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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?"
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.
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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.
Sure... provided you have no real understanding of the processes involved.
The common, simplistic explanation of nutrition is that you consume food, which your body then breaks down, releasing the energy of chemical bonds, which your body then uses as fuel. We measure the energy released in a unit called calories.
This description is fine, and it suffices for most day-to-day discussions of food, with one caveat: It's fiction, almost from top to bottom.
Just for starters, when nutritionists talk about calories, they're not really talking about calories like a physicist would. They're really talking about "food calories," which I believe are equivalent to kilocalories. This may be a minor point, but it serves to illustrate that if you think nutrition science maps directly onto physics, you are wrong.
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. 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).
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.
Breakfast served all day!