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Brains of Overweight People Look Ten Years Older Than Those of Lean Peers, Says Report (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of people who are obese or overweight appear to have aged an extra 10 years compared to their lean peers from middle age onwards, brain scanning research has revealed. The difference, scientists say, corresponds to a greater shrinkage in the volume of white matter, although they don't know the cause. It might be down to genes causing both brain-shrinking and obesity, or it could be that changes occurring in the brain lead to overeating. Either way, it does not appear to affect cognitive performance. White matter is tissue, composed of nerve fibers, that aids communication between different regions of the brain. The volume of white matter in a human brain increases during youth and then decreases with age for both lean people and those who are overweight or obese. But researchers have discovered that this shrinkage differs depending on a subject's BMI. "The overall message is that brains basically appear to be 10 years older if you are overweight or obese," said Lisa Ronan, first author of the study from the University of Cambridge. Despite a higher BMI being linked to a smaller volume of white matter, it did not appear to have any link to mental prowess, with no difference seen between lean and overweight or obese participants when they were subjected to IQ tests. Scientists from the University of Cambridge and Yale University have published their findings in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Well since you're supposed to get wiser with age, does this accelerate the wising-up process?
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Since they said specifically that there seemed to be no differences in cognitive performance between the skinny subjects and the fat ones, this is unlikely to be the cause of the difference.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So now, on top of missing dark matter, we're missing white matter too? Frak. Who the hell is in charge of keeping track of where this shit goes?!!!
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Those people who stay skinny have a genetic predisposition however if a person struggles to keep their weight down it is their fault for not working hard enough. Because you know Calories in vs Calories burned.
Now genetics is only part of the equation. there are thing you can do to put on weight (say weight lifting) or loose weight (sat cardio and diet)
There are too many diet snobs out there telling you that everything you eat is bad. Just as your genetics may make your body digest faster and slower people have different dietary requirements. I tried vegetarian for about 2 months my body didn't like it. I gained weight because I ended up eating more calories to get what my body said it wanted for protein. Now other people are fine on a vegetarian diet because they may not need as much direct protein. Perhaps I have a harder time digesting protein from beans and vegetable than others do.
However all these comments saying how a particular diet is bad and how their body types issues can be fixed with the diet changed that worked for them is just lazy, shaming of people so they feel morally superior due to their foods that they eat.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
More aptly, who wants to torture themselves just to get old.
This doesn't seem out of line with other studies that link a more restricted caloric intake with youthfulness and better health.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Having lost 150lbs over the past few years, I have read innumerable articles over that time about nutrition and have come to a conclusion: Nobody has any fucking idea what they're talking about. Carbs are bad for you, fat is bad for you, refined sugar is bad for you, all sugar is bad for you, processed food of any kind is bad for you, artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and on and on. I can find an article and a study to back up just about any claim you care to make about nutrition. It's all bullshit pseudo science.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
If you're having trouble gaining weight, you're not eating enough. Simple as that. Here's what you do: Eat what you normally would every day, then eat an entire loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter every night. That's an extra 10000 Calories or so every day. If you can't gain weight on that then you're a medical marvel or an Olympiad in training. Will it be hard to force yourself to eat all that? You bet it will. It's at least as hard for people on the opposite end of the spectrum who have to force themselves not to eat, trust me. So it's really just a matter of how bad you want it, isn't it?
Like in the old joke:
Doc, what do I have to do to get old?
You smoke?
Nope
You drink?
Nope
You sleeping around?
Nope
Then why the hell you wanna get old?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your claim of lower cognitive performance due to diet choices is not related to the premature aging the scientists found.
My guess is that the brain matter loss has more to do with the sedentary life style which often goes along with obesity. Lack of exercise, watching too much TV, etc.
When looking at an entire populate, the very muscular athletes are outliers. High BMI almost always indicates obesity.
It's all bullshit pseudo science.
That's what I concluded from years of following discussions, and I never even tried to start any fad diet.
The one thing I started with after reducing my working days to just a few hours was only eat when I'm really hungry.
Not when I feel peckish or something looks good. No, my stomach gives a clear signal that the body needs food and then I eat. And with just a little restraint at first and stop eating when I feel full enough, my portions became automatically smaller.
Since the start of the year I've gone down from 110kg to hitting 96kg on the scale as of last week. With the increased energy I also did a bit more weightlifting.
Even my girl who's overweight has followed my lead and only started eating when really hungry has lost 4 to 5 kg in just over 1 month (with light exercise). She now has more energy and feels much better.
home
No one should be overreacting on this subject. On TFA, the researcher already stated that weight may not really be the cause (just a possibility and may need further research); thus, it is still inconclusive.
But, Ronan warns, it is not yet clear whether an increased BMI is driving the effect. “It could be that the genes that are responsible for obesity could also be responsible for smaller brains, or it could be that if you have a brain change that could lead to overeating,” she said.
Another researcher also confirmed that the result could be inconclusive.
Claudia Metzler-Baddeley, from Cardiff University’s Brain Research Imaging Centre, said the research backs up previous suggestions that obesity and brain structure are linked. But, she added, “It is cross-sectional study - so it is not following people up over time. That is always a limiting factor. It doesn’t allow you to make any inferences about cause and effect.” What’s more, she says, self-reports of health and lifestyle factors are prone to inaccuracies, while the use of BMI also has drawbacks. “You can have a very high BMI just simply because of high muscle mass,” she said.
Thanks for the most insightful post on Slashdot on this matter ever. Damn that I don't have any modpoints to give you. The only reason that "don't eat fat" or "don't eat carbs" work is because they make people eat less, i.e if you skip carbs then there is a lot of calories on a lunch plate that you suddenly don't eat anymore. Also if you skip fat or carbs you automatically don't eat a lot of the junk food. Myself I started to calculate calories and so far have lost 180lbs.
From The Guardian:
Underweight people face significantly higher risk of dementia, study suggests
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/10/underweight-people-face-significantly-higher-risk-of-dementia-study-suggests
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Research involving health records of 2 million people condradicts current thinking, sparking surprise among authors and health experts
It has been wrongly claimed that obese people have a higher risk of dementia, say the authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
Even this is a little bullshit. I lost 100 pounds last year and I had similar experiences to yours. My weight has now been stable for about eight months. This year, I suffered an injury which changed my routine, causing me to burn about 7000 fewer calories per week than my pre-injury routine (I was completely bedridden). With my reduced calorie burn and no significant changes in intake, I lost about five pounds in a few weeks. Here I am six weeks later, and the weight loss was real and permanent. This weight loss completely baffles me and can't be explained by my mental model of weight management.
I'm already on it - no need to nag!
Thanks for the most insightful post on Slashdot on this matter ever. Damn that I don't have any modpoints to give you. The only reason that "don't eat fat" or "don't eat carbs" work is because they make people eat less, i.e if you skip carbs then there is a lot of calories on a lunch plate that you suddenly don't eat anymore. Also if you skip fat or carbs you automatically don't eat a lot of the junk food. Myself I started to calculate calories and so far have lost 180lbs.
While that is true, one of the things that is a marker of healthy aging is higher than average insulin sensitivity, which a certain number of general things are known about:
1- Centenarians consistently have excellent insulin sensitivity, resulting in lower heart disease, cancer and chronic degenerative brain disorder numbers.
2- One way of improving insulin sensitivity is to lower carbohydrate intake in relation to total calories, for some this works for others it needs to be balanced by exercise.
3- Ketogenic diets originally were formulated to provide relief in seizures for children who suffered from epilepsy. The ketogenic diet, while not for everyone is well studied and it is known and well documented that it does not cause heart disease and promotes good cholesterol numbers.
4- Once people lose a lot of body fat through diet or exercise by restricting dietary carbs or overall calories (or both) they can titrate in more carbohydrates and in the presence of better insulin sensitivity tend to do better in keeping the fat weight down, all other things being equal.
It was never meant to be such.
BMI is a 95% accurate predictor of obesity in men and 99% in women. IOW if you pick a random member of the population, measure their BMI and body fat percentage 95-99% that BMI says you're obese, the fat percentage will agree (and also BMI will miss quite a few). And bear in mind of those 5% wrong, some number will be merely overweight rather than obese. So if you take an obese BMI to mean "should I lose weight", if it says "yes" it's going to be wrong way under 5% of the time.
That's pretty bloody good. A lifetime spent smoking is a less good predictor that you will die from smoking related diseases than BMI as a predictor of obesity.
So, it's an accurate predictor as these things go and it is very easy to measure correctly without specialist equipment unlike more accurate techniques like body fat percentage or waist measurement (which is hard to measure correctly).
Fit athletes can have a high BMI, it's mass (muscle is heavier than fat) against height.
Fit athletes can, but even then it's not as common as you might think. Here's a paste from an earlier post of mine on the topic (the tone was directed at the person I was having a "discussion" with back then, not you):
some of those are pretty big blokes. Even for pro athletes, you have to be on the bulky end to get on the wrong end of BMI.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
When looking at an entire populate, the very muscular athletes are outliers. High BMI almost always indicates obesity.
Except on slashdot. You see on any youth thread we complain about how all the millennials think they are special snowflakes. But on BMI threads, everyone with an obese level BMI is one of the few special snowflakes for whom the prediction is not accurate.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Also, with carbs, it's really easy to underestimate the calorie content. It doesn't seem right that a lean chicken patty can easily contain fewer calories than the bun you put it in.
I've found that when I look at a meal and think to myself "What can I take away that will remove a significant number of calories, but reduce my enjoyment of the meal as little as possible", I almost always come to the conclusion that taking the high-carb portion out works out best. Fats my be calorie dense, but 35 calories of butter can add a lot of flavor to a meal.
Another virtuous feedback benefit relates to salt. You can reduce your blood pressure by reducing salt - and suffer bland food, or you can reduce your blood pressure by losing weight and getting fit - and eat much tastier food. My BP went from 120/80 when I was overweight (borderline high), to 85/55 now that I am normal weight and very fit.
No one should be overreacting on this subject. On TFA, the researcher already stated that weight may not really be the cause (just a possibility and may need further research)
If there's a correlation it could be the other way around: perhaps people with those specific brain characteristics are prone to eating more.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Just because your IQ is not impacted doesn't mean the white matter doesn't serve other purposes.
I am currently trying to exercise and radically changed my diet. It is because exercise has as much if not more impact on depression than anti depressants according to studies! When you exercise, go on a ketone diet, or take anti depressants your body creates BDNF. BDNF causes neurons to grow more synapses and dendrites to repair the brain.
Fat and sediment people have shrunken Hippo Thalamus which controls mode, executive functions, and short term memory.
So yes as people as some people pointed out people become wiser, but many who for example who were once sharp programmers end up in management as their is cognitive decline and a difficulty learning new things.
http://saveie6.com/
There is also science that suggests Low Carb and higher Fat diets are better. Insulin and Insulin resistance seem to be (for some) the primary factors in plaquing and heart disease. BMI is not the leading indicator.
Links to scientific studies (not blog posts - real studies) http://2ketodudes.com/#science
So --- what is the truth? dunno. But it seems this may all be an up and coming topic for researchers to figure out. Keto is 180 from conventional message - but seems to be working for many. Everyone loves a conspiracy: why isn't keto being researched? Because drug companies make money selling drugs? You'd think the bacon industry would be backing this anti-research :-P
This. There are several insights I've found useful for keeping my weight down:
(1) Learn to recognize the difference between hunger and craving. When one's body seems to "be trying" to get back to your set-point weight, you'll be hit with all kinds of cravings that are unaccompanied by hunger. It takes less discipline to ignore cravings than to ignore the cravings+hunger.
(2) Keep a mental tally of (approximately) how many calories you've eaten so far in the day, vs. how active you have been / will be. It helps you decide if it's worth eating food ${X} or doing activity ${Y}.
(3) Poor sleep ==> { extra appetite, worse self-control, and less desire to get exercise }. So place a high premium on good sleep.
(4) Carbs seem to be somewhat addictive, in terms of cravings. In my experience, it takes ~ 1-2 months of not eating a lot of carbs in order for the cravings to go away.
(5) If I'm hungry, or even have cravings for fattening foods, it's better to eat something filling (meat, yogurt, etc.) rather than let myself get so hungry / craving that I say "screw it" and make brownies.
(6) For some reason, people who eat a lot of yogurt seem to be skinny. Correlation isn't causation, but it's perhaps a sign of it. So consider eating more yogurt. IMHO the yucky low-fat stuff with aspartame isn't worth it; just get something really yummy like Liberte and accept the calories as a worthwhile investment.
Also, it seems to take a little bit of time before you start to feel full, even if you've eaten enough food to make you full. Eating slower helps you stop eating before you get too stuffed. Drinking water with meals also helps you get the "full" feeling before you're painfully over-full.
I don't have any weight problems, but I absolutely hate the feeling of being over-full. I noticed that I'm way more likely to have it happen if I eat very quickly.
With the increased energy I also did a bit more weightlifting.
Building muscle burns energy, but even just having more muscle increases your resting energy consumption and can help you lose weight. Handy!
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It's all bullshit pseudo science. That's what I concluded from years of following discussions, and I never even tried to start any fad diet.
This stuff isn't magic or unknown. Long established science.
Hormones, hormones, hormones. "Nutritionists" claim all sorts of crap but endocrinologists, at least the good ones, know that there is a vast amount of actual science on mammalian metabolism. A good book
To say "Calories = calories" is flat wrong. Attention! Automobile analogy coming: Your car will run differently on gasoline vs diesel vs nitro-methane. No one with an I.Q. in the upper two digits or better would claim that they all have the same effect on a car engine for a given number of calories. Our bodies are the same.
The hormonal effect of the *type* of calories makes a huge difference.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Well... yes and no. 5000 calories is a lot, even in high-caloric foods. I think you would poop a lot and you wouldn't WANT to eat that much food because you wouldn't need to. The calorie argument is a red herring - it is a piece of information, but only a small one.
But I can tell you this. After eating high-fat (animal fats, butter, coconut oil, olive oil), no grains/legumes and virtually no sugar for a year, and not counting calories at all or exercising any more than I normally did, I lost 15 lbs and 2 inches off my waist. Actually that happened in the first 3 months, but I tracked it for a year. I went from 170 lbs to 155. If I were overweight, I would have lost a lot more. I have been eating this way for 4 years now, and after increasing my non-grain carbs a little I am at 160 with no effort. And I feel better than I ever have. There are other great effects of eating this way, such as reducing inflammation.
A year or so ago I did track what I ate and measured the fat/calories/sugar for a week. It was typical, and I made no adjustments to my diet.
The daily average came out to 2300 calories, 54 grams carbs, 186 grams fat, 18 grams sugar. I actually expected the calories to be higher, but that is what I found. I did actually think for a moment "oh no, I'm not eating enough... the average male should consume..." NO! That is generalized hogwash for the masses based on old information (I can't even call it science). Watch this video by Dr Peter Attia on Vimeo who talks about how our Dietary Guidelines are what they are. I know.. it's long, but it's really interesting. He has some really deep info on his website about how our diet and fat affects our cholesterol. Another fun fact - high cholesterol isn't bad. Another fun fact - half of all people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol. Cholesterol is simply one thing, one factor in the grand scheme... but you know what doctors say... you need to lower it, I want you to take statins. (which are at the top of the most prescribed drug lists, in quantity and in dollars) But I digress...
I think it would be hard to eat 5000 calories in a day. I can see where someone doing vigorous work all day would require more food, but that is not saying the same thing as "just eat fewer calories and you will lose weight". I can only explain so much... I referenced some good books that go into far greater detail on the topic. Your body operates on hormones, and what you eat directly impacts that process. Calories do not. It's really that simple. But please, don't take my word for it, find those books and read them. The information is out there.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Gender as a social construct, ignoring millions of years of evolution into a bisexual species, is truly a delusion. Gender is a double bell curve function. The majority fall in the one sigma deviation of male and female. There are outlyers that are significantly in the minority with XXY or XYY genes (hyper-male and hyper-female). There is a more significant minority that express mixed gender markers. This is "intersexed" and can run a spectrum from a man with lactating teats, a woman with an exceedingly large clitoris, all the way to having both a penis and vagina.
Now, gender specific customs are a cultural construct. But that is not driven by biology but peer approval. Some gender specific customs are quite benign. Some gender specific customs are quite toxic. Most are just that, customs.
One of the benign ones is how you button a garment. With unisex fashion a lot has fallen by the wayside but you still see it in more formal garments. Men's clothing buttons with the right plaquet on the bottom and women's clothing buttons with the left plaquet on the bottom. Why? I think it is in Leviticus where you find the prohibition against men wearing women's clothing and women wearing men's clothing. This kind of inconsequential crud is what is a social construct. I should rather say it is now inconsequential. In past centuries, sumptuary laws had real teeth. Our modern sumptuary laws seem only to involve how much skin you can show and where and whether the face can be covered in public.
NRRPT/RCT