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.
In: Diet, Insulin, Obesity, Sugar
I Am Therefore I Think!
The title comes from John Galt, the character of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged. He declared that “man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is the only means to gain it.
Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by the mind.”
When it comes to health, too many people spend time waiting for some pie-in-the-sky answer, usually something outside of reality. As late as 1994, the World Health Organization announced that the chronic diseases of civilization are preventable and that some aspect of diet or lifestyle must be the culprit. After the announcement, people did indeed get serious about changing their lifestyle, but the changes have not gone far enough. They listened to the “experts” but they did not consider the reasoning of these so-called experts.
It appears that people are afraid to go any further than the initial thrust. If you ask about a healthy diet today, you’re told to focus on the vegetable kingdom and that your salvation basically rests with them. If it’s not that, it’s enjoy the foods you love, but in moderation. The only change in that scenario is that you eat less of the things that made you sick to begin with. Kind of like telling a drug addict to just take smaller amounts of the drug of choice. Doesn’t work very well….
So as I’m browsing the headlines this morning, I spot an article that says if you want to avoid cancer, then you should have a college degree. Apparently, those with more education tend to die from cancer less frequently than their less educated brethren. That’s not to say that a college education directly saves you, but the pattern can’t be denied.
In order to make a real change in diet and lifestyle, it requires reason. It’s not enough to just take the expert recommendations and call it a day because the experts do not have a clue as to how to cure or really prevent any chronic disease. They just provide the same advice: eat less and move more for the rest of your life, which doesn’t guarantee anything. In fact, what they are telling you is the results that a healthy person achieves with their lifestyle. This does not tell you how they achieved it. It may be true in some cases that healthy people move more and that they eat less, but that doesn’t tell you why they do so.
The initial thought would be, well, they move a lot and eat a little in order to be healthy. But we don’t consider the possibility that perhaps they move more and eat less simply because they are healthy. By deduction, it’s clear that one of two things is happening. One person eats more than another person which accounts for the size differential. The alternative is that one eats foods and converts that food to energy far more successfully than another person who stores the food instead.
In the former scenario, the question is why does one person eat more and move less than another. In the latter, the question is why do some people store what others easily burn. One question is subjective and the other is objective. Proper reasoning demands objectivity.
We’re not going to find many studies directly on point in these issues as it would be immoral to administer a diet that someone believes to be patently unhealthy on a test group. That’s the problem. Because we can’t even try the all-meat diet, we cn’t see how beneficial it would be.
But some researchers give it a shot in other ways. In this study, researchers found a dramatic link between high-carb diets and the growth and spread of cancerous tumors in mice.
Dr. Gerry Krystal and his team fed one group of mice a typical Western diet, and another group of mice a high-protein, low-carb diet.
“On the Western diet, half of the mice had tumours by middle age. On the low-carb diet, none of the mice had the tumours.”
Dr. Krystal said the mice used in the experiment were genetically predisposed to breast cancer, and had a normal life expectancy of two years. About 70 per cent of the mice on the Western diet developed cancer by the time they died, compared with 30 per cent of those on the low-carb diet.
“Only one of the mice on the Western diet reached a normal lifespan, and half of the other mice reached or exceeded the expected lifespan.”
The mice on the Western diet ate 55-per-cent carbs, 23-percent protein, and 22-per-cent fat. Mice on the low-carb, high-protein diet ate 15-percent carbs, 25-per-cent fat and 60-per-cent protein.
Interestingly, said Krystal, “we kept the diets the same number of calories, the mice on the Western diet gained a lot of weight.”
“It’s possible that by simply changing our diet to a low-carb, low-fat, high protein diet, we can starve the cancer by eliminating the glucose the tumours need to grow,”
Now, the person who refuses to think for himself and would rather rely on mystics or some other “experts” would just chalk this up to only applicable to rats and continue eating bagels and baguettes. But Dr. Krystal made significant changes in his own diet after seeing his results in the laboratory. That is a reasonable decision. Rather than rely on the opinions of others, he decided to put the science to work in his life and give it a trial. If his health improved, then he knows he’s found something. If his health would deteriorate, then he would know that he’s done something improper. Either way, the best choice was to rely on his power to reason and listen to his own body.
So I’m giving you another chance. Here’s another result that tells us that as human societies adopted agriculture, their people became shorter and less healthy, according to a new review of studies focused on the health impacts of early farming. Societies around the world—in Britain and Bahrain, Thailand and Tennessee—experienced this trend regardless of when they started farming or what stapled crops they farmed, the researchers found.
This finding runs contrary to the idea that a stable source of food makes people grow bigger and healthier. The data suggest, in fact, that poor nutrition, increased disease, and other problems that plagued early farming peoples more than their hunter-gatherer predecessors outweighed any benefits from stability.
If you’ve never heard news like this before, then you might think this is some new revelation. However, if you’ve ever researched a nutrition transition where a population went from their native diet and adopted a Western diet, the same trend occurs. The diseases come upon the new population with staggering suddenness and the great health experienced for centuries is compromised in just a a generation.
While we tend to think that growing our food rather than foraging for it must be a good thing, “humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture,” anthropologist George Armelagos, one of the researchers, said in a prepared statement.
They were eating predominantly meat or fish prior to the nutrition transition and once they began to incorporate (or even trade in many instances) vegetation for animal products, things only got worse.
Living in agriculture-based communities likely made infectious diseases more of a problem, as well, the scientists say. Higher population density, disease-carrying domesticated animals, and less-than-ideal sanitation systems all would have helped diseases spread.
This effect was seen over thousands of years, starting at the dawn of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. In more recent times, however, height and health have been increasing, especially in 75 years or so since mechanized agriculture began to spread.
This is largely due to our ability to treat the symptoms of disease. We’ve done a very good job with treatment, but we continue to lack the ability to prevent or cure these diseases. People are aging much faster and they can look forward to chronic disease in later years, which isn’t so “later” anymore.
Now the reasoning person would say, I need to avoid agriculture and its products and focus on eating meat. If my health improves, then I should go with it. If it doesn’t, then I should continue as I always have.
That is the challenge to the thinking person. Because we exist, it is imperative that we think. That is the thing that separates us from the lower animals, our ability and capacity to reason and deduce to further our self-interests. Unfortunately, we also have the power to destroy ourselves by choosing not to reason. Today, the choice is up to you!
In: Anthropology, Cancer, Diet, Disease, Obesity, Populations
Calories Again
I’m always baffled by the number of intelligent people who take nonsense and rely on it as fact. In this case, we’re talking about the ubiquitous calorie. A recent Men’s Health article attempted to educate the public on this subject. They noted how calorie-counts are showing up everywhere, on menus, food packaging, treadmills, sports watches, etc.
Best of all, they told us what a calorie is: “A calorie is simply a unit of measurement for heat; in the early 19th century, it was used to explain the theory of heat conservation and steam engines. The term entered the food world around 1890, when the USDA appropriated it for a report on nutrition. Specifically, a calorie was defined as the unit of heat required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.”
They also told us what a calorie is not: “Your body isn’t a steam engine. Instead of heat, it runs on chemical energy, fueled by the oxidation of carbohydrates, fat, and protein that occurs in your cells’ mitochondria. ‘You could say mitochondria are like small power plants,’ says Maciej Buchowski, Ph.D., a research professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University medical center. ‘Instead of one central plant, you have several billion, so it’s more efficient.’”
They rightfully point out that calories are not all created equal. They recognize that our bodies do different things with the various nutrients we consume. The notion that a “calorie is just a calorie” is patently false and very misleading. The simple fact is that body weight is not regulated by how much we eat or don’t eat; rather, it’s regulated by what our body does with the various nutrients we consume.
Carbohydrate calories primarily go to fat tissue. Indeed, they must be converted to fat in the form of triglycerides before they can be used by the body. In fact, they require conversion just to pass through the body via the bloodstream.
The article also says some very good things about absorption: “Just because the food is swallowed doesn’t mean it will be digested. It passes through your stomach and then reaches your small intestine, which slurps up all the nutrients it can through its spongy walls. But 5 to 10 percent of calories slide through unabsorbed. Fat digestion is relatively efficient—fat easily enters your intestinal walls. As for protein, animal sources are more digestible than plant sources, so a top sirloin’s protein will be better absorbed than tofu’s.”
This is extremely important to understand and it’s non-controversial. By that, I mean you’re not going to find any doctors who will argue with that. People always look at these nutrition labels touting the fact that Vegetable A has certain nutrients in it. But when you approach the situation from an absorption standpoint, it’s very clear that our bodies do not absorb these nutrients readily. The human body absorbs the nutrients in meat almost completely whereas with precious fruits and vegetables, in many cases we absorb nothing. For the tomato, for example, the nutrients there are fat soluable. That means, if one does not consume the tomato with fat, they would not absorb any nutrients from the tomato. Not only that, but one would have to consume a very large amount to equal what we get readily from a small amount of animal products.
Different carbs are processed at different rates, too: Glucose and starch are rapidly absorbed, while fiber dawdles in the digestive tract. In fact, the insoluble fiber in some complex carbs, such as that in vegetables and whole grains, tends to block the absorption of other calories. “With a very high-fiber diet, say 60 grams a day, you might lose as much as 20 percent of the calories you consume,” says Wanda Howell, Ph.D., a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Arizona.
Facts such as this are what prompted Dr. Theodore van Itallie to testify at the 1972 McGovern hearings on nutrition, that “carbohydrates cause our bodies to lose nutrients.” Based on this, they recommended that Americans take a multivitamin despite having no idea what our bodies do with these multivitamins. They’ve since rescinded this advice, but not everyone knows that the recommendation is no longer valid.
As long as we’re talking about absorption and digestion, let’s look at another statement made by our article: “A lab technician might find that a piece of rock candy and a piece of broccoli have the same number of calories. But in action, the broccoli’s fiber ensures that the vegetable contributes less energy. A study in the Journal of Nutrition found that a high-fiber diet leaves roughly twice as many calories undigested as a low-fiber diet does. And fewer calories means less flab. ”
This is where the anamoly is revealed and the calorie myth exposed. The article just spent all this time telling you how our bodies do different things with the various calories we conume. But then, we’re left with this information that fiber remains undigested in our colon. They want to blame red meat for colon cancer, but it seems to me that if you’re walking around with undigested food rotting in your colon, wouldn’t the source of colon cancer be more likely to emerge from this situation? Seriously?
When a food item is loaded with fiber, that means we’re converting less energy from the food as well as absorbing far less of the nutrients. Indeed, the nutrients in vegetables are extremely limited as it is. When you calculate the effect of fiber, it’s easy to see how a diet of exclusive vegetatation could easily result in malnutrition. Yet, many vegetarians are overweight and obese.
How could this be? It’s very easy to understand when you know what the body does with the various nutrients it consumes. Obese doesn’t mean healthy. We like to refer to overweight people as “hearty” even though we associate excees fat with unhealthy. We think this in terms of heart disease or some other thing. But we have this thought that the person with a large stomach has many nutrients in their body at their disposal. We don’t seem to realize that the person who is obese is also malnourished. The weight gain is a result of malnutrition not too much nutrition.
Vegetables and grains are just longer chain sugars and not much different than processed junk food. We absorb very little from them and the majority is converted to fat. Sugars raise insulin which causes the nutrients from these carbohydrates to be locked away in fat tissue unavailable to the rest of the body. If they body could access all of the energy contained in fat tissue, it would. Instead, it only gets a percentage of what is available and this is the reason for obesity.
I don’t have to mention the exercise shortfall that the article mentions because I’ve written about that many times. “Even the most fanatical fitness nuts burn no more than 30 percent of their daily calories at the gym.”
Instead of focusing on the calories contained in foods, we need to be much more concerned with the content of that food we consume. And more importantly, what exactly our bodies do with the food we consume. When you approach it that way, then it’s easy to see why the all-meat diet is the hands-down winner!
