Why People are Fat
May 20th, 2012
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People are getting fatter, at least in the industrial world. In fact, it’s become the single largest health problem facing most first world nations. With increased obesity comes more heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions. It’s often been stated that the United States is the fattest nation in the world. That’s not actually true. The US is near the top, but several are in fact, fatter. A number of small nations and the nation of Kuwait have higher rates of obesity and heavier populations than the US. Canada and Mexico are both on par with the US, as is Egypt, while the United Kingdom is rapidly catching up.
In fact, the problem is nearly universal in most first world countries. Across Western Europe, waistlines are growing. Germany, Ireland, Finland, Greece, Spain and others have seen obesity skyrocket in recent years. In both Australia and New Zealand, obesity rates are now described as “epidemic” and continue to rise. The nations with the fastest growing obesity rates, however, are those which are still developing industrially. Although the overall prevalence of obesity in Chile, Brazil and India are low, they are growing at the highest rates. In China, obesity was once extremely rare, but in the past decade has become common. Even Japan and South Korea are seeing rising obesity, despite having had a reputation for generally lean populations.
The common yet false claims:
If you ever happen to watch a youtube video or visit a website claiming dangers associated with food irradiation, genetic modification or the use of vaccines, modern medicine etc etc, you will very often hear claims that it is the reason why the population is obese. Pictures of unhealthy, overweight kids are often shown alongside warnings of the evils of modern agriculture.
Others will say that we need to “detoxify” to become thinner. That seems to be an odd suggestion, since fat is not toxic but the result of your body absorbing and storing nutrients, which is what it’s supposed to do. Others insist that the answer is eating only organically-certified foods.
NOT reasons why people are fat:
- Vaccines
- Antibiotics
- Chemtrails
- Genetically modified foods
- High fructose corn syrup being used as a sweetener (as opposed to cane or beat sugar)
- Food irradiation
- Bisphenol A
- “Toxins”
- Insecticide residue
- Fluoridation of water
- A need to “detoxify” the body
Reasons why people are fat:
- Eating large amounts of high calorie food
- Sedentary lifestyles
Of these the first is by far the most important reason. The second does have some impact and may be more true in children, since there has been a very strong shift toward less outdoor play and exertion than in decades past. That said, there have long been large segments of the population who get minimal exercise and it is primarily the change in eating habits that is responsible for more obesity.
People in industrialized countries are eating more processed foods than ever before, more calorie-dense snacks and consuming more soft drinks than ever. When one says “processed foods” it might seem to indicate that the problem is that they are a problem because there is something artificial or unnatural about them. That’s not really the problem so much as it is that these foods tend to be very dense in calories and are easy to consume in bulk. They also, by and large, are easy for the body to extract those calories from. Fast foods and packaged snack foods are widely available and cheap. It is very easy to eat a lot of them without even noticing.
Soft drinks are another big culprit. It’s not uncommon for someone to drink sodas or sweetened juices with every meal of the day. A single can of cola can easily contain 150 calories and it’s quite easy to put away 500+ calories of soda with a meal and hardly even notice it. Sodas and soft drinks are so high in calories because they are loaded with sugar. Often this is in the form of high fructose corn syrup, but that’s not what matters. It could just as easily be cane sugar or beat sugar or any other kind of sugar. It’s not the source of the sugar but the quantity and thus the caloric value.
The problem is not limited to sodas either. Sweetened iced teas, sports drinks and other beverages can contain just as much sugar and calories. Even “unsweetened” fruit juices can be very high in naturally occurring sugars from the fruits they are made from.
It’s become very common for people in industrial societies to drink large quantities of sodas and soft drinks every day. It’s become very common for people in industrial societies to eat large quantities of processed, calorie-dense snack foods like cookies, candy bars and other sweets. More and more people are also eating food from restaurants, fast food or otherwise on a daily basis. These foods too tend to be high in calories, often being fried.
It’s important to remember that none of these foods are “bad” in and of themselves, should they be eaten in relative moderation. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have both been around for more than one hundred years and were popular and ubiquitous around the world throughout the 20th century. If the average person had a Coke or Pepsi every time they went to a ball game or barbecue, then there wouldn’t really be any problem. If donuts were consumed a couple of times a week, they would not be much concern either.
The problem is that these foods have become staples. It’s not uncommon for a person to eat a couple donuts for breakfast, chased with a coffee with lots of sugar then eat a burger and fries, with a large soft drink for lunch, snack on candy bars and soda in the afternoon and then have a large high-calorie dinner.
Why this has happened:
The reason that so many have excessive calorie intake is that they can. It’s not the fault of restaurants or food producers, they are just filling a demand. As a general rule, humans prefer foods that we would generally consider “unhealthy” by modern standards.
For most of human history, food has been scarce, so it was beneficial to eat the foods with the highest calories in high quantities, when they were available. Calories are the most important consideration when it comes to nutrition and having a constant surplus is something that has only happened recently. Foods with a lot of fat and sugar taste good and are satisfying. Other options are there, but given the choice between a salad and a burger, most people will choose the burger. Choosing the salad usually means making a conscious decision to do what is healthy, not what is more enjoyable.
Innovations in agriculture, automation and the general rise of more food services has made it easier and cheaper than ever to get these foods. Soda machines are common and convenience stores and gas stations are stocked with every kind of sweet confection imaginable, primarily because that’s what people want. Fast food restaurants can provide a quick breakfast, lunch or dinner with drive-through convince and do it for only a few dollars. They often do have healthy options on the menu, but that’s not usually what customers buy.
Given the choice, consumers will also tend to prefer larger portions. To some extent it is an issue of more value for one’s money, and simple economics come into play here. The value to a consumer can be increased by either lowering the cost of a product or increasing the quantity. For a restaurant, it’s more attractive to increase the quantity, since they are then taking in more revenue and have fixed preparation costs. Additionally, consumers simply tend to gravitate toward greater portions. French fries and other high calorie sides are cheap, so it makes business sense to pile them on, since consumers prefer to get more anyway.
There are also some cultural reasons for this happening. People are more mobile than ever, and being on the go means more opertunity to grab a quick packaged snack. Eating at home is less common than in decades past, and prepared foods and restaurants are part of the growing service-oriented economy. With more women in the workplace and fewer traditional families, the old norm of having a woman spend her afternoon making a pot roast or meatloaf for the family to eat together at the dinner tables is no longer common.
The solution:
There
are no easy solutions here. Encouraging people to eat more healthy foods and reduce intake can help. Providing more low calorie options can help too. Encouraging more exercise is also helpful.
On an individual basis, we can all decide to eat healthier and do so through willpower, but making the whole population do so is much harder. To some extent, one is up against human nature, which is generally a losing proposition. Making food more expensive or less available is not a good option, because doing so would result in greater burdens on the lower classes and more income going toward food purchases. Trying to place restrictions on foods won’t generally work either. Such restrictions are unlikely to be well received and would need to be draconian to have any chance of working at all.
Even if restrictions put in place, there will always be ways to skirt them. Creating a “black market” for high calorie foods might seem like an absurd idea, but it has actually happened. In Los Angeles, school districts instituted a policies for school lunch programs, replacing most of the high calorie foods with things like salads, whole wheat breads, grilled chicken and other foods generally considered healthy. Unfortunately, a large portion of students don’t like the new menu and prefer sodas, chips and candy enough to create a thriving black market. More and more students now bring their own lunches, and now are selling to their peers. Food trucks and vendors set up shop around schools to fill the demand. Now California is mulling banning such vendors, while some districts consider either inspecting bagged lunches or banning them altogether.
Trying to apply such rules and restrictions to greater segments of society would result in similar backlash, although it would likely be even worse.
Disclaimers:
[1] I know already someone is going to point out that I personally could stand to lose a few pounds. I don’t dispute this. That’s not the point. I’ll be the first to admit that the reason I am overweight is that I my eating habits are sub-optimal.
[2] A lot of the readers of this blog seem to like hypertechicalities, so to clarify the “Not reasons why people are fat” should probably say “Not MAJOR reasons why people are fat.” It is true that there are circumstances where antibiotics can result in some weight gain. It’s also possible that one could make the logical connection between vaccines and more obesity by pointing out that vaccination has economic benefits and that these could, in turn, result in a population that could buy more food.
[3] Of course the subject is more complicated and there may well be other factors that come into play, but go beyond the scope of this blog post.
[4] Someone is almost certainly going to bring this up – it’s true that HFCS and sucrose (cane sugar) are not identical and that there’s some difference in the dietary effects. In general, HFCS is lower in calories than sucrose of an equivalent sweetness which would suggest that it’s actually less problematic. Claims have been made that HFCS is more readily converted to fat than glucose, although data to confirm this is, at best weak. Regardless of these possibilities, it does not change the fact that the major problem is quantity, not type of sugar and HFCS does not appear to be significantly more prone to contributing to weight gain than other forms of sugar.
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2012 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Culture, Obfuscation, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 21st, 2012 at 12:47 am
Poverty also tends to correlate pretty strongly with obesity, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people who are obese never had enough to eat when they were kids (and thus developed a tendency to eat whenever they could since they wouldn’t know how long before their next meal). I suspect that poverty reduction may actually be the most effective way to solve obesity, at least in the next generation or if epigenetic factors come into play the one or two after.
It’s also worth pointing out that people tend to eat after they exercise (and usually quite a bit more than what they just worked off).
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May 21st, 2012 at 2:08 am
I think the link between poverty and obesity in First World countries is more because poor regions (such as northern England, or the southern United States) tend to be areas with a tradition of heavy manual labor, and therefore have a culture of eating lots of high-calorie food in order to fuel such labor. The heavy manual jobs have largely been eliminated (by automation, or offshoring to the Third World), but the high-calorie diet remains.
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May 21st, 2012 at 3:20 am
Well, I’m trying to lose some wieght (doctor’s orders), and I’d like to know: How could I emulate the diet and exercise of my ancestors (back in the days when food was scarce and women could slave in the kitchen all day over a roast) without sacrificing the comforts of modern living and on a shoestring budget? Being able to do it without experienceing hunger pangs would be a bonus.
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May 21st, 2012 at 3:49 am
Lucario said:
You could try this variant of raw foodism.
The diet of our ancestors was hunger then feast, then hunger, then feast.
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May 21st, 2012 at 6:23 am
^ Sorry, anon, no sheep or other such game out ther for me to catch and slaughter.
What I meant was how one could emulate the diet/exercise habits of one’s ancestors (not necessarily cavemen, peasants will do) without sacrificing the comforts or modern life or suffering hunger pangs. That is, I’m still ” hunting and gathering” from the supermarket.
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May 21st, 2012 at 6:41 am
As the author points out…
Reasons why people are fat:
* Eating large amounts of high calorie food
* Sedentary lifestyles
I’ve heard a lot of noise about calorie taxes and salad from politicians and news outlets, but I’ve yet to hear anything about reason #2. For many of us, leading an active lifestyle is a luxury. Gym memberships cost money, and taking an hour out of your busy day to exercise exacts a real cost in time. Maybe instead of trying to tell us what to eat, government could encourage municipalities to provide free or low-cost gym facilities to their residents. Investment in mass transit and walkable neighborhoods would also be a great way to get people to walk more without necessarily having to take time out of their schedule to do it.
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May 21st, 2012 at 7:22 am
Lucario said:
Pity.
Lucario said:
It’s only relatively recently that we’ve gotten to the point of not being a bad hunt/harvest away from starvation so starve-feast-starve-feast-etc is pretty much how we’ve been living, whether or hunter/gatherers or peasants for most of human history (and peasantry is relatively recent compared with hunting and gathering).
Benjamin Kay said:
It also happens to be the reason you can’t really do much about (promoting exercise isn’t going to work as people will just end up eating more after they’re done completely wiping out what they’ve sweated off).
Benjamin Kay said:
Which would only likely be used by those who already go to the gym without actually getting any new people into there (or at least new regular customers, which is what you’d need for it to be a success, a person who shows up once or twice isn’t being helped, or hurt by it).
Of course the people who drive to the gym should probably be pointed at and laughed at (unless they work there).
Benjamin Kay said:
Inrceasing the amount of walking people do might actually help (since they aren’t all that likely to quaff down lots of food as soon as they get to work) and there are other good reasons to invest in public transport.
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May 21st, 2012 at 8:32 am
Lucario said:
I have no idea what your situation is. However, my doctor told me I needed to lose some weight and suggested I cut back on soft drinks. That’s what I did. I really found going to water was very bland so I started drinking seltzer, which is calorie free and also flavored seltzer, which is very low in calories.
That alone was enough to lose a couple pounds.
Benjamin Kay said:
You don’t need a gym membership to have a non-sedentary lifestyle.
I understand what you are saying about it being a luxury to take an hour or more to exercise. However, in the historical context, it’s absolutely bizzare that being active is something you would have to try to do.
Before mechanized transport, for example, it was damn near impossible to not get a lot of exercise.
My grandmother has told me about when she was younger, in the 1950’s, starting a family, and I’m impressed by how much walking was required. My grandparents lived in the suburbs, but as was common at the time, the expense of automobiles meant that there was only one family car. My grandfather took it to work on weekdays. She did not, however, stay put. She walked (almost every day) to the neighborhood market, which was a good half mile away.
If she wanted to go further, she would take the bus, but the bus stop was also a good walk from the house and the bus only took her to the downtown area of the town, so she would have to then walk around to get to the final destination.
They did not get a second car until the late 1960’s. Again, this was fairly common at the time.
She also had to hang the laundry on the line because there was no dryer. I think things were just required more exertion at the time in general – lawn mowers were not self-propelled and many still used non-motorized mowers. Vacuum cleaners were heavier and took more effort.
Mind you, I am not trumpeting the virtues of being a 50’s housewife as if it’s a wonderful thing. It’s certainly true that a lot of that stuff is thankless work, preformed in relative loneliness and that it is not what a woman would want to aspire to, given other choices. I’m just saying, that’s the way it was – life involved more manual labor.
Benjamin Kay said:
I really doubt that would work.
For one thing, I really consider gym memberships overrated. Yes, they make it easier to exercise, especially if you have some specific goal or prefer weight training. However, you don’t need a gym membership to just regularly run or walk.
Having a membership does not mean you will actually go regularly and stick to it.
Memberships are not expensive to begin with. Not only that, many have access to free gym facilities and don’t use them. Universities have student health centers that are free to use if you are enrolled. Some employers have gyms at the office. I’ve seen many communities which have free or extremely low cost exercise facilities maintained by the parks and recreation department. It’s great to have free or low cost gyms, but that’s no magic bullet to actually getting people to exercise.
Anon said:
Not sure about that. The area I live in, I’m not sure I could walk to a local gym. Not that they’re not within reasonable walking distance, but the area is just not very pedestrian friendly. Not all streets have sidewalks etc. I would really not want to be regularly walking along the shoulder of the road regularly, especially after sunset. It could be downright dangerous. That’s not even factoring in the weather.
Yeah… walking back from the gym at 8 pm, in the complete darkness, on the shoulder of an unlit road where cars barrel around blind curves at 50+ MPH, in November, in a driving freezing rain… No thanks.
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May 21st, 2012 at 11:03 am
George Carty said:
Not to mention that the cast-offs from the meat markets were readily adopted as down-home cooking for the people that could not afford choice cuts or for whom that’s what was provided by their masters.
Fatty Southern US Examples:
Rib meat
Cheek meat
Brains
Chicken wings
Ox tails
Pigs’ feet
Pig lips
Tripe/chitterlings
Fat back/pork rinds
and on and on…
Some cast-offs aren’t necessarily high-fat, unless, like skirt steak, you want it to be tender, in which case you make chicken-fried steak by tenderizing and deep-frying it.
It’s worth noting that many of the same people who could not afford lean/tender meat also relied heavily on their own vegetable gardens for sustenance, giving them some nutritional advantage over the McDonald’s/KFC set.
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May 21st, 2012 at 12:07 pm
This posting could have been made shorter by simply invoking the laws of conservation of mass and energy, combined with the assumption that no nuclear reactions converting mass to energy occur within a typical person’s body.
More muscle mass does cause a person to have a higher resting/basal metabolic rate, however, so that could be a good addition to the discussion.
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May 21st, 2012 at 2:28 pm
I could stand to drop a few pounds myself and have had to watch my weight for most of my life, so I understand the issue. I would just like to add that the task gets more difficult as one ages, and strategies that worked just fine in my forties just won’t cut it now that I am past sixty. It is not just a case of not being as active; since I stopped working I have exercised more than in the past. However it would seem that my metabolic rate has dropped slightly and it takes more effort and less calories to drop a pound than it did when I was younger.
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May 21st, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Benjamin Kay said:
Won’t help (as our host replied, but I’m gonna amplify that).
Because the major problem is that people don’t really want to exercise that much, not that it’s too expensive to go to the gym.
(Indeed some people have reported that “because I paid for it” is the major motivator that gets them to the gym in the first place.)
The time factor is partially true – but mostly it appears to be that people don’t want to actually do it all that much. (Nor will walkable neighborhoods and mass transit free up that time that they’re short on…)
There is no “solution” that can be applied by The Man – at least not one that people would tolerate.
I think the broader thing to realize in this context is that “problem” does not imply “solution”, at least not any immediate and acceptable one. Maybe/probably someday science will come up with a way to let us be lazy and not get fat, with no extra work, or produce extra motivation to exercise without an intolerable level of interference…
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May 21st, 2012 at 4:11 pm
I really enjoy the blog — found it during the whole Fukushima panic — and found it a wonderful read. However, on this topic, I think you are off base.
The whole idea that there’s an “epidemic of obesity” along side worsening health, doesn’t seem to be bearing out under scrutiny. BMI is a poor predictor of disease (Flegal, 2005), with a more in depth study showing that most of those so labeled as “overweight” were metabolically fine while a large percentage of those deemed “normal” were, in fact, metabolically in poor shape, (Wildman, 2008.) Calorie restriction doesn’t work long term (Mann, 2007) and it looks like it and the yo-yoing that goes on is bad for the overall health of the body.
Here’s one popular article from 2004 that sums a lot of this up:
“One of the country’s foremost obesity researchers, Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University explains that the commonly-held simplistic belief that obesity is just a matter of eating too much and/or not exercising enough is “at odds with substantial scientific evidence illuminating a precise and powerful biologic system.”
According to his research and that of numerous others, obesity is the result of differences in biology and metabolism, not behavior, diet or the environment. Through their own volition, people can control their weight long-term to a very small degree. Even voluntary physical exercise has minimal effect, according to Friedman and Glenn Gaesser, PhD., exercise physiologist and obesity researcher at the University of Virginia. So, while better access to foods can account for some of the increases seen in the average height and weight of all people in developed countries — 7 to 10 pounds in the U.S. since 1980s — it’s genetics and not the environment that accounts for the largest proportion of the differences in size among people, Friedman explains.
“The propensity to obesity is, to a significant extent, genetically determined,” he says. Someone genetically predisposed to obesity “will become obese independent of their caloric intake” even when it’s restricted to that of thin counterparts. “The heritability of obesity is equivalent to that of height and greater than that of almost every other condition that has been studied,” Friedman states.”
–http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2004/10/on-obesity-what-the-researchers-didnt-find.html
This is an incredibly complicated issue that we’re only starting to get a handle on. But the conventional wisdom regarding health, weight, calories and the like — information mentioned in your article — isn’t right.
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May 21st, 2012 at 4:15 pm
Growing up as a kid you always knew which old men where retired farmers or had their sons doing most of the work because they blew up like mini Macy’s parade balloons. They continued to eat like a person who was working and sweating all day. I noticed that I and a lot of my fellow former farm kid classmates really put on the pounds after college when we stopped going home during the summer to work for our dads. The farm kids who never went to college and continued to farm stayed fit for the most part, as did the “townies”. This is a generalization and there were exceptions, but that struck me as the trend.
They say the men on the Lewis and Clark expedition ate nine pounds of meat a day each. Sounds like the original adherents of the Adkins Diet if true, although I suppose they could have all just had intestinal worms too in addition to working their asses off.
For my part I see my problem as being one of tearing myself away from reading science magazines and surfing science blogs, etc. and spending more time working in my yard or walking a few miles a day.
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May 21st, 2012 at 4:22 pm
For me, low fat diets never worked and I was always hungry. Low carb worked well without hunger. See Taubes book “Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It”. He also demolishes the calorie in / calorie out theory. For example, there is a animal virus that makes animals fat, even if they eat the same amount of food and exercise the same amount. For type 2 diabetics, limited carbs are pretty much mandatory.
Poor people also eat lots of carbs. Meat is expensive, grain is cheap. This may be why they are fat.
Your mileage may vary.
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May 21st, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Comments on this could run and run.
This side of the pond I’ve noticed a few things about dietary habits.
People are generally terrified of cooking and trying anything new. I grew up in the 60′/70’s and offal was a regular on the table.
Eating/ cooking healthily is equated with expense. I really don’t get this one at all, if I were to cook all my meals for a month I know I could do it for under £100 and probably nearer £60. (I would in fairness be screaming for a kebab or curry by the end of it!)
Of course there’s always the fact that people forget that the entrance to the alimentary canal is a lot wider than the exit.
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May 21st, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Walkable neighborhoods and mass transit DO help free up time because instead of spending an hour in rush hour traffic, I can spend fifteen minutes walking to and from the train station and 45 minutes on the train. Or I can just walk to the grocery store in the time it would take me to drive there and find a parking spot.
Fair enough, gym memberships won’t help people who don’t use them. Also, it’s true that you don’t need a gym membership to work out if you live in rural Colorado, or someplace nice and safe. But I, for one, wouldn’t want to go jogging around my city neighborhood after dark. Also, jogging in 36C+ weather isn’t exactly pleasent, and it can even be dangerous. Although it may seem silly, driving to a gym can solve both the safety and climate impediments to exercise.
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May 21st, 2012 at 6:07 pm
“waste lines are growing”. Was that a deliberate pun, or simply a typo?
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May 21st, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Jody said:
Okay… So you’re saying that being heavier and having a fattier BMI is not as unhealthy as it is made out to be? That might be true. But that does not change the fact that the average person in most western societies is getting fatter.
Randal L. Schwartz said:
Um… yeah… that’s it. IT was on purpose. I never misspell anything.
BTW: To make sure I keep this on topic. The point of this post is how much it drives me nuts to see these idiots claiming that people are all getting fatter because of some evil unnatural substance or irridiation, cell phones or any of that other crap.
The explanation is simple and straightforward.
Also it’s stupid to say that it happens because the body is full of toxins or needs to “detoxify” or something like that.
Eating more than the calories you burn and putting on weight when it happens is not any kind of toxic effect or the result of some kind of foreign stressor etc. It is natural, your body is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and it’s just how it works.
Your body produces energy from the substances you eat, breaking them down to fatty acids and glucose that then oxidizes in the cells. If there is more of that than is being used, it ends up going into the fatty tissues.
That’s obviously a huge over-simplification. But the point, is it’s the natural response. It has to go somewhere.
If anything, failure to gain weight could be seen as a potential sign of exposure to toxic substances. But gaining weight certainly is not.
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May 21st, 2012 at 8:01 pm
I lost 5 kg giving up fruit juice for diet soft drinks a couple of years ago – no idea what all the asparmatine or whatever is doing to me, but it wasn’t hard to swap 1 sweet drink laced with sugar for a different one without.
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May 21st, 2012 at 8:07 pm
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Yes, BMI is an awful predictor of disease. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, has a very high BMI because of his muscle mass, but he obviously isn’t obese. Waste circumference, as it turns out, is an excellent predictor of disease. So, despite whatever misconceptions you may have gleaned from these articles, being fat is still bad for you. BMI just isn’t the best way to tell whether or not you’re fat.
Honestly, you’ve got to provided at least a title if you’re going to cite an article. My suspicion is that Dr. Friedman is talking about leptin signalling and how it no longer works to control apetitte and metabolism in obese individuals. That said, diet and exercise are still undisputably the best way to prevent obesity, barring some rare metabolic disorders.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 12:52 am
Sigivald said:
Once we had sufficient understand of the human genome and more advanced genetic engineering technology we probably will end up able to fix the problem (and have a fix which actually works).
Benjamin Kay said:
Or I could drive to the train station in 5 minutes and park the car there (just because a neighbourhood is walkable doesn’t mean it will be walked). Though an hour of walking and riding a train instead of an hour in the car doesn’t really seem like saving time.
Oh and how do you propose to get >10 bags of shopping home walking?
Benjamin Kay said:
Which is basically everyone. There’s a reason why companies who buy gym memberships for every employee can get them really cheaply and that’s because basically no one uses them.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 3:15 am
Life is a series of choices; these choices give us the power to shape and mold our lives, and influence outcomes. We would all be better served if we chose to eat healthily. A healthy diet is just one part of long-term weight management! You can eat whatever you want – no one is stopping you.
Thanks
Fittodo.com Team
Dite For Weight loss
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May 22nd, 2012 at 3:38 am
Lucario said:
Only eat what you can catch (no cheating by going to the supermarket either)?! Sorry, this will not help with the hunger pangs. No pain, no gain!
Joke aside, I know that it is very difficult in urban America to put a pair of trainers on and chew some pavement for an hour 3 times a week (or a bicycle for that matter), however this is what you should strive for. If you can’t spare an hour every second day to take care of your self, you really need to consider your life choices as they are slowly killing you (work, familly etc.). This may sound harsh but it is the reality of life.
Join a sportsclub, I know they exist, play a team sport or do anything that involves some form of physical activity and socialising as this will help motivation and provide you with a new social circle, it happens to be a good way of establishing your own network as an expat in foreign lands I have found…
If this collides with other things then so be it, in the end if you are dead (or too out of shape to do anything useful) you are no use to anyone!
PS. Yes, I could do with loosing a stone or two too. DS.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 6:30 am
Here’s one supporting a genetic disposition to weight. Look up “supertaster” on Bing (or Google if you are not disgusted with it like I am). Supertasters tend to be thinner and being a supertaster is clearly linked to a gene difference. I’m a supertaster – do not ask me to eat broccoli – and I’ve maintained a steady non-fat weight most of my life. Of course 35 years as a soccer player, coach and referee might have had a hand in this too. Speaking of which: being a soccer referee is a great way to get exercise. A good referee will put in seven miles during a game. Because your mind is so occupied trying to keep 22 idiots from killing each other, you never think about all the running, jogging and walking you are doing. And you get paid to exercise! It beats a gym membership any day of the week. I have a bro who’s a basketball ref, and he stays slender also. Most of my other brothers, not so much.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 7:08 am
This lady has stopped writing for a while but her series on obesity was very interesting.
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2006/11/obesity-paradox-1.html
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May 22nd, 2012 at 7:22 am
If you live or work in a busy downtown near a train or bus stop, you are going to be able to walk to the stop faster during rush hour than you will be able to drive there. But yes, with adequate money and motivation, you can always defeat the purpose of exercise.
Aha! If you have a decent size family then owning a car is inevitable. But each of my grocery bags contains one person-day of food, I can carry four bags home walking, and I can carry eight bags home on a bicycle. If you’re single and you’re bringing more than a week’s worth of food home in one trip then maybe that’s why you’re having weight problems!
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May 22nd, 2012 at 8:07 am
Benjamin Kay said:
Traffic around here usually isn’t that bad (in the areas where traffic actually would be bad enough the train stations don’t tend to have much in the way of car parking anyway).
As for motivation, do we really any not to exercise?
Benjamin Kay said:
You could do without if you really tried, living in an apartment (with a supermarket on the ground floor) would do.
Benjamin Kay said:
Maybe not, if a person only goes to the supermarket every second week then bringing home two weeks worth of food actually makes sense.
Then there’s all the other stuff bought at supermarkets.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 8:38 am
Jody said:
If we accept this claim, then what accounts for increased rates of obesity in the first world? Does industrialization or wealth allow the obese more reproductive success? My understanding is that it is generally more difficult for the obese to get pregnant. I suppose fertility treatments could be resulting in substantially greater success in propagating obesity genes.
Is there selective pressure against obesity in the developing/third world? Lower fertility? Higher mortality? There’s nothing in that that’s implausible.
But there’s also far too much observable (admittedly anecdotal) evidence around us to accept that as the whole picture. I know several people who have gone from morbidly obese to overweight through diet and exercise. I also know athletes who have ballooned after they stopped working out. But most telling for me is to simply observe the clientele at the Golden Corral or casino buffets. Doing so allows little doubt as to the correlation between diet and obesity.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 11:09 am
Peebs said:
Agreed. I cook 90%+ of my own meals (I buy the occasional soup or have a night out with my GF), and eat for substantially less than a lot of people who are below the poverty line. Even if someone is is in a studio apt without a stove/oven, you can get:
1. A toaster oven (small, but you can even roast chicken in it)
2. A microwave
3. A hot plate
4. A chest freezer
5. A mini-fridge
for something on the order of $400, if you are frugal and hit thrift stores. By comparison with getting fast food every day, they pay for themselves in a few months.
That’s probably why I have zero sympathy for anyone who claims that they eat junk food because they’re “too poor to eat healthy”
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May 22nd, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Shafe said:
From what I’ve read, it looks like it has the most to do with the definition of “obese” being elastic enough to accommodate a huge bulk of social, moral, economic and medical changes of the last few decades it was stuffed with.
The increase in the ease of access to calories has caused changes in society. *Some* of those changes have resulted in medical problems for some people, but not all, and not even in people who outwardly look the same as a result of that same increase in available calories.
We’ve tied together a lot of cultural changes, many having nothing to do with health, with a disapprobation that doesn’t hold up, in all cases, once subjected to scientific inquiry. We’re ignoring error bars, limitations and simple ignorance, declaring certainty in all cases where it doesn’t exist.
It’s a very human thing to do, though.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Benjamin Kay said:
Outside of including it in the second-to-last paragraph of the post, I can’t do much more for you than that.
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May 22nd, 2012 at 3:35 pm
Jody,
What you’ve provided is a URL to a popular news source. The actual article is a commentary in the journal Nature titled “Modern science versus the stigma of obesity”. The author, Jeffrey M. Friedman, is the man who discovered leptin, a very important hormone that regulates appetite and energy metabolism. The discovery of leptin has furthered our understanding of obesity tremendously. It has also led to the discovery of leptin-associated genes in humans that are associated with obesity. Thus, obesity is not 100% due to “bad” behaviors of the obese person, nor are diet and exercise practical in 100% of people.
The article certainly does not dispute the claim that the prevlance of obesity is rising (“epidemic of obesity”), nor does it claim that obesity is not associated with high morbidity. In fact, Friedman agrees that obesity increases the risk of “numerous conditions that shorten life, including diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancer.” The “conventional” wisdom that obesity is harmful in general (individual exceptions may apply) is correct. The “conventional” wisdom of diet and exercise is also correct — search Pubmed or Google Scholar for the term “diet and exercise” and you will find articles describing a reduction in body weight and also in morbidity (e.g. insulin resistance) following diet and exercise. Diet and exercise are currently the best non-invasive ways to combat obesity and its associated complications, even if they don’t work for everyone. Gastric surgery is an alternative for some, and numerous weight-loss drugs are under development.
You might also be interested in an article entitled “Genetic Epidemiology of Obesity” by Yang, et al. From the article: “The rapidly increasing prevalence of obesity, in spite of an unchanged gene pool, makes it interesting to search for responsible environmental factors that increase the susceptibility for obesity at the individual level. Migration studies help support the impact of environmental factors on obesity development. For example, Japanese people who have migrated to Hawaii and California are more overweight than their relatives who remained in Japan. Perhaps the genetic background of most people is not prepared for the current abundance of food and sedentary lifestyle.”
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May 22nd, 2012 at 9:15 pm
Paul Studier said:
Mind you, the animals that get fat after contracting that virus do so because the virus is altering their mechanisms of calories in/calories out.
Calories in/calories out holds quite true as long as you factor in ALL avenues, including changes in hormonal signalling, metabolic rate, appetite, digestive efficiency, etc. I had a relative who developed Addison’s Disease, and ever afterwards struggled with obesity and diabetes. Cortisol levels can profoundly influence your body’s attitude towards the calories you eat (though sadly for the diet pill business, this isn’t that easy to manipulate externally, except in bad ways, like putting a person on high doses of cortisone).
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May 23rd, 2012 at 5:38 am
Man oh man! With all this conflicting information I’m getting regarding diet (low-carb, low-fat, low-whatever), frankly, I don’t know! What should I eat? What diet does science say is the best for a human being living in the here and now?
Also, I live in a very large urban area, somewhere in the periphery. What options might exist for me to emulate my peasant ancestors? Also, I’m on an extreme budget, so joining a sports club doesn’t look like an option.
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May 23rd, 2012 at 7:24 am
Lucario, I don’t know if you’re being silly or not. The USDA food pyramid is a good starting point on what to eat, see choosemyplate.gov. You can also look at the nutrition label on the processed foods you buy. Both sources specify how much of your total caloric input should come from carbs, fat, protein, etc. Your physician is also a good source of information. Of course, you are welcome to try your own diet.
What I’m hearing a lot of, and I’m not sure if it’s satire or not, is, “Scientists aren’t 100% certain what causes obesity, so I might as well eat whatever I want.” This is not a rational position to take. Although we don’t know everything about obesity, we are pretty sure that a high-calorie diet enriched in fat and sugar is bad for most people. Consider, for instance, the following true statements about smoking that echo the sentiments I’m hearing here:
“Lung cancer is highly heritable. Most people who smoke don’t develop lung cancer.”
“Tobacco helps treat mental illness. It’s not all bad for you.”
“Tobacco is highly addictive. It’s not entirely my fault that I smoke.”
“Cigarettes are expensive, so poverty is probably anticorrelated with smoking, right?”
“My Grandpa/some historical figure/Native Americans smoked and didn’t die of lung cancer.”
“Tobacco is a natural product.”
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May 23rd, 2012 at 7:46 am
Lucario said:
Benjamin Kay said:
I don’t know how your grocery store is laid out, but I consider it good practice (not that I’m good at following it) to aim for the corners. In my store, the far right corner is produce. Shop there. The far left corner is meat and seafood. Shop there, too. Skip everything in between (except the coffee aisle.)
Of course, if in your store those corners are the bakery and the ice cream freezers, I would consider modifying that approach.
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May 23rd, 2012 at 2:21 pm
Sure, the fact that it’s sugar is more significant, but HFCS is still bad. Sucrose and fructose-enriched monoglyceride mixture are different, and it should surprise no one that they act different. People shouldn’t drink 2liter soda bottles if they don’t want the same amount of calories as a baked potato. Getting rid of transfats and HFCS won’t make people who eat too much polyunsaturated fat and sugar into healthy people. But it will help a little.
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May 23rd, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Produce, meat, and seafood only? What about bread? What am I going to do with all these coupons I clip? My family isn’t wealthy, you know.
And I’m not being silly re: diet advice. I’m merely feeling confused. One day someone says something’s helpful; the next day someone else says nope, it’s hype. Trying to find good diet (and fitness!) advice can oftentimes be like walking through a minefield! And I’m not sure I can follow the food pyramid without busting busting the bank. Therein lies the problem.
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May 23rd, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Yes, there is a lot of confusing diet hype out there. Try limiting yourself to reputable sources based on evidence and you will find things much less confusing.
What kind of budgetary constraints are we talking about here? A good chunk of your diet should be coming from grains (e.g. pasta, bread) which are quite cheap. Some fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive (e.g. artichoke, asparagus, strawberries, grapes), but plenty is not (e.g. mushrooms, lettuce, frozen brocolli, peas, pears, grapefruit, navel oranges, raisins) — buy smart. Lean protein can come from fish or poultry (which are typically less expensive than beef and ham anyway), but it can also come from eggs and dairy if you are on a tight budget. See:
http://www.choosemyplate.gov/healthy-eating-on-budget.html
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May 23rd, 2012 at 3:43 pm
tom said:
Do you have a citation for that? As I understand it, HFCS is actually generally either slightly less fructose than sucrose or slightly more, depending on the specific HFCS formulation used. Natural corn syrup is very low in fructose, so HFCS is really only high fructose by comparison to ordinary corn syrup (which is less sweet due to the lack of fructose).
Fructose and glucose do act differently, but that’s not to say that one is better than the other. Pure glucose goes pretty much straight to the bloodstream. So it isn’t going to make you immediately fat, but it will put a strain on your pancreas if you’re overindulging in it. Fructose, however, gets used to make fat. As I understand it, that is; I’m not an expert.
In the end, I don’t think HFCS is “bad” any more than anything else. There are very few foods which you can eliminate from your diet to get a magical effect, because you’ll just fill the gap with something else. It takes a mindset shift. I found the easiest place to start was portion control (in particular, consciously saving half of my meal for later when going out to restaurants), and deliberately planning a couple of small snacks during the day so I didn’t get desperate and break my self-control. It’s in a work in progress, but I have already gotten used to eating less.
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May 25th, 2012 at 5:15 am
Dr. Buzzo –
I think you meant “waistlines”, and not “waste lines”.
I wonder if there are any spell-checkers that include a homonym-detector.
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May 25th, 2012 at 9:09 am
tom said:
Pepsi makes something called “Pepsi throwback” which is made from cane sugar. If you drink a two liter bottle of that stuff every day you are going to be packing on a lot of extra carbohydrates and a lot of extra calories. I don’t see how it’s any better than HFCS.
It seems to me that the idea that HFCS was worse came out before any evidence and the evidence that has since been found is pretty weak at best.
AS I understand it, the process of digestion of sucrose will immediately break it down to fructose and glucose at a 50/50 ratio. HFCS is fructose and glucose at varying ratios but usually something like 55/45. I highly doubt that that small difference is going to account for much, especially compared to the amount you eat. The one thign I have read is that for the same relative sweetness, HFCS actually has slightly LESS calories, but not by much.
BTW: I could also stand to lose a few pounds. I would not call myself fat, but I’m definitely above what would be considered the medically optimal weight.
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June 28th, 2012 at 6:30 am
Lucario said:
Bread is acceptable, but if at all possible, go for whole grain and/or seeded loaves, white bread is a mess of chemical additives and sugars.
Trying to eat like a peasant is a daft idea, the world isn’t like that any more and medieval peasant living isn’t really the clean, disease-free place it seems to be in most TV shows and films. There’s good evidence that large percentages of peasant farmers were perpetually under-nourished.
Your basic food priorities (and I’m simplifying a lot) go like this :
1) Vegetables. King is always the fresh stuff, frozen comes next, tinned/canned comes a poor third. Next time you do your food shopping, take a notepad with you, don’t be afraid to check the price per weight of the same veg in each category and shop where you get most mass for your buck.
2) Protein. Fresh fish is good frozen fish is okay too. You can do pretty well from beans and pulses as well which are usually sold dried or tinned. Tinned are easier to use but dried are probably a bit better for you if you have the patience. Note that they’ll both store for a few years without too much trouble. This incidentally is where the peasant living comes in – meat was a rare treat back in the day.
3) Fruit. Why so far down? Sugars mainly. Don’t get me wrong, fruit rather than a Mars bar is always going to be a good thing, but celery will fill a hole with almost zero calorie intake. If you have a sweet tooth though, fruit is going to make it much easier to bear than trying to go cold turkey on the sweetness front.
4) Meat. Technically it’s mainly about the protein, but I thought it needed its own paragraph anyway. Meat is usually priced by the cut – certain types are more expensive than others, usually based on texture. You can eat well off cheap cuts of meat, it usually means slow cooking, big stews and that sort of thing which can give you a meal to feed six for less than steak for two might cost.
5) Carbs. At best filler, at worst fast sugars, carbohydrates are the work of the devil. No, just kidding, but it’s really easy to eat more than you need. Basic staples like rice, potatoes and pasta are pretty cheap and so family meals often include way more than are needed (especially when my mother is involved) and they don’t even taste that good. Drop the fries from your Maccy D’s order, ditch the mashed potatoes and cut down on the rest where possible. If you must eat pasta, go for wholewheat stuff (best with strongly flavoured sauces like bolognese, crap with milder stuff) likewise if you must eat rice eat brown rice.
6) Fats. You need some, the right ones in the right quantity, but as long as you aren’t going full vegan you’ll always have some in your diet. Just think carefully. As a *very* rough tip, fats in meat and fish aren’t a major problem, fats in cooking are. Stop eating cheese.
Most of this has come from my own dubious experiences as a student living on very little money. In some respects it’s easier to cook for a family than for one, as fresh produce will be eaten quickly rather than perishing.
TL;DR?
A) Stick to basic ingredients and build your meals yourself.
B) Do not eat like a peasant, but would a peasant recognise the food you’re buying?
C) Reduce your portion size – easiest way to eat what you want for less and cut calories.
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June 28th, 2012 at 10:07 am
What exactly are you shooting for, though?
I eat what I consider a “reasonable” diet. I eat sweets and fatty foods, but not too often. I eat meat regularly and I eat fast food only on rare occasions, less than once a week. I get some exercise.
The result is that I’m in reasonably good shape. I might be a bit over what I could be, but only by a few pounds. I’m not fat. I’m in good shape but not great shape.
To me this is a reasonable compromise between convenience, money, time and health.
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July 1st, 2012 at 7:49 am
Shafe said:
I’l add a few tips to this method:
1. Plan ahead. make a shopping list. avoid all impulse buying of food.
2. Eat before going to the store. you are less tempted to buy snacks and junkfood items if your belly is already full.
3. go for the harder to digest foods. it’s not all about the caloric value. digesting costs energy too, and the harder to digest the food is, the more energy is expended digesting it. excersize those intestines.
4. go to the foodstore regularly. don’t stock up on a weeks worth of food. when you have lots of food in the pantry the temptation to eat more than you need becomes greater.
5. finally: take any and all chance to get a tiny bit of excersize in. like taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever you are out shopping at the supermarket. park in the far corner of the parking lot etc.
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July 6th, 2012 at 11:12 pm
Read Gary Taubes’ exhaustively researched “Why We Get Fat” (and if you want all of the details, the predecessor “Good Calories, Bad Calories”). Short summary:
(1) Obesity is almost always caused by a hormonal imbalance that causes too much of the incoming food to be stored as fat, and at the same time, makes it more difficult for the body to use the stored fat for fuel;
(2) This induces semi-starvation at the cellular level, since the incoming food is disproportionately being grabbed by the fat tissue and “locked away”;
(3) This induces increased hunger, which results in more food (aka calorie) intake; this can be a relatively small amount (as little as a few tens of calories a day) that accumulates over months and years;
(4) This also induces the body to expend less energy, making more nutrients available to feed the body at the cellular level;
(5) Excess fat (and weight) continues to accumulate until a new hormonal balance is established, and a weight equilibrium is established; this is why many obese people consume no more calories than lean people, and find it so difficult to lose weight even on semi-starvation diets.
The key hormone that gets imbalanced is insulin, and the primary cause of its imbalance is the consumption of refined / simple carbohydrates such as white flour, polished rice, potatoes, table sugar (sucrose, which is half glucose and half fructose), and high fructose corn syrup (fructose is particularly problematic; see the book for details).
The solution is to dramatically reduce (i.e., effectively eliminate) these foods from the diet, and eat leafy green vegetables, meat, eggs, cheese, etc. Dietary fat from animal and dairy sources does not significantly contribute to either obesity or heart disease. See the book, especially GCBC, for all the details (including all of the research citations). Evidence strongly suggests that this kind of diet is substantially easier to follow than the typical 1200 cal/day diet (containing 50%+ calories from carbs) that is the current-day (but not historically) most recommended reducing diet.
The USDA food pyramid is one of the biggest disasters the government has EVER foisted on us, and IMHO led directly to the obesity epidemic we have today. So is the notion that we must have a certain amount of carbohydrates in our diet; there is NO SUCH THING as an essential carbohydrate. Humans can live well and be perfectly healthy on animal protein and fat (animal and plant) alone.
Read the book(s)!!!
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August 6th, 2012 at 4:10 pm
Lucario, some foods are definitely more filling than others and anything that slows down eating and allows more time for satiety to kick in is helpful.
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October 30th, 2012 at 9:12 pm
I once read an article that suggested the one major factor is that folk in the US have, in general, more efficient gut bacteria. Seems that US gut bacteria can get something like 35% more fat out of the food eaten than Eastern European gut bacteria generally can. Haven’t read anything about it since.
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February 12th, 2013 at 10:17 am
My understanding is that HFCS does contribute to overeating behaviors because unlike sucrose, HFCS does not allow the body to send signals that the individual is ‘full’ or has eaten enough. I can reference various reports citing this if needed but I’m sure if you do a search on the topic you will come across this plausible theory.
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