2012 – Looking Forward
I’m still here! I know, I haven’t been in the mood to blog for much of 2011 and I can’t guarantee that I’ll be much more active in 2012, but I will post when I find something interesting to write about.
For those of you interested in ZC and athletics, you can check my results for the end of 2011 and you’ll see that I ran a personal record in both the 10k and the half marathon. I ran 1:32:05 in Las Vegas on the Strip at Night. I had a lot of fun during this race and I surprised myself with how easy it was to run so fast. My training went very well and I was up to 60 miles per week for a number of weeks preceeding this race. It’s quite clear what I’ll need to do in order to replicate these results in 2012.
Right now, I am leaning towards avenging my poor performance in Dallas this year in March. I’m sure I’ll repeat most of my schedule from last year, but there may be some changes. When I know, I’ll post a schedule.
Have a great 2012!
Returning Vegans
I read a very interesting piece in Time magazine regarding the return to meat-eating by former vegetarians. CBS News performed a study claiming that ex-vegetarians outnumber current ones by a 3 to 1 margin. I found that quite surprising. Not that I’ve ever looked into it all that much, but I was still suprised to see such a high number. I’m not surprised in the sense that I believe vegetarianism is harmful to the majority of us, and the statistic only bears out the truth.
As the article relates, a survey by Hal Herzog and Morgan Childers found that these born-again omnivores were mostly women (as many vegetarians are) an average age of 28 years old and had been vegetarians for nine years when they reverted. The majority went vegetarian due to concerns about the treatment of animals and returned to meat because of declining health (“I will take a dead cow over anemia any time,” one man told Psychology Today), logistical hassles, social stigmas, and meat cravings. Only two of the seventy-seven former vegetarians surveyed resumed meat-eating because their moral views changed.
I would expect people to continue to be hung up on the perceived ethical issue of factory farming and the like. But the thing that I keep going back to is that our bodies are clearly designed for meat-eating. I feel for the animals under some of these conditions but at the same time, factory farmings allow a far greater number of people to access meat than they would otherwise. That is a plus for humanity. Not only that, but agriculture is the reason for factory farming to begin with. Using precious grazing land for soybeans and corn spawns factory farming. The animals don’t get to return to the land until after agriculture has ruined it and made it completely unusable for any purpose except a skyscraper or a shopping mall.
Vegetarians typically miss the damage that their precious vegetables do to the environment. No one cries over the complete ecosystems that are destroyed or our precious top soil which is what made the land fertile to begin with. When the crops are finished, they leave the ground fallow and destroyed with no living creatures remaining. They spread pesticides that contaminate ground water and kill off all sorts of small creatures in order to protect their crops. So much for the theory of nothing having to die for them to eat. And the declining health that the majority of vegetarians experience is evidence of their own slow death. Vegetarianism certainly does not protect anyone against cancer or any other disease of civilization.
And despite these facts and statistics, the so-called experts will continue to recommend mostly vegetarian diets to the public and diets high in carbohydrates as the answer to the obesity problem. Cognitive dissonance at its finest!
Getting Fatter
The news on weight only gets worse. The excuses and recommendations remain the same — completely ineffectual. The doctors believe that no one is listening to them. They think it’s a simple matter of eating less and exercising more. The fact is that in 1995, there was not a single state with an obesity rate above 20 percent. Now, every state has a rate higher than 20 percent except Colorado who managed to stay under the magic number. However, the experts say that even though Colorado’s number is the best, it’s still unacceptably high because it still means 1 in 5 is obese.
This report could actually be made meaningful if someone would bother to tell us sugar consumption for the different states.
I’m willing to bet a substantial sum of money that Colorado happens to consume less sugar per capita than any other state in the Union at this present time. We all eat a carbohydrate-heavy diet but the experts continue to blame fried foods and fat. Forget the fact that the fats they mention are always carbohydrate foods like french fries, but because they used the “fat” word, red meat is thought to be the automatic villain in particular.
Mississippi is the fattest state in the union with an adult obesity rate of 34.4 percent. Colorado is the least obese — with a rate of 19.8 percent — and the only state with an adult obesity rate below 20 percent, according to “F as in Fat,” an annual report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The American South is the home and province of “sweet tea” so loaded with sugar that it’s almost too sweet. Copious amounts of ice cubes help, but it still goes down. The top nine states are all Southern States if you look at the list of obese states. They think the problem is related to the pig-pickin’s and the like, but I’ve been to a few of those and I can tell you that it’s not the pig doing the damage. It’s the side items, pies and drinks that are responsible. I never gained a pound eating at these events.
The upward obesity trend does seem to be leveling off, but the level is still unacceptably high. There are a few doctors out there actually giving good advice urging people to cut back severely on the sugary drinks and junk food, but until people get an understanding of blood sugar and insulin’s regulation of fat tissue, the primary problem will remain. Jumping up and down regarding whether insulin is the sole cause of obesity gets us nowhere. Sure, there are some who have obesity due to compensation for something else going wrong with their metabolism such as a related illness, but for the majority of people, we’re talking about simple sugar consumption.
If we can cut the consumption in half, I think we’d find our health improving in huge increments and the obesity trend would reverse itself. It wouldn’t reverse all of it, but it would make a more than significant difference.
Now, some of you reading this will say to yourselves, well, I can’t just eat meat. What you’re really saying is that you “won’t” eat just meat because the sugar addiction has you safe in its clutches. But you should know that unless and until you get a handle on the situation, it will never improve no matter how much time you spend at the gym.
In: Diabetes, Diet, Heart Disease, Hypertension, Insulin, Obesity, Populations, Sugar
Prejudiced Doctors
I’ve always maintained that the biggest problem with the modern medical community is their overconfidence. On the one hand, they’ve become very good at keeping us alive and applying band-aids to chronic disease.
Their biggest shortcoming is that they can’t cure practically anything. Some of it is their fault but most of it is the fault of the patients. They simply don’t know what to do in order to reverse chronic disease. In the rare event that they are able to reverse the symptoms, they invariably return especially if the patient does not make serious changes to their diet and lifestyle. In many cases, the patient follows the instructions to a tee but despite that, the disease returns. The doctor is left to wonder whether the recommendation was faulty or the patient non-compliant.
Understand first and foremost that so-called chronic diseases are symptoms of the same malady which is metabolic syndrome. This Syndrome X is caused by our reliance on refined and easily digestible carbohydrates; namely, sugar, white flour, white rice, etc. We know that these symptoms are preventable because the World Health Organization has told us so many times. However, we, and our doctors, don’t know what the prevention is. Sure, we blame fat and red meat, but those who eat fat and red meat exclusively don’t suffer from metabolic syndrome in that they either reverse it or don’t get it at all, so obviously someone is wrong.
To add to that mix, several studies have now shown that doctors tend to stereotype their patients. When patients are obese, they often don’t look much beyond that to any other problem that the patient may have.
The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University reports that this prejudice is deeply rooted among health care providers. In landmark 2003 research from the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, more than half of the 620 primary-care doctors surveyed characterized their obese patients as “awkward,” “unattractive,” “ugly,” and “noncompliant”—the latter meaning that they wouldn’t follow recommendations. More than one-third of the physicians regarded obese individuals as “weak willed,” “sloppy,” and “lazy.”
I am aware that this is very common in the larger society but one would expect better from healthcare professionals only if they understood what it is that they were dealing with. As long as we think obesity is a simple matter of eating more than we should and exercising less, this problem will only continue. I would imagine that a fat healthcare professional would also get intense scrutiny from their thin, self-righteous peers. After all, if this kind of thing is happening with patients, it’s not hard to connect the dots.
The fact is that most everyone has a problem with metabolic syndrome. Those who do understand the problem are reluctant to tell people how to fix it. The fix is just too severe they say, which is having people stop consuming carbohydrates. More and more people are beginning to target sugary drinks which account for the majority of sugar in the American diet, but that doesn’t go far enough. You almost need a sugary drink after eating animal fodder and bagels all day. Have you ever tried to eat a bagel without a drink nearby? Just awful.
According to Prevention Magazine, it’s women who bear the brunt of this characterization — even when they’re not obese. Doctors’ weight prejudices start when a female patient is as little as 13 pounds overweight —meaning her body mass index would likely be around 27 — found a 2007 study from Yale University. (BMI is a measurement that uses a ratio of height to weight to categorize people as being of normal weight [18.5 to 24.9], overweight [25 to 29.9], or obese [30+].)
“For men, the bias doesn’t kick in until around a BMI of thirty-five, approximately seventy-five pounds overweight,” says Rebecca Puhl, PhD, director of Research and Weight Initiatives at the Rudd Center. “That’s a definite gender difference.”
When doctors take courses that emphasize “uncontrollable” causes of obesity, such as genetics or certain medications, their weight bias diminishes. Although medical school curricula are expanding, most physicians who are practicing today received little training on weight issues.
Very few seem to learn about metabolic syndrome and all the attendant research that accompanies it. They associate the entire line of science with Dr. Atkins and they ignore it, which only hurts the rest of us. There is also the problem of specialization. Because doctors specialize on primarily one area, they simply don’t have the time or inclination to read other journals of related fields. Metabolic syndrome encompasses several disciplines that are currently pursued separately.
“I hear so many stories of doctors making assumptions about patients’ health and lifestyles based on their appearance,” says Arya Sharma, MD, PhD, chair of obesity research and management at the University of Alberta. “One of the key factors underlying this stereotyping is the notion that nobody would be obese if they were eating healthy and exercising,” Dr. Sharma says. “But for every obese person I see who doesn’t exercise two hours a day or who’s drinking gallons of soda pop, I’ll treat ten thin people doing exactly the same thing.”
For some reason, the ten thin people don’t react to the gallons of soda pop the same way that obese individuals do. The alternative hypothesis (as named by Gary Taubes in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories) explains this rather easily. If you ask any person who was thin when they were small and now they are carrying extra pounds, you’re very likely to find that they didn’t change anything about their diets. They might say that they quit exercising because that’s what they’ve been programmed to say, but looking back, there was no conscious change on their part. Yet, they are still perceived as fat and lazy even though they have no clue as to why they are in the predicament that find themselves.
And the thin have no reason to be self-righteous because they don’t have an ability to control their sweet tooth any more than the obese, even though they tend to imagine that they can. For them, the proof is in the result. If one got fat and another didn’t, then it seems one ate just enough and the other ate too much. Never enters their mind to consider the possibility that they ate similarly but one metabolism absorbed it and the other simply compensated for it in a harmful way.
Many vegetarians get fat, diabetic, and have heart disease. Most people can’t fathom such a scenario but it does indeed happen and it’s not hardly uncommon. The assumption is that this person must have been sneaking others foods on the side.
Is it any wonder Gary Taubes opined that “nutrition is a science that works more like a religion”?
In: Diet, Disease, Obesity, Sugar, Uncategorized
Excess Pounds
I saw two very interesting articles regarding possible causes for excess pounds. It’s universally recognized that weight gain for adults happens over a period of years. It’s a steady weight gain that people have a very hard time controlling.
A team at Harvard recently looked at data on 120,877 U.S. women and men from three large studies of health professionals that tracked changes in lifestyle factors and weight every four years over a 20-year period. All study participants were normal weight and healthy when they started. Over time, they gained an average of 3.35 pounds during each 4-year period for a total average weight gain of 16.8 pounds at the end of the 20-year study.
They identified watching TV, eating potato chips, having a sugary soda at lunch or staying up too late at night, as the main culprits for the weight gain.
I have no problem with the notion of potato chips and sugary drinks being a problem because they fit with the science. The items affect insulin levels and send blood sugar soaring and falling which would cause an effect, not only on weight regulation, but on energy and sleeping activity. It’s pretty clear to me that people with unstable blood sugar will lack energy to exercise, thus the couch and the television. The couch does not take away the exercise. Rather, the diet brings on the couch which takes away the exercise. By the same token, exercise will not get a person off the couch without a corresponding change in diet.
I’ve seen a study involving rats where they were injected with insulin during their sleep. After receiving the insulin, the rats woke up ravenous and fed. A similar effect can be found in humans with insulin resistance and fruits and vegetable eaters who graze every two hours. This is nothing but poor blood sugar control.
Of course, the researchers will point to what they feel is a healthy diet of fruits, vegetables and nuts but what they don’t understand is that while these items are fairly harmless, they impact blood sugar just enough that it makes a person crave sweets. Vegetables and fruits are nature’s gateway drugs that lead to more and more sugar. As I’ve written many times, any diet that does not control cravings and hunger is not a proper diet. Everyone knows the feeling that a salad can bring on. You can eat a ton of it, but within a few minutes, you’re ready to eat again. That’s why it’s usually served as an appetizer.
It’s not uncommon for people to want to put something in their mouths every two hours. Before carbohydrates, this would have been unthinkable. It takes far too long to hunt and prepare and animal so eating every two hours would have been impractical. With an all meat diet, we typically go at least 6 hours before thinking of eating again. If we need to wait longer, it’s not a problem to do so.
The researchers also pointed out processed and unprocessed meats as being a culprit for slow weight gain, but again, none of the people in the study were eating an all-meat diet and I can assure you that if they were, we would not have seen this weight gain over time.
The good thing is that the researchers said their study contradicts the notion of “moderation” so prevalent in our society. They recognized that a calorie is not just a calorie and our bodies do different things with the foods we eat. I advocate the all-meat diet because my body benefits the most from meat and I need nothing else.
Along those lines, comes another headline featuring Walter Willett, of the prestigious Harvard School of Public Health. When asked what was the biggest problem in the American diet, he answered,
“Sugary beverages — sodas, sports drinks — were among the top contributors to weight gain. They are a special problem because so many people consume multiple servings of sugary beverages on every day. That makes them the number one problem related to weight gain.”
It can be difficult to eat as many grams of sugar in prepared foods as one can easily consume with sugary drinks. They go down easily and go immediately into the bloodstream sending blood sugar out of control. The pancreas works overtime to produce enough insulin which facilitates fat storage.
Dr. Willett recognizes that what we put in the workplace and in our overall environment has a great effect on our health and I agree. Where I work, it’s not uncommon for there to always be sweets lying about. Someone brings in pastrys or bagels. There is always some retirement or special observance that always includes sweets and other junk foods. Carbohydrates travel well and easily so it’s very easy to consume well over the recommended 70 grams of carbs that is shown to be healthy for the uncompromised human being.
But just as in the other study, the important thing is the recognition finally, that what we eat is more important than how much. Some foods will be completely stored as fat while other foods will be used for energy quicker and only partially stored. This is what leads to the small weight gain over a period of time that seems to affect practically everyone. And for those whom it doesn’t, they are in line for some other disease of civilization as evidenced by the rising statistics.
