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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
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
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.
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
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.
This is nothing more than a pre-emptive strike against the rising war on sugar. The tobacco companies did the same thing for years, despite the science being pretty fucking conclusive since at least the 1950s. But big money buys big influence, and allows companies to essentially peddle poisons for decades.
Yes, calories are required for survival. But there's a helluva lot better source of calories than what amounts to a flavored sugar syrup in a carbonated water solution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn,
Wrong. You metabolize more calories than you burn, while your body is in a state in which it will store the unused food as fat. But all of this is controlled to a very large extent by factors other than what you eat right now; some of it is controlled by what you've been eating, there appears to be a genetic influence, and there's also the current condition of your gut biota which is also affected by the other two major factors. Remember, poop transplants can make people fatter or skinnier. Once you realize that, it's all a bunch of shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.)
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!
Remember, poop transplants can make people fatter or skinnier. Once you realize that, it's all a bunch of shit.
Gouging my eyes out now, but still can't get that image out of my head.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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.
Coke and Pepsi have been around well over a hundred years.
100 years ago coca cola contained actual cocaine, it probably did promote weight loss
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.
The general idea is still sound. The problem is that the calorie/kilocalorie values are based on a very average and idealized man
No, the problem is that the calorie/kilocalorie values were derived by setting food on fire . Seriously, I am not making this up. Since mitochondria are not little coalmen shoveling food into furnaces, the whole idea of deriving caloric benefit values by setting food on fire is basically insane. But as the link above explains, today, we don't even do that. We just look up each ingredient in a table, a table which was derived by setting food on fire, and then decide what its caloric content is. So not only does the back of the package not tell you what percentage of the food you're going to metabolize (it can't, since we're all different and we don't actually know that much about it) it also doesn't actually tell you what the caloric content of the food is! (There are numerous other problems with the system; some of them are described in the second link.)
Setting food on fire can be fun, but it's not a very good substitute for actual knowledge of how it will behave in the body.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
How do I get a poop transplant to deal with obesity and type II? Presumably this will clear my stress hormones too.
Since it's a pretty new thing, I imagine you'd either have to join a trial, or find a back-alley donor.
You probably don't want to know that freeze-drying poop and putting it into capsules and then taking it orally has been shown to also work...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.