First Signs of Obesity In Some Arctic Groups Have Been Linked To Instant Noodles (sciencealert.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Researchers have noted the first signs of obesity in the native ethnic groups of the Yamalo-Nenets region -- an autonomous district that sits on the coast of the Arctic Ocean in Northwest Siberia. According to local experts, obesity has not previously existed in these indigenous populations, but the first cases are now being reported, and a marked change in diet -- including instant noodles and pasta -- appears to be responsible. The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug has a population of just over 522,000 people, whose ancestors have survived the permafrost for millennia. The nomadic Nenets and Khanty peoples have been herding reindeer up and down the Yamal tundra -- a 700-km-long peninsula that stretches deep into the Arctic Ocean -- for 1,000 years, with diets heavily based on venison and fish. But that appears to be changing fast, as researchers note the increasing uptake of chemically processed foods, such as instant noodles and pasta, and the addition of sugar, pastry, and bread to their diets. According to Titovsky, these changes -- which have only been occurring over the past few years -- have seen the intake of venison and river fish cut by half.

Comments

Re:Taste Score

[AthanasiusKircher]

Let's have a focus group of 5 years old and see if they prefer Doritos or fresh halibut.

What culture were the 5-year-olds raised in? What foods were they exposed to? Seriously: food preferences and cultural preferences start developing at a much younger age.

Even foods "all kids love" may not really be so. My son hated sweets until he was 3 years old. HATED them. We gave him a piece of his first birthday cake, and he spit it out and literally scraped the remainder off of his tongue with his hands. We never tended to have sweets in the house, so he was never exposed to anything like that before. I think he had the same reaction I do now to regular Coke -- it's so sickeningly sweet that I'm repulsed by it. It's positively unnatural.

My kid instead barely experienced refined carbs probably for the first couple years of his life. I baked at home for him the only bread he consumed. We weren't trying to "hide" sweets from him -- in fact, we offered them to him quite a few times. Inevitably, he'd take a small bite of the cookie or whatever and then put it down. We didn't eat a lot of the stuff either, so it didn't matter to us. One thing his mother really likes though is ice cream, so she kept trying to introduce that, and he'd spit it out.

His favorite foods when he was 2 included things like sauted bitter greens and eating beans basically right out of a can. Oh yeah, and bacon. And just about any kind of meat. But sweets? Absolutely not. Any kind of "chip"? Once he was old enough, we offered, and he hated them. It wasn't until he was 6 or so that he actually started to be interested in things like potato chips, but Doritos would still be summarily rejected.

He simply grew up without a lot of processed foods in the house, so they were unfamiliar and weird to him -- often with extreme and bizarre flavors, so he rejected them.

So weren't we shocked when for his 3rd birthday party he requested cupcakes! Huh? The kid who for years rejected every sweet thing we offered for years? Turns out that unbeknownst to us, his new daycare facility (the first time he had been in regular daycare) served cupcakes to all the kids as a treat on every kid's birthday. So he came to associate cupcakes with celebration, and that was finally enough to overcome his revulsion of things that were too sweet. It was the ASSOCIATION of sweets that made them appealing, not the flavor by itself. (Note that he loved stuff like fruits since he was a baby... it was only the stuff that was a lot sweeter like candy and cookies and cakes that he rejected.)

I'm sure not all kids would be like this, even if they weren't exposed to as many processed foods at a young age. But keep in mind that it's NOT flavor alone that makes processed foods appealing -- it's what they do to your body. They are cheap easy calories, often packaged conveniently with little or no preparation, and they cause metabolic reactions that often lead to overeating (especially stuff like Doritos, which fool your body with flavors that mimic savory stuff but only provide cheap carbs and fats, which leads your body to say, almost literally, "Where's the beef?" and thus encourage more eating....).

If you don't get far enough with processed foods to experience those reactions, the taste alone may not be enough to hook you. Try spending a few months away from the "junk food aisles" and learn to cook things for yourself, and see how much you really miss. Sure, there are a few specific cravings I still may get for the junk food stuff, but mostly I now find the flavors less significantly appealing than "real food."

Re:"...diets heavily based on venison and fish..."

[Anonymous Coward]

As another Greek Orthodox Christian, you seemed to have completely forgotten about another food group: vegetables

I don't understand why everyone forgets about them. You see food studies with people abstaining from meat and increasing their grains and veggies and their health improves. Then you see studies with people abstaining from gains and increasing their meat and veggies and their health improves. Clearly the two constants in those 'conflicting' studies is: increased vegetable consumption improves health.

Instant Noodles don't cause obesity elsewhere

[RubberDogBone]

So I can still eat all the Slim Jims and beef jerky I want (which is a lot) but I have to give up my fire noodles and cup ramen?

Dammit.

Seriously, I am not sure how to take this. Instant noodles are hugely popular across asia, consumed in vast quantities every day, and yet asia still has low obesity rates. So is it the noodles that are the problem OR how the people respond to what they eat?

Or is it not the people as much as it is their gut bacteria?

Living where they do and eating what they have eaten for centuries has probably left them with a fairly specialized set of gut bacteria good at extracting maximum nutrition from meager food, and perhaps pasta and noodles are just the wrong thing for those people to eat. Perhaps their bodies are TOO good at retaining the calories from the food, because they had to be good to survive. Now, with caloric food in good supply, they no longer need that ability as much, but it's not like we can reprogram our guts.

Small, details

[DrYak]

bad eating habits = too much sugar,

When you eat too much sugar, the body produces more insulin to force the sugar into the cells, cells get too much sugar, and reduce their insulin sensitivity. After a while, you see blood sugar rise, but the damage has already been going on for years, usually.

For added precision :

bad eating habits :
- high calorie intake (too much sugar and fat) : drives obesity up.
- too much *glucose*, i.e. *processed* sugar (In everyday's terms: pure sugar. Like the sugar-cubes equivalent in a soda can. As opposed to complex glucose polymers fibers, as found in nuts) and/or *very small low complexity oligomers* (starch. Like white bread. It doesn't taste sweet at all (there's very little actual pure sugar inside) but the starch gets broken up *extemely fast into glucose* during digestion. As opposed to whole grain bread which takes a bit more time. And as opposed to nuts, as mentionned above : their fibers takes a long time to digest).

When the glucose absoption is too fast (because the sugar is alredy processed as glucose, or because the starch gets digested too quickly),
the body keeps the blood glucose concentration low by quickly releasing peaks of insulin.
(Compare with eating nuts : they get digested into glucose extremely slowly and thus the glucose only enters the body drip by drip. Insulin only needs to be raised very slightly above basal level) (As a consequence, a type 1 diabetic doesn't usually give a fuck about nuts and doesn't need to take them into account when computing insulin injection dose)

This *very sudden* and *very high* rise of insulin causes :
- nearly all cells in the body will down-regulate their insulin receptors. They become more insulin resisting (eventually devolving into type 2 diabetes). And eventually glucose rises as a consequence.
The lone exception is the brain which use an entire different pathway (does not depend on insulin at all) and still keeps getting its sugar. (And this is part of the reasons why diabetes is much more destructive than fasting / any other protein-high diets)
- the high level of insulin also work as hormone and signal to the body. It encourages creating even more fat tissue storage (as opposed to use the sugar to build muscle mass). This worsens the obesity, which in turn works as a positive feedback, and is also a cause of heart diseases.

Once insulin resistance sets in :
- glucose remain in excess in the blood
- due to high concerntration you pee a lot (hence the name diabetis)
- as it doesn't enter in the cells (except the brain) the rest of the body thinks that it doesn't have any, and thus bruns fat and proteins instead, tries to synthetise glucose out of these, and asks the liver (through glucagon) to release some of the glucose from the reserves in the liver.
- but non of this extra glucose (synthetised or release) is of any help : the insulin still won't bring it in.

Damage comes from :
- High concentration of glucose. (Body has problems keeping the osmolarity of the blood). This eventually leads to blood vessels walls being damaged.
(Diabetes is mainly a blood vessel disease, mediated by the glucose concentration).
- Ketonic bodies toxicity. Because glucose can't enter most of the body, it's as if there was none and the body was fasting. In absence of (available) glucose, the body cells start to burn fat as an energy source (this requires to burn proteins as a by product of a missing reaction)
(this also produces ketonic bodies. These are toxic. Under normal circumstance (someone on a high protein, low carb diet), the brain cell would eat it and burn it as fuel source. But here the brain has access to plenty of glucose (remember : brain uses a different pathway to get its glucose and isn't affected by glucose) and thus will keep burning glucose, instead of burning ketonic bodies. These therefore accumulate and they end up being toxic)

Note:
- The above only concerns *glucose*.
- This doesn't concern al