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Coca-Cola To Fund Research That Shifts Blame For Obesity Away From Bad Diets
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports that Coca-Cola is teaming up with influential scientists to support research into fighting obesity through other means than improving diet. They've provided funding to a new nonprofit called the Global Energy Balance Network. Its president said, "Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, 'Oh they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much' — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on. And there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause." Health experts say it's an attempt by Coca-cola to deflect criticism of the sugary drinks that are the lifeblood of its business. "This clash over the science of obesity comes in a period of rising efforts to tax sugary drinks, remove them from schools and stop companies from marketing them to children. In the last two decades, consumption of full-calorie sodas by the average American has dropped by 25 percent."
I think its stupid to try and shift blame for obesity from poor diet, but as a fat man, if you can come up with a legitimate way for me to lose weight without diet and exercise, I will love you forever
How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...
=Smidge=
So anything that shifts the attention away from that will only help their business of selling detritus. I would say it's an addictive drink, almost as bad as cigarettes.
Isn't the classification of "diet drink" completely unregulated? I would be very surprised if "diet drinks" helped people lose weight at all.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's like clockwork. If I drink one ordinary can of soda, two days later my face id covered in zits, and I wear them for a good two weeks.
I have been told by some that this is impossible, there must be some other cause, etc. It's bullocks.
And it isn't just soda, if I eat a nice big slice of cake, or anything with 40 grams or more of sugar and little-to-no protein, this happens.
When I wanted to lose weight, I reduced the number of calories I was consuming, and I lost weight! Weird, it must be that I changed my "energy balance". Except I didn't change *what* I ate, just how much. I'm not saying it's easy, but if you eat fewer calories than you burn, as a general rule, you'll lose weight.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Not so much propaganda as well known psychological phenomena. Some people switch to diet drinks and decide that since they consume less calories now, they can have an extra piece of ice cream. Often that turns out to more than offset the gains.
You can always ignore what they have to say. Obviously, calorie intake (and coke sure is high in calories!) makes you fat. However, the body isn't a simple machine. Denying it calories results in a lot of negative reactions which are intentionally designed in to ensure the body keeps amassing calories. Most intelligent doctors know that just telling a fat guy to stop eating so much is worthless advice and just about never works (there's exceptions to every rule). Diets failing is the rule.
If Coke figures out how to get fat people thin without going the diet route (how, well, hell, I don't know!) at least it gives the overweight a fighting chance. As one of the members of that category, if you could slice 100 lbs off me tonight, I imagine I'd have a HELL of a lot more energy for the physical fitness I desire.
Or just keep making fun of fat people and telling them to diet. I mean, it's working pretty well right now, isn't it? I'm sure telling someone who already spends extra money on more calories that their food will cost even more is definitely going to make a big difference!
They say to really know someone you need to walk 1000 miles in their shoes. Well, to really know what it's like to be overweight, you need to be overweight. It's pretty much that simple. If you are, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you're one of the few that beat it through the traditional diet and exercise (ie: Sheer willpower) approach, good for you! But you know as well as I do that it sure as hell was harder than stopping smoking or even putting down the drink. Yet society views those as things to offer support, rather than ridicule for.
Sigh. I'm sure someone will just reply to this "LOL FATTY". Whatever. I'm in a taxpayer funded healthcare system. You're paying for not helping.
Yesterday on a radio I heard a DJ saying that there was a study showing that diet drinks didn't help people loose weight. So the propaganda is already flowing.
They don't. They reduce the amount of calories you consume from drinking soda (diet vs. regular), but they stimulate your appetite so you actually end up eating more food when you do eat.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Had a quick google and evidently 1 pint of Coca Cola has a few more calories than...a pint of Guinness!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Remember, your not fat because you eat a bag of cheetos and 2 liters of coke everyday and never leave your house. You're Fat because of North Korea and Iran and you don't believe in the right God.
Corporations have been doing this for ages.
The same professional deniers that insisted there was nothing unhealthy about smoking cigarettes, are now working the Koch brother's PR firm, and insisting that global warming is a hoax.
These scientists also work for, and support: the nuclear industry, Monsanto, and factory farmers.
You might also want to watch "That Sugar Film"
Patrick Moore, a scientist who help found Greenpeace, now works for several corporations.
Here he is promoting the wholesomeness of GMOs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSten18rI9A
Here he claims that rising levels of CO2 are good for the environment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWEjSDYfxc
Just typical corporate shenanigans.
It's not that simple for most people. The body prefers a certain caloric intake level. When it does not get its preferred level, the body "complains" loudly in terms of cravings and discomfort.
And over time metabolism will slow down to catch up with the lower intake, so that one still gains weight even though they are eating less. And, still feel like sh8t.
It usually backfires after about 4 years. Very few can maintain that level of discipline to suffer beyond 4 years. Evolution heavily shaped our bodies, genes, and cravings to error on the side of plump.
Who knows, chubbies may better survive the apocalypse, having the last laugh. When nukes are flying, nobody will care about their slim figure.
Table-ized A.I.
Limit your calories per day say 2000 and go for a 30 Min walk or bike ride. You can easily lose 20LB in 4 months. Besides who wouldn’t want to have great cardio and not get winded when picking up a trash can.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The main purpose of a diet soda is that it doesn't have any sugar, and therefore, no calories either. What defines "diet" isn't regulated, but every diet soda I've seen indeed has less than or equal to one Calorie.
I suspect that it could very well be true that diet soda doesn't help you lose weight, but if so, it isn't the fault of the diet soda that you aren't losing weight. The more calories you consume, the more "full" you feel, and likewise, simply drinking diet soda isn't going to help you shed pounds if you're consuming something else in lieu of those calories.
Let's say for example that as part of your daily routine, instead of drinking a regular soda (about 150 calories) you decide to drink a diet soda, and have a chocolate chip cookie (typically about 150 calories) with it. In this scenario, you're still retaining the same calorie intake, so you aren't going to shed any pounds that you otherwise wouldn't have.
Having said all of the above, indeed you *can* use diet soda as part of your weight loss plan, but at the end of the day your calorie intake must be less than your Basal Metabolic Rate.
Oh and for anybody who wants to know how to lose weight, it's dead simple, just follow this formula:
Nc = F - (Bmr + E)
Where Nc = Net Calories, F = food calories consumed, Bmr = Basal Metabolic Rate, E = Calories burned during exercise.
So long as Nc is less than zero, you're losing weight. How fast you're losing weight depends on how much deficit. One pound of fat is roughly 3600 calories. As a rule of thumb, your food intake shouldn't be less than around 1800 calories per day for males, 1200 for females, and if you go below these figures, your liver slows down your metabolism (aka starvation mode) and you get tired all the time lose weight slower.
Also one thing to remember about calories: They are a total sum of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and alcohol. How much of each you need is debatable, but I've found that getting calories mostly from protein and fat (aka low-carb) works best for me (not to mention, low carb also got rid of my cholesterol problem.)
There is evidence diet sodas may further insulin resistance, http://care.diabetesjournals.o....
I switched to diet soda about 12 years ago and over the course of a year I effortlessly lost about 15 pounds with no conscious change to my eating habits (aside from the switch to diet). Then over the next two years, still with with no conscious change to my eating habits, I gained all of the lost fat back. So who knows.
400?! Amateur. When I switched, I averaged 5 Cokes per day for about 700 calories. The switch to diet 6-odd years ago made an immediate difference with no other marked change in diet. Even 6 years on I'm still about 25 pounds under my pre-diet-Code days.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
What you're saying is wrong.
There is evidence that diet sodas actually cause weight gain. They are not simply water: the artificial sweeteners have physiological effects, and they are not benign.
While we're still figuring out exactly what those effects are, the main ones that we're aware of now are:
1) They stimulate your appetite.
2) They disrupt your intestinal bacteria.
If I understand it correctly, the body reacts to some artificial sweeteners similarly to how it reacts to actual sugar though, so being sugar-free doesn't necessarily mean that the body won't experience some of the same results from overconsumption of sugar.
You're right that weight loss is generally a matter of expending calories in as-great or greater a quantity than one consumes them. Soft drink companies seem to be in a do-or-die effort to convince us that their products, often some of the biggest single contributors of calories and sugar to our diets, aren't the problem, when all of the anecdotal evidence that I've seen indicates that simply dropping the soda without making any other lifestyle changes (ie, diet, exercise level, etc) actually causes weight loss. I've experienced it myself in switching from Mountain Dew to coffee, I lost about ten pounds without doing anything else.
We've taken things that were treats and turned them into regular consumption and are surprised that we're having problems, and these companies can't afford for us to relegate these products back to where they belong, as occasional treats.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not surprising, making one good choice (avoiding sugared soft drinks) isn't enough to make a good diet, just like one bad choice doesn't make a bad diet. You could lose weight on the "Coke Diet" by consuming nothing but 10 servings of Coca-Cola every day.
It's simple math - calories in and calories out. There are "good foods" and "bad foods", but the effect of which food you eat makes less of a difference than how much food you eat on weight loss. Effect on overall health is a different story. A person on the "Coke Diet" above would almost certainly lose weight, but they would almost certainly suffer health problems if they stuck to it for too long. A lot of people give "healthy eating" advice as "weight loss" advice and vice-versa.
The real problem is the "Silver Bullet" mentality. The soft drink industry didn't cause this problem all by themselves and telling people to stop drinking Coke isn't going to do any more good than telling people to eat less fat did over the past forty years. If people used the low fat campaign to buy Twizzlers (a low fat snack), then the no soda campaign will produce equally horrible outcomes.
Nope, its actually worse than that which is why Coke is trying to get ahead of the media by funding these "studies" that I put about as much faith in as RJ Reynolds studies of ecigs.
You see the diet colas kill the good bacteria while helping bad bacteria to flourish in your gut which means that if you put two otherwise healthy people side by side, have one only drink regular and the other diet? Then the one drinking diet will gain more weight and be more unhealthy overall. So you can understand why they want to get ahead of the media, I've seen more and more stories trickling out about this and I'm sure their PR dept has been keeping an eye on it and seeing its starting to catch the public eye.
So in this case the company really has no more cards to play, regular cokes are empty calories and diet cokes make you fatter, so what else can they do but spin like a top? After all the flavored water biz is already saturated and they will never make a tenth what they have selling cokes, and now that its coming out that diet is even worse? if I worked for their PR I'd do the same move, they really don't have any other moves to play.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It isn't as simple as eating fewer calories than you expend.
If I'm hungry and eat a handful of almonds - say 100 calories - the fiber and fat content makes me feel satiated for several hours and signals to my body that I'm full. Craves go down and blood sugar remains in a normal range.
Compare that with a handful of skittles. Also say 100 calories. I get a sugar rush, my blood sugar spikes, the skittles breakdown into energy that isn't used and is immediately stored as fat, and my body gets no signal that it's hunger has been satisfied - leaving to more cravings.
Not all calories are equal to one another. On the surface just eating less than you expend works out, but in practice it's a lot harder to do without changes to the actual diet that's supplying the calories.
Sure there is! There's also Dasani!
But you're missing the point, instead of trying to bribe scientists into "proving" that sugary drinks are okay, which is terrible, they should be putting forth the stuff that is at least marginally healthier as an alternative. It shouldn't be Coca-Cola's job to convince you to consume the healthiest thing available, it should be Coca-Cola's job to convince you to drink their brand of whatever it is you want to drink. If you're concerned about the sugar in Coke they should want to convince you to drink Diet Coke, and if you're scared about both real sugar and artificial sweeteners they should want to convince you to drink Dasani. Their job should not be to convince scientists to lie to you.
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The Hacker's Diet supports and expands on your points.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A common, but simple error. Muscle weighs more than fat. If you strength train, your muscles will constantly be repairing themselves well after you've done strength training. This repairing burns far more calories than the initial 900-1400. It will be far more than that.
Phelps spent at a minimum of 5-6 hours in a pool a day. His routine (assuming what is listed is correct) highlights all of the stuff he does http://workoutinfoguru.com/mic... If you're spending 5-6 hours swimming then you need to consume 10,000+ calories. Looking at Phelps diet he's eating a lot of grains, an energy drink, and could most definitely eat those pizzas you're referring to.
He also incorporate compound lifts into his training. Compound lifts include the bench, pull ups, push ups (really just a bench), squats, and deadlifts. These work the most muscles in your body and give you the most bang for your buck.
Word of advice for you to help speed up your fat loss. Stop looking at your overall "weight" and saying I need to lose X. Weight is a cumulative number that fails to show the full picture. Instead, find out what your body fat percentage is. This number is what you really need to focus on and bring down. Muscle is infinitely more attractive than adipose tissue.
Next eat a diet high in protein. Pick either animal fats or carbohydrates. If you pick both you will get fat. One of the other. If you lack self control, consider trying the paleo diet. This will force you onto a high protein and fat diet while lowering your carb intake.
Good luck, personal fitness is a goal that every one should esteem to be the best at. People instinctively follow those who are in better shape.
No no no, thyroids are mythical.
I assure you thyroid glands are real. When you go to the doctor and he palpates the base of your neck he is checking your thyroid.
If you don't believe in prostate glands either, you're in for a big surprise when your doctor decides to check it.
Oh and for anybody who wants to know how to lose weight, it's dead simple, just follow this formula:
Nc = F - (Bmr + E)
Where Nc = Net Calories, F = food calories consumed, Bmr = Basal Metabolic Rate, E = Calories burned during exercise.
The idea you're expressing - "Eat less exercise more" - is correct but this formula is deeply incomplete. A fat calorie isn't equal to a sugar calorie isn't equal to a carb calorie because the metabolic pathways are entirely different. Even different kinds of each of a given calorie (e.g. sucrose vs glucose sugars) are metabolized differently.
The human body simply doesn't process calories like an LTI system. It's both hysteretic and complexly dependent on what the composition of a meal is. Drinking a soda or pulpless fruit juice on an empty stomach basically dumps the entire sugar content into your bloodstream the moment it reaches your intestines, which sends your liver and metabolism into panic mode and turns a goodly amount of it into fat, but eating a fruit (which contains asstons of sugar) is harmless because the fiber slows bioavailability. Likewise, if you eat a meal after a long fast (meaning all of 5 hours), your metabolism will be in "ermahgerd starving" mode and process it very differently than if you'd snacked a bit in between.
So it's more like
* eat less in general
* eat less at once, more often
* eat more natural/less processed foodstuffs
* exercise more
This is without getting into things like how science has been used to subvert your body's self regulation systems. Greasy, fatty fast foods - by design! - contain just the mix of salts and fat to prevent you from feeling full and satisfied, so you keep eating until your stomach's "oh god, buffer overload" signal gets through. Well, perhaps this just falls under "eat natural" but still.
Unless you have a causal mechanism and argument, generated through the scientific method...
[Sugar - The bitter truth by Dr Robert H. Lustig, University of California Television (UCTV)] https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [Warning: 90 minutes]
This is the best math I've seen about sugar, coca-cola, energy drinks and obesity.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
Oh and for anybody who wants to know how to lose weight, it's dead simple, just follow this formula:
Nc = F - (Bmr + E)
Where Nc = Net Calories, F = food calories consumed, Bmr = Basal Metabolic Rate, E = Calories burned during exercise.
The part you left out is Bmr = f(F, Ft, E) where f is a non-linear function that we don't fully understand and Ft = type of Food and is a catchall for the impact of different types of food on your metabolism. A naive reading of your original equation might lead people to assume that Bmr is a number rather than a function of the other variables. A more accurate formula would be:
Nc = F - (f(F, Ft, E) + E)
Also worth noting that F = g(F, Ft, E) where g is a function describing your body's hunger and fullness sensing mechanisms as well the decision making neural pathways in your brain. The ability to solve a differential equation or write an elegant piece of software or make a correct decision under psychologically challenging conditions is very much influenced by F and Ft. So I think your simple equation would be more accurately written as:
Nc = g(F, Ft, E) - f(F, Ft, E) - E
I distributed the subtraction to remove an extraneous pair of parentheses.
Since g and f are non-algebraic functions it's understandable that solving this equation is a bit more complicated than the simplistic arithmetic that your original equation implies.
Damn.... I thought the B in Bmr was how much Bourbon I put in my coke zero! No wonder I'm not losing weight.
I love how people say artificial sweeteners are harmless, but whenever I accidentally ingest one I get a headache, become nauseous, a sharpness around my heart, and almost vomit.
What terrible thing did I eat to make me feel so sick? A can of PEACHES. That's right, it had sugar but was also laced Sucralose.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media, I didn't know Sucralose could make me sick until after it happened and I started doing some digging. Tons of people apparently have similar reactions:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com...
This is correct. They also muck with your body's insulin production. This is problematic for someone with Type 2 diabetes who used to drink a lot of diet soda.
I love how people say artificial sweeteners are harmless, but whenever I accidentally ingest one I get a headache, become nauseous, a sharpness around my heart, and almost vomit.
I'm sorry you have a bad reaction to an artificial sweetener, but you should realize that the term "harmless" doesn't mean "nobody can ever have anything bad happen", it means that for normal people it does no harm.
For most people, peanuts are harmless. For most people, a bee sting is an annoyance. For most people, shellfish are a yummy treat.
For most people, aspartame is a harmless sweetener. For people who have phenylketonuria (PKU) it can kill them. They lack an enzyme that processes phenylalanine, an amino acid (building block of proteins) that is part of aspartame, and is also found in higher concentrations in turkey. Should the media report on a regular basis this fact?
For most people, most medications intended to treat some symptom or disease do just that and nothing more. But read the contraindications or side-effect lists and see that some people don't have the same reaction that everyone else does. Does that mean the drug or whatever should be banned? Of course not.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media,
I don't know that it is the media's responsibility to report every bad side-effect that a minority of people experience to some common food additive. They'd be so busy reporting on what affects a minority that the main news would never get covered.
For most people artificial sweeteners including aspartame fool the body into thinking you've ingested sugar and responding in kind. In particular spiking insulin levels. This causes the body to reserve body fat, store any sugar in the blood as tissue (mostly fat), and experience low blood sugar levels and therefore mood swings. It also can cause headaches for the same reasons.
Many of these sweeteners also disrupt beneficial digestive bacteria. So no, artificial sweeteners aren't really harmless for most people. They are just even more harmful for a small minority.
It's worth mentioning, there are actually a few artificial sweeteners that don't trigger an insulin reaction such as Stevia and not to astroturf on Coca-Cola's behalf but I will credit them being responsible for forcing the FDA to acknowledge stevia as being safe for human consumption. Before they pushed this issue it was considered safe to eat as a supplement yet somehow not safe to use as a food additive... a strange determination that smells of uncontested U.S. sugar industry lobbying efforts.