that area.
I'm open for suggestions. I'll run 'm by my specialist first, just to make sure it won't interfere with anything.
.......but eventually you reach the upper limit of how long a human being can live........
It isn't so much how long people live, but how healthy they are at any given age on average.
In the early part of last century, a dentist named Weston A. Price wanted to find out more about dental health. He knew that in some parts of the world tooth decay and other common dental problems found in industrialized nations did not plague certain isolated people groups in widely scattered parts of the world. He visited these out of the way, "backward" places and studied the life style and diet of those who lived there. You can find out as much or more about what he learned here:
http://www.westonaprice.org/splash_2.htm
It seems that our modern factory foods are the biggest contributor to the many degenerative ailments affecting children, grown up adults and the elderly. Environmental factors also are involved. Maybe better living through chemistry isn't at all better, but rather bad all around.
All theory is gray
Energy doesn't just disappear into thin air; when you consume it, you either use it or you store it.
You, sir, are a moron.
-Stu
Before you call bullshit by invoking thermodynamics, be sure to recognize that there's more than one law of thermodynamics.
Independent of Taubes' argument, I note a number of people are making the "Calories In - Calories Burned = Calories Stored" equation, invoking the Law of Thermodynamics, as if people that disagree with this equation were a bunch of lunatics.
But before you're going to invoke this line of argument, please read up on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. No machine, even the human body, is completely efficient. Some energy will be lost to Entropy.
The second law implies that there is at least the possibility of metabolic advantage of some forms of calories (e.g. glucose) over other forms of calories (e.g. ketones).
Incorporating Taubes' hypothesis, that fat accretion is a hormonally regulated process, and you get a very different picture of why people gain weight, one that is worthy of further study.
-Stu
Back in March I quit drinking Cokes. I averaged a couple a day and now I only drink water with the exception of alcohol on occasion.
The first couple of weeks after not drinking Cokes I noticed all food I ate tasted different. I also noticed I had a bit more energy and that I lost some weight (I don't measure but I could tell and so could my family). The color of my teeth is also getting whiter too.
At this point I don't even desire Coke. The mere thought of drinking one disgusts me because of how sweet they are. I am not a hippy and I dont have anything against Coke. I don't do the whole "natural medicine' BS stuff either. I am not on a diet or a health nut.
But I ABSOLUTELY noticed a difference after not drinking Cokes.
Libertas in infinitum
OK, fine. I think it would be a bad idea to eat nothing but olive oil and/or nuts for every meal. Are you happy now?
Sure, we can argue all day long about whether or not certain subclasses of fats are better than others, but when you get right down to it, the body is perfectly capable of intraconverting between all the different forms, and no matter what kind of fat you're eating, if you eat too much of it, it will be bad for you.
Read the book. The "conclusive evidence" for the cholesterol-heart disease connection simply isn't there.
A lot of people on this forum are mistakenly thinking that Taubes has written a diet book, or that he is putting forth his own conclusions. This is not that kind of book. This is a science book, that examines the evidence (or lack thereof) for many of the nutritional dogmas that we assume are proven fact by virtue of them being repeated so often. All Taubes does is examine the data to see if the conclusions put forward are supported by the data. He doesn't come out and tell you what his opinion is, he simply presents what the data does or does not show.
Google for it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
- medicine has a long and spotty history
The last point I consider most interesting. Medicine does its science based on the hypotheses it comes up with, and it comes up with new hypotheses based on what it has believed in the past. In other words, it moves in directions influenced as much by history as by science. I saw this clearly when I lived in the former Soviet Union, which lacks the microbe obsession that grips western medicine. It was obvious that both the medical profession and ordinary people did not worry about germs as much as Americans did. Ordinary colds were blamed on drafts, exposure to cold temperatures, wet feet, and the like. People were less nutty about disinfecting and sanitizing, and seemed to be roughly as healthy as Americans. No allergies, either. Initially I was astonished that these people had such backwards notions about the causes of disease; but they were so sure of themselves. It took a little while before I realized that I was equally sure of myself, and that my countrymen were so sure of themselves, with just about as much basis: we were each repeating the story our moms had told us (and with conviction, too). I saw plenty of doctors there who were equally confident about all manner of different things, some doctors contradicting other doctors; western doctors scoffing at local doctors and vice versa. The folklore of previous generations bears some resemblance to peer reviewed studies; perhaps more important is to keep in mind that both can be worthless.I'm not saying science is helpless in the face of these historical tendencies, I'm just saying that science has a mighty tough row to hoe in this sphere, and it has its own built-in weaknesses.
$META_SIG_JOKE
All boils down to conservation of energy. Saying the contrary is just coating the truth.
You can surely choose what to eat to affect your hunger, but at the end if you eat too much while doing precious little, you will still get fat.
Fat people should be told in no uncertain terms that they should move their asses of the couch and go for a walk at the very least (buy a pedometer, do 5000 steps a day).
Conceding for the sake of argument that this will not contribute to weight loss (as if), the benefits of physical activity are fully documented, and frankly it stands to reason that if you do nothing somehow magically you will lose weight by eating as many calories as you wish, as long as they are the ones that don't make you hungry.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.