Just because you say “physiology” in a sentence doesn’t mean you’re not ignoring it. Potato. See I’m ignoring potatos even though I wrote the word.
“Mentality”, “choice”. Let me ask, do you think it is possible for me to give you a drug that forces you to do something? Or do you always have a choice?
I know more about it than you do. That did not happen as a result of ignorance. It happened as a result of living with someone that studied health sciences for 8 years (and further) and being a “health nut”.
Sure and there are many “drugs” in the body and brain. Show me proof that one renders, let’s say, 1/3 of the U.S. population helpless to obesity. Until then I’m selling futures on bridges in Peru.
There are many factors that go into how people make decisions about the foods they eat. Some of my observations are:
I would fault the government for:
With that said, i think the agricultural revolution, i.e. the mass production of wheat-based and sugar-based products, plus fatty protein products are the leading contributors to obesity and unhealthiness in america. I don’t know of any evidence that would say the government played a role in introducing wheat/sugar/dairy/fatty protein into the average diet but today the gov’t exacerbates all of the problems and make the solutions harder to come by.
In a free market, it would be an individual’s choice to eat bread/pasta/sugar/fatty protein vs. eat the paleo diet. And while bread/pasta/sugar/fatty protein have only negative health consequences, they are easier to eat, they are far less perishable, and a strong case could be made that it allowed individuals to spend less time on preparing and eating food, thus allowing them to have more time to work on other things, thus allowing them to further specialize in other skills, and thus raising standards of living. It almost certainly will decrease the length of an individual’s life and lead to health problems down the road, but that doesn’t change the fact that it can allow you to life a lifestyle for some amount of time where you have more time to focus on other things besides eating.
So who is to say that individuals should not be making this trade-off however they please? The issue IMO is that because knowledge of the paleo diet is so rare, i don’t think individuals are actually making this decision in the way i described above. Most are eating bread/pasta/sugar/fatty protein and still believing they are healthy. And the government is severely slowing down the process of individuals realizing that the paleo diet is the true healthy diet, and is impeding them from making rational choices between the trade-offs of one diet vs. another.
There is more to it that what sibean (or w/e his name is) says. BUt HE is RIGHT and that is what matters hahaha
Could have fooled me. Nothing you said has demonstrated any knowledge. Take your appeal to authority elsewhere.
But nice red herring. You’re ignoring physiology in your post. Good job.
That’s not my point. Of course with enough “willpower” you can overcome any mental obstical. That’s what “willpower” means. Duh. Its a circular argument. So instead of just saying “hur hur willpower” you need to ask where “willpower” comes from. Hint - the brain is chemical.
But here’s what’s going on.
The majority of people use their body’s own built in appetite regulators to determine caloric intake.
Eating high density palatable foods induces leptin resistence.
People will overeat and get fat.
So you can see, it is a combination of psychology and physiology. It is unclear how hard it is to find alternatives to your built in appetite regulators. Depending on how severe your leptin resistence is, it could mean fighting off starvation-style hunger day in and day out. Certainly not the same level of “willpower” you require to stay “lean”.
Well now you’re just building further evidence that you’re illiterate. My name is not a random assortment of unfamiliar letters. But even if you were illiterate, you could just copy/paste my name, so you’re also building the case that you aren’t resourceful. Good job.
But yeah. I’m right. Too bad.
Oh look at all these controlled studies from pubmed. Oh wait, those aren’t controlled studies, those are more sensationalist pandering to the public fixation with simple answers and easy solutions. Durr don’t eat fructose it is the bad. Oh wait, Sibean (or w/e his name is) linked a paper showing superior weight loss on a moderate fructose diet in a CONTROLLED SUDY. Durr.
haha you haven’t read those, but you assume you know what is in them. so stfu.
I just read Gary Taubes’ book, Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It and one of his themes was that the original idea behind the food pyramid was some government appointee (sorry I don’t remember the exact details as well as I should, who pushed for the low fat, high fiber/high carb diet that is now the “conventional wisdom” for a healthy diet. He said it was controversial at the time, and in fact went against the prior conventional wisdom, at least in many circles, that it was in fact carbohydrates that make us fat. He said they had very little data or studies to back up this new recommendation and that the studies since then have tended to disprove the theory rather than prove that a low fat diet is healthy for us and specifically that it will keep us from getting fat and getting the diseases and syndromes associated with being overweight.
He gives quite a few historical examples of people who ate high fat diets and were quite healthy, with virtually no obesity, diabetes and many of the cancers that plague us, but when they adopted our western diets all of those problems exploded in their populations. He also noted that when the government recommendations changed, back in the '60s I believe, the rate of obesity, diabetes & related diseases were far lower than they are now, despite all of the diet clinics, the significant reduction in the amount of fat we eat per capita, the explosion in the number of health and exercise clubs and the phenomenon of what folks back then would probably consider rather humerous - people running around the city in the equivalent of colorful underwear.
After the big health push and many millions of dollars getting the message out being overweight has virtually become the norm and I think some 30%+ people are obese, and the number of people with diabetes and pre-diabetes has exploded, as has high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome etc.
I just saw a story talking about how brain issues from fatty liver disease was unheard of a decade or two ago, and now it’s the most common disease of the liver:
The growing culprit behind liver disease
By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Producer
June 17, 2011
www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/06/16/liver.disease.ep/
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and doctors say they’re seeing more and more patients like Wilson Alvarado.
“It’s overwhelming how many patients we’re seeing with this problem,” says Dr. Naim Alkhouri, a hepatologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. William Carey, also a hepatologist at the Cleveland Clinic, adds, “This is huge. We didn’t even know this disease existed 30 years ago. Now it’s the most common liver disease in America.”
Here are some .pdf screenshots from his book for anyone interested:
Two columns per page (smaller print)
One column per page (larger print)
An essay on The Soft Science of Dietary Fat by Gary Taubes
Is Sugar Toxic, by Gary Taubes - NY Times
What if It’s All a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes - NY Times
Btw, I think Robert Lustig is right about sugar and high fructose corn syrup being the two primary causes of the obesity epidemic. Gary Taubes, takes that a step further, though, in recommending cutting out sweet fruits and the starchy foods like breads, rice, potatoes & pastas etc. He seems to recommend a maximum of 20 grams of effective carbohydrates (subtracting fiber from carb numbers) per day. It looks like “The New Atkins Diet” goes in stages starting out at the 20 grams per day & then gradually working up to higher numbers until a person begins to gain weight. Supposedly that helps find how many carbs an individual can tolerate. They add in more fruits and vegetables after the initial weight loss than Taubes does.
FWIW, I tried taking Taubes’ advice and did about 180 degree flip flop from my former very low fat, high fiber diet and immediately started losing weight. I was amazed. It was almost the exact opposite of what I had been doing and fortunately seem to be getting the opposite results as well. Rather than continually gaining weight while eating a lot of whole grain foods (& admittedly some junk thrown in as well), I was eating bacon and eggs, fatty meat, fish, butter, cheese etc. and was losing weight while eating until I was full. I’ve dropped about 10% of my former body weight in about a month or so & my blood pressure has come down some, if those store blood pressure machines are to be believed.
I haven’t checked in with my doctor, though, but I’m sure he’ll at least be pleased with my weight loss. Supposedly, the blood tests should come out pretty good as well. Taubes says it drops triglyceride levels, raises the HDL (good cholesterol) levels, lowers the bad part of the LDL (bad cholesterol) levels, and lowers blood pressure. I guess I’ll see what it’s done to mine. I haven’t been on any medications or anything, but it sounds like it should also lower glucose levels.
Here’s one way trolls debate on the internet. If they can’t explain themselves or give any clear and concise evidence, they’ll ask you to spend hours of your time watching entire presentations and reading whole books. Of course no one will do this, so they’ll just claim victory.
All I’m asking for is a controlled study. Why can’t you provide one? If you think its so important for me to spend hours of my time on your material, why can’t you spend 5 minutes on my material?
Noob.
I don’t appeal to authority. I appeal to knowledge.
I’ll be sure to heed that advice if I ever decide to be the 2nd person here to say “willpower”.
Your point is crazy claims about leptin.
Is that supposed to mean something? They affect each other. What you think can affect your appetite.
It is sheer antagonism to refer to something disproven as “pseudoscience”. Being wrong does not make an idea “pseudoscience”. You can be wrong because you did not have complete knowledge despite conducting good research and forming the best conclusion possible with available information. Attitude like this only makes people afraid to try anything.
If you just say “hur hur I have a lot of knowledge that makes me right” without actually using said knowledge, it is an appeal to authority.
“Choice”. Your constant references to Pscyhology.
Oh yeah cus you’re sooo knowledgable right? Let me get this down though - you are officially calling me on my leptin claims, and you are positive I am wrong because you know about nutrition physiology and I do not. Is that right? I want you to actually say this is what is going on before I slam you.
Red herring. The point is that it does not does simply depend on choices. There are strong, sometimes very strong, chemical influences. Much stronger than what you deal with on a regular basis.
Well they did recommend a 10:1 ratio of carbs to protein. No dietician has ever thought this. No study has ever shown high carbohydrate intakes to be necessary or beneficial for normal people. Even elite endurance athletes do not consume such crazy ratios. Its totally inexcusable. Thank god nobody actually followed the food pyramid.
The conventional diet will work if it is calorie restricted. All diets work if they restrict calories. The reason people focus on individual foods or food groups is because it will cause them to lose weight via eating less calories. For example, if you think fast food makes you fat, and you stop eating it, you will consume fewer calories because you will not automatically replace fast food with an equal amount of alternative calories. However, you will eventually compensate for the differential and eat back at (or over) maintenence again. The same goes for Paleo and Atkins/Keto diets who drop sugary foods, or vegetarians who drop calories by eating less meat, etc.
Because they ate more calories. If Taubes ever controlled his comparisons for caloric intake, he’d say “and then they added 500 grams of carbs on top of their diet and got fat”, and everyone would be “duh”.
Well no, this is misleading. We don’t consume less fat. We consume less fat as a proportion of total calories. But if you eat 3800 calories/day (the average american), then you’re going to have health problems. Triglycerides ARE going to pile up in your blood stream, even on low carb/keto. Its just that people use atkins as a weight loss diet, reduce overall calories, and then health markers improve. Health markers always improve on weight loss diets. I’d like to see 3800 calories of fatty red meat and creamer.
Well this was a fad in the 70’s-80’s. It isn’t so much anymore. But most people who go to the gym don’t lose weight. Some quick math reveals that if they go and do 30 minutes of cardio every day, they’ll burn an extra 1400 calories a week. So they’ll lose a little more than 1 lb of fat a month, which is a very slow rate. That is ASSUMING that they do not compensate themselves for the calories. If they drink gatorade during the exercise, they may gain weight. People are just retarded. Its not that exercise doesn’t work.
This is not because of the government’s recommendations. If people followed what the government said they’d be eating 2000 calories a day and lose tons of weight.
Except Taubes has no science to back up his claim. Just epidemiological anecdotes. If you do controlled studies, Taubes is proven to be wrong. Believe it or not, you do not have to be in ketosis to lose weight. In fact ketosis has no metabolic advantage for the average american. The supposed superiority of the diet comes from low insulin which allows fatty acids to be mobolized more easily. But overweight people don’t have a problem with fatty acid mobilization - HINT LOOK AT THEIR BLOOD WORK. It is only very lean individuals trying to get down into single digit bodyfat who need to be concerned with the relationship between insulin and fatty acid release. But once fatty acids are in your blood stream, you still have to burn them. You don’t just poop them out… But conveniently, Taubes stops his story much before this and doesn’t really consider how you’re going to go about expending all the extra energy.
The only reason atkins is so popular is because people drop a TON of water weight right immediately. Most people drop 5+ pounds in the first week. They’re stupid and the atkins people don’t tell them this because they’re biased scumbags, so people think they’re doing a really good job. Except after they have dropped the water, they lose weight at the rate of true caloric deficit they’ve created, and get really depressed when they go off atkins because they gain all the water weight back and think “oh that’s my body packing fat back on”, even though it would take at least 2 weeks of 3800 calories/day to gain 5lbs (or even more if the person is fat already).
One of the most striking signs of arrogance and stupidity from Taubes is that fructose is metabolised by the liver and deposited as glycogen or stored as fat. It does not enter the bloodstream as sugar, and therefore does not raise insulin levels. Therefore it does not have all the nasty effects associated with regular carbs. So Taubes should have NO problem with high fructose corn syrup. Except he does because he’s just jumping on the scapegoat bandwagon. The whole nutritional community has their little pet peves about which foods are evil and which foods are good. But where are their controlled studies? Nowhere.
If it works for you, and you can stick to it, good. Anything is better than overconsuming calories. Just know WHY it works - you have dropped your calories and your body does not hold on to as much water in low carb diets. For most people, Atkins is not sustainable because they get carb cravings. But the best diet is the diet you can follow, so if for some reason low carb works with your brain chemistry, keep at it. This is one thing that is NEVER emphasized by dieticians. They all think they have the magic diet. But the right diet depends on the person, can only be found by trial and error, and depends on how that person reacts to meal composition, food choice, and timing.
But no no no. Fructose is da baddy. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21621801 Except fructose helps you lose weight because it sends a fullness signal to your brain, enhancing dietary adherence and slowing all the “negative” effects of dieting. FWIW most reasonable diet protocols have people take a diet break every 4-10 weeks (depending on how lean they are - leaner = more frequent breaks). You need to let your thyroid and leptin levels recover, both for weight loss and sanity’s sake. So you take a “diet break” by eating at maintenence for 2 weeks, during which you will usually gain 2 lbs of water (so don’t freak out). But this only holds if you’re in an actual calorie deficit, and if you aren’t counting calories in atkins, you may not remain in a deficit for very long.
All weight loss diets improve blood lipid levels. But there’s some concern over having triglycerides and ketones bouncing around in your blood stream compared to sugars. AFAIK there’s never been a controlled study, but it takes years for cardiovascular damage markers to show up, and frankly, most people can’t follow atkins for years cus of the carbs. So if you ever do go off it, just remember to control calories somehow. Or gain wait. Its up to you 
American consumers have on average 29 pairs of shoes and they all own too much clothing.
I highly doubt that number. I own 4 pairs and I know no one who owns more than like 10 (and that is the very most). Maybe you are counting ones which they have bought 20 years ago and forgot to clean up out of their attic?
McDonalds doesn’t make people fat. Fat people make McDonalds. Companies cater to consumers. Consumers decide exactly what type of food the companies produce.
Try eating McDonalds for a month 
But yeah, the company did not choooose to make people fat. That is not why it exists. However, it is not fat people banding together who said “we demand more fatty munchies!!” The more appropriate second statement would be “people make people fat”
Furthermore, while it is true that companies cater to customers, companies also control the wants of customers. Otherwise you would have no need for advertisement. If supply=demand (in terms of type of product), no need for advertisement exists. It’s just like politics: while politicians must cater to constituents, they also try to control the constituents. Note that there are people who have listened to, say, Ron Paul, and decided they agree. Capitalism is a two-way game. Never forget that.
in the 1950’s people … were arguably wealthier than today
“Arguably” not = evidence. If you are going to make assumptions without checking the data, please state so so that people aren’t misled by your “information” (you may say something along the lines of “I am running on the assumption that X, correct me if I’m wrong”.) “Arguably” is a rhetorical and manipulative device that diverts attention and has no place in a forum where we discuss facts and not just try to convince each other of empty words. That’s what politics is for. Anyway, check out the real per capita GDP over the years - http://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/?q=hmit/gdp/ - We are wealthier now.
Governments always create problems and then call it a market failure. Then they use it as a justification for why they must interfere within the economy and rob us of our freedom.
I’ll give you this one. Government does, imo, weaken capitalism’s own built-in system for correcting itself and then claims that capitalism needs to be fixed.
Epidemic home ownership flies in the face of your “government promotes low-time preference” hypothesis.
Note quite so. That;s the reason for the bubble. People buy houses on cheap credit (I want the house NOW) instead of waiting until they have enough money. Furthermore, being a foreigner, I have noticed that Americans move from house to house quite often relative to Europeans, further supporting the time delay idea.
I am not on board with the idea that government is making people fat (unless you add in the government-sponsored creation of the internet, microwave, etc). It’s really a human instinct to eat as much as possible and store fat (correct me if I’m wrong). Furthermore, the obesity rates are highest (at least currently) in the Deep South:
http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
This might be due to a tradition of farmers to eat a hearty breakfast which has stuck.
You said that in the '50s people weren’t as fat. Well, that might be because of a recent explosion in the amount of chemicals in food which slow down our metabolism (please correct me if I’m wrong).
Well… I don’t.
The only thing constant is your obsession with my single use of the word “choice” in a statement that did not pertain to appetite. All you did was try to twist what I said into a different context. So, all of this ranting is pointless. That and talking about “high density palatable” food as the culprit, which I understand is more commonly known as “junk food”, as if it is some new discovery or well kept secret that it is bad stuff to eat is difficult to take seriously.
I’ve never heard of that. Unless it was a “Flexner Report” I would wonder what the basis was, considering this.
If you’re interested in doing some nutrition research, look up the evolutionary medicine or paleolithic nutrition movement online. There are a lot of great scientists publishing data on how evolutionarily novel foods are contributing to obesity and degenerative disease. Interestingly, a very large percentage of the people in this movement are libertarians (and atheists, since we believe nutritional science as a branch of biology must be measured through the lense of human evolution, and many people who believe in evolution are non-religious).
The US government (and most governments throughout the world) are heavy subsidizers of industrial grain production. Much of the calories we eat today come from grains, industrial seed oils (many of which didn’t even exist 30 years ago because we didn’t have extraction techniques to make soybean oil, for example) which contain evolutionarily novel lectins that act directly on leptin receptors to change bodyfat set point. For example, through the hormone ghrelin which causes hunger regulation.
The meat and milk we eat are fed these industrially produced grains. This dramatically alters the fatty acid profile of the meat as well as important vitamin content such as eliminating the presence of the omega 3 fatty acids and increasing omega 6 fatty acids. Milk used to contain something called vitamin K2 when cows were allowed to eat what they ate during their entire evolution–grass–and this vitamin is highly correlated with cardiovascular disease risk factors and osteoperosis rates. There are studies done in Japanese women showing K2 intervention is better than any existing drug in reducing bone breaks. There are studies in Europe showing the K2 content of a European’s diet dramatically lowers his risk of cardiovascular episodes, more than any pharmaceutical available. This is because in Europe many cattle are still pastured and eat grass, so Europeans have accesst to hard cheeses which contain K2. French paradox anyone?
You can probably do endless research on this. I recommend you look up the blog wholehealthsource, see the book The Paleolithic Solution (free podcast of same name), and read the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price which is available for free online because the copyright has expired.
Americans and modern people are not just lazy bastards compared to their trimmer great grandparents. They are eating foods which make it harder for them to remain satisfied and have compounds which act directly on the body’s own bodyweight regulation mechanisms.
It isn’t a secret. In fact, it is one of the simpler explanations for overeating. Its just that people want to look past it and blame grains or carbs or saturated fats or gremlins. I’m emphasizing “junk food” (well known) in combination with its effects on leptin (less well known, or intuitively known), to show I have an easier and more plausible explanation for obesity and overeating.
This.
Lectin sounds like leptin, but I’m not aware of any mechanisms by which the former induces changes in the latter to induce changes in “set point”. And FWIW, “set point” is an amalgamation of many many different processes. I mean… simply having more food choices increases the amount of food people eat, but there’s not been discovered any chemicals contributing to this outcome.
You don’t have to be paleo to take fish oil caps.
No way. Osteoporosis? I mean, correlates? Maybe. But the decline in pirates also correlates with cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. Given that 3x10 leg press has been clinically shown to beat the hell out of osteoporosis without any supplements (let alone vitamin K2 supplements), this is a pretty poor explanation.
A better explanation is total calories. Its likely that if you feed your cows grass, beef is more expensive, so you eat less. Nevermind some tiny micronutrient that no one has ever heard of. Multivitamins dont list it. Etc etc…
Paleo is better than the standard american diet. But it is not THE answer. There are perfectly reasonable diets that incorporate evil industrial grains and other paleo no-nos.
The dietary hierarchy goes something like this:
Paleo is not defined in terms of ANY of these benchmarks. Like most fad diets, it focuses on food choices. In this case, what paleo man ate. But eating what cavemen ate doesn’t gaurantee that you hit ANY of those 5 targets… A better strategy is just to aim at it directly instead of trying to go some fashionable indirect route and pray that you don’t systematically eat 50 too many calories, which would result in 5 lbs weight gain/year, which is what most people achieve anyway eating ad libitum.
Paleo man did not have a fridge. Paleo man did not use forks. Paleo man did not use the internet. Paleo man… etc etc. The whole credibility of the paleo movement is the observation that most people’s food choices are bad. Sure. But that doesn’t mean the right answer is nuts, berries, and red meat.