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What's Causing the Rise In Obesity? Everything.
Mr_Blank writes "We all know — because we are being constantly reminded — that we are getting fat. Americans are at the forefront of the trend, but it is a transnational one. Apparently, it is also trans-species: Over the past 20 years, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America's laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. Researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of 9% per decade. Lab mice gained about 11% per decade. Chimps are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35% per decade. What is causing the obesity era? Everything."
more data should be required before we make such a broad spectrum 'everything is getting fat because of everything' claim, which is absolutely as absurd as it sounds. In the cases of laboratory controlled animals, im willing to venture a sedentary and stressful lifestyle has accumulated their girth.
in the case of people, we've stopped eating real food entirely for both convenience and lack of nutritional education. Some of us work odd hours or multiple jobs and just dont have time to cook. places like wendys offer a reasonable facimile of food but the ingredients list for even a hamburger bun starts to look more like the back pages of an organic chemistry lab book. Most 30somethings like myself havent the slightest idea, nor care, about how to cook their own food outside of a cardboard box and boil-point water. And packaged food companies agree this is the way it should be. There is no more home economics, we emerge from primary education with no more than an understanding of hunger and satiation.
I also think its a cultural thing. Jamie Oliver, for all the work hes done in targeting childhood obesity and healthy eating, still cooks an alarming number of recipes that youd never think to serve the majority of a populus thats overweight. This holds true for most chefs, celebrity or not. Browned butter and whole cream are still entirely acceptable additions to most semi-casual and upscale dining experiences despite the well proven fact theyre killing us. There are only four meats we readily consume on a daily basis yet theyve replaced hundreds of vegetables in nearly every meal of the day. Many adults simply avoid healthy vegetables like onions, tomatoes or broccoli alltogether, picking from their meal and instead focusing on pasta or meat.
articles like this that just throw in the proverbial towel arent helping. We need competent nutritional education and responsible industry to start offering food that is both nutritious and healthy. Yet as with most industries the change often comes from the consumer, and its often met half-hearted and begrudgingly.
Good people go to bed earlier.
>And, as we all know, marmosets are among the greatest consumers of manufactured foods.
These are laboratory marmosets which are, if anything, fed MORE on manufactured foods than even pet marmosets (since nobody gives a lab animal treats).
These are all animals that eat foods made in large scale commercial operations and poured out of a tin or cardboard box.
There is NO evidence of an obesity rise in WILD stocks of ANY of these animals.
What do humans and lab animals have in common ? Diets filled with processed and manufactured foods.
Now I am not saying that this is the cause or even that the GP is right- I am saying your reason for claiming he is wrong is outright idiotic.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No. You taste them, but that's different. Candies contain so much sugar (compared to the food we would eat in nature) that our bodies do not trust their own correction mechanisms anymore. This is called insulin resistance. This suppresses your feeling of having eaten enough, so you stay hungry. This is why you can eat the bag of candies completely empty in one go, even if (no, because) it contains more energy than you will need the entire day.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Diets filled with processed and manufactured foods.
Pointless statement.
There is absolutely nothing that says that processed or manufactured food should be any different form other food. Even if the food is entirely synthetic doesn't mean that it is in any way less healthy than non-synthetic food.
There could be something wrong with the processed food that obese people eat but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to create processed / manufactured food that is healthier.
General fear of processed/manufactured/GMO/whatever isn't helpful and doesn't lead to a correct decisions. Instead you should point out the specifics on why current food is bad.
It's not like switching to a diet of organic natural sugarcanes is going to be healthier.
Not my favourite part of his article but you're splitting hairs if you only accept statements that are universal. Your own post says "The locals freaking love McDs" WTF man? but by your own criteria-> No they don't. Maybe it does for that ONE, perhaps for SOME.. can you see how that kind of nitpicking doesn't add anything as it's obviously not meant literally.
There is a well researched correlation between stress, over-eating and unhealthy-eating.
You're right that personal responsibility and control are important and some people tend to ignore these, however it is also true that factors outside individual control (brain hacking as you call it for example) play a massive part and masses of people ignore those. A common opinion of fat people is that they're fat because they're lazy, weak etc with no recognition that yes they played a part but so did food manufacturers, governments etc and we should be dealing with both.
I watched this lecture recently about Fructose (and high fructose corn syrup). https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dBnniua6-oM
It was quite long (1.5 hours) but very informative in how bad HFCS is to us, and why low fat has caused this.
Cheers, Chris
Certainly, in principle that's entirely true. In practice though, our bodies have evolved to try *really* hard to extract as much energy as possible from the food we digest. To our detriment today, eating 500 kcals/day too much wouldn't matter if the body would just take "what it needs" and poop the rest.
There's no indication that consuming more calories will cause your body to digest significantly fewer of them. But it is true, like you write, that on very low calorie diets, your metabolism and thus energy-consumption will tend to fall. So you might eat 1000 kcal less, but your metabolism slows by 300 kcal, so your weight-loss is slower than expected.
God i hate articles like this. Everything isnt causing obesity, lazyness is. Want to know why im fucking fat? Cus im fucking lazy and like to eat pizza while watching 4 episodes of TNG on Netflix. From people too lazy to go buy groceries ( i had someone tell me it was virtually impossible to buy groceries because they didnt have a car) to people being too fucking lazy to cook, or exercise even the slightest bit. You can eat whatever food you want, as many calories you want, if you burn it off you wont be fat, you might have other health complications but thats another story alltogether. Combined with people telling them that "its ok", "not your fault" and "out of your control" that make it worse. Obese people just go "oh its not my fault fuck it", stuff their faces with food, dont work out, baloon up, then shrug like they had no control over it. Its bullshit. People need to start accepting some personal responsibility for their actions.
Contrary to what you're saying, the problem has everything to do with thermodynamics. You just don't seem to get the "simple thermodynamics" argument.
You're right that the energy used by the body might vary, and right that it's difficult to control or assess the difference between the input energy and the used energy. Still, you're missing an important limit in your calculation.
At 0 calories input, your body may well decide to do the following:
- Use only 750 calories
- store -750 calories
- poop 0 calories.
There is no way around it. You can *force* your body to use more than you eat, and you *will* lose weight. This can be done by eating less, or moving more. This isn't easy, would not necessarily be considered 'healthy', but that's not the point. The point isn't about whether you'll feel depressed or tired, it's about conservation of energy.
The question is, WHICH processes are to blame? Obviously, the dropping of fat levels and the rise of HFCS look to be LIKELY causes, but it would be nice to see if this is confirmed by double-blind testing.
Notionally, take 10,000 rodents, and a basic food stock. Process some of the food for low-fat only, some for HFCS-only, and some for both. And, of course, the unprocessed as control. Other variables to explore would be physical portion size (based on 100% need and the raw food stock), caloric size (again, baselined to the control), and unlimited portions, for each food type. And run for a few generations. That should provide a decent statistical universe for drawing conclusions.
Rinse and repeat for other suspect methods/additives. We can't make rational decisions without good data. . .
Personally I'm a bit tired of all of these media invented excuses. If you're overweight in almost all cases with very few exceptions it's YOUR fault.
And the animals that are gaining weight, too? For instance, did we all of a sudden start overfeeding lab rats and lab mice? Did ferral dogs and cats all of a sudden start ignoring nature and quit eating when full? It's one thing for humans, it's another thing for the animals mentioned in the article.
So which of these is your proposal for someone gaining 30 calories worth of fat from 2030 calories intake per day?
Change to zero input, causing instant lethargy, depression, other health complications, and causing your body to store everything it can when you have lost sufficient weight, and hence for the net actually to be weight gain after all's said and done.
Eat 1015 calories a day instead, causing your body to still go into starvation mode, store as much as it can, poop nearly nothing, and making you lethargic and depressed, and hence unable to exercise properly.
Eat somewhere in the "traditional" diet range, of 1500 to 2000 calories a day, which, as the article points out, doesn't actually work, you will simply poop less out, and/or feel more tired and do less.
The point actually is that you in many cases *can not* force your body to use more than you eat in a way that doesn't ultimately result actually in either weight gain, and/or more health complications.
youre body doesnt "decide" to poop out calories. who the hell taught you biology?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Well, maybe you should follow the links you cite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food clearly points to http://www.potatopro.com/newsletters/20100310.htm when it says there are currently no GMO potatoes marked for human consumption, but the linked page shows this information is outdated.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Maybe it was all the nuke testing done on the planet, seriously, 500+ nukes in the air and orbit and underground, cant be healthy can it.
Ah, there's that phrase I love: can't be healthy/good for you. It seems every time I hear or see that phrase, it's someone who doesn't really quite know what they are talking about and just has a hypothesis from their gut. They want to say it's bad for you, but have absolutely no evidence of that, so they just say it can't be good.
Well, in the GP's model, there is a limit.
At less than 30 calories, you can no longer store 30 calories as fat.
Actually, you hit that limit earlier unless you also stop pooping.
-- hendrik
I'm losing fat actually. Get some exercise and cut out the high fructose corn syrup.
Screw going to a gym, just buy this book:
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Your-Own-Gym/dp/0345528581
That's so idiotic it hurts my head to read it.
ALL DIETS involve calorie restrictions. Low-fat diets, low-carb diets, Mediterranean diets, all-kelp diets, etc., they ALL involve reducing calorie intake as the fundamental first step in the diet program.
No studies have shown any type of diet is more effective than any other (beyond the margin of error). Whether you follow Atkins, or the FDA pyramid, or Jenny Craig, or anything else, your chances of success are the same, and you'll lose the same amount of weight. It's the "diet" part, consuming slightly fewer calories, that causes the weight loss and health improvements.
Calorie restriction ALWAYS works. There's no way for it not to. All the body reactions that can cause gains or reduce losses, are entirely temporary and rather short-term. And starving is never required... Just keeping yourself very slightly hungry for a few weeks, rather than stuffing your face at every opportunity.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Most applications of HFCS use versions that are between 40% and 60% fructose. The other 40-60% is, of course, glucose.
Table sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide that consists of glucose and fructose combined. When it's metabolized, very early on, it's hydrolyzed into its constituent parts (glucose and fructose), which are then metabolized normally. So by the time you're talking about actually using the sugar for energy, HFCS and sugar are the same.
There's some evidence that the metabolic feedback early on of sucrose, glucose, and fructose have subtly different effects.
But fructose, pre-hydrolysis, is not some rare chemical only found in HFCS. Agave syrup is about 75% fructose / 25% glucose. Fruit is quite heavily weighted toward fructose. Honey is roughly equal parts glucose and fructose (plus a weird collection of other sugars). Invert sugar, which is created in the kitchen from sugar, is a common component of many candies and confections. Invert sugar is just hydrolyzed sucrose -- 50% glucose and 50% fructose. (Heat sucrose in water and some of it will invert. Add a bit of acid and stick with it and most of it will invert. Now you've basically recreated HFCS.)
There's nothing chemically special about HFCS. Despite the label "high fructose", which is chemically accurate but terrible marketing, it's not really high in fructose relative to other common forms of sugar. It's also, despite claims, not enormously cheaper than sugar. It's cheap, yes. Sugar is also cheap. A lot of companies have been moving from HFCS to sugar because the cost difference is small and the marketing edge is big.
The problem with HFCS is that sugars in general, along with fats and salt, are really overused in processed and prepared foods.
Few few people ate dozens of kilograms of honey per year.
The quantity of HFCS in a typical modern diet is rather large.
Rod Taylor
Water is a poison, as is oxygen. Actually, glucose is also a poison by these standards. When you take a common food staple and label is as a poison at the beginning of your argument you lose all credibility.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
OMG! CHEMICALS!
You know what? Everything - literally everything - is made of chemicals.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I spotted a logical fallacy immediately. Just because one set of people or animals weigh more than another set of people or animals does not mean that the first set is obese. Under the standards used to measure human obesity, I am obese. Yet my doctor tells me I should not lose any more weight since my body fat percentage is on the low side of 10% (which every reference I can find says is below ideal for my age).
I will say that everything I have read supports the idea that BMI (what is used for determining whether humans are overweight or not) is useful for determining whether or not a group of humans weighs more than they should (although it is clearly not as useful when applied to individuals). However, without some sort of study to determine if the increased weight in pets and laboratory animals represents those animals being fatter and/or unhealthier than previously requires significant additional information.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Normally I would completely agree except, there is a difference here. People are not increasing their consumption of water, exposure to oxygen, or even ingestion of glucose, to the point that they are manifesting toxic effects.
The rise in diabetes, heart disease, and liver damage, are seeming to indicate that fructose consumption IS in fact reaching levels that are manifesting toxic effects in the form of those diseases, which are exactly what we would expect from chronic exposure to excessive levels of fructose.
Sugar is a poision, just like many things are poisons, but unlike those many things, a large percentage of the population is exposing themselves to toxic amounts of it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"