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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!
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.
Exercise is absolutely insignificant next to the baseline caloric intake. Any dietician will tell you the same. You have to get as much exercise as a marathon runner to lose substantial weight without changing your diet. It's almost ALL about diet.
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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. . .
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.
You're effectively running 1/8th of a marathon each day, and you're doing it every single day, which is atypical, so almost a marathon each week.
And you're STILL not burning a significant number of calories. You would completely erase all your work by just eating 5 cookies, or drinking 2 bottles of Gatorade.
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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.
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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