Astrogirl » obesity

The Fat Trap

Nicole — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:09:32 +0000

If you read Tara Parker Pope’s article The Fat Trap, you might be led to believe that weight loss is difficult and maintaining a weight loss is a herculean feat. This is just not true.

A four-year post-weight loss study by the NIH shows that motivated people *do* keep weight off. I weigh 50 pounds less than I did in 2000. I lost that weight in two big pieces, one in 2000 and one over the end of 2009 into 2010. Don’t let her defeatism convince you to not bother.

People who maintain a weight loss do pay attention to what they eat. I do not weigh and measure everything, and I do drink alcohol and eat sweets or chips sometimes. The key is to eat the most nutritious diet that you can, using fruits, vegetables and healthy protein sources to crowd out foods that don’t contribute much to your nutrition bottom line.

A few points:

If you go back to what got you fat, you will gain back the weight. You need to find a weight-loss formula that is really a lifestyle change.
Eating like “everyone else” isn’t what you think. If you mean the “everyone else” that’s overweight or obese, that’s an obvious problem. If you mean someone who is active all day and you aren’t or someone who is still growing, that’s another problem right there.
People who are naturally thin don’t eat the way you imagine. The two very thin people I know DO eat a lot less than I do on average. One of them fasts and binges, which is actually a formula for weight loss if done correctly.
You must eat high-quality food while dieting and afterwards. Yes, you can eat a bit more afterwards, but the basic composition of your diet needs to be the most nutritious food you can get.

I think the next big thing in dieting will be micronutrient sufficiency. I’m see it becoming a popular topic on blogs and podcasts. Here are three references to it from the last week:

Paul Jaminet’s The Perfect Health Diet
Free The Animal’s post on Malnutrition and Obesity
Jimmy Moore’s Podcast with the authors of Naked Calories.

Stupid or Insane? Does it Matter?

Nicole — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:15:03 +0000

I cannot believe I’m about to link to the Huffington Post, but this article really gets to the meat of the so-called obesity epidemic.

In 1977 America changed its health advice. In a nutshell (or, more likely, an ADA approved Mars bar): Eat more starchy foods, eat more carbohydrates, saturated fats are bad. If that sounds like pretty good advice to you, then you don’t know enough about what you are putting into your mouth.

Your grandparents were raised in a generation aware that God’s supermarket was better than man’s. Saturated fat was a vital part of their diet. For them, obesity was not a common health problem. They were not suffering malnutrition in the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K). Remarkably, you, dear Western reader, probably are.

The 2010 Dietary recommendations are very much simply “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It is total insanity.

I think the biggest danger out there is the foods with a health halo – too many people, even supposedly smart Whole Foods shoppers – fall for the idea that processed foods, if it fits their particular orthorexia, are healthy. Evaporated cane juice and agave nectar are *still* sugar. You might as well feed your kids HFCS for all the difference it makes. Most fat-reduced dairy products are full of additives that, let’s face it, you don’t even KNOW WHAT THEY ARE! But if Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods is selling it, you trust them that is must be OK.

Don’t even get me started on the gluten-free junk food revolution. It’s going to be the next giant money maker for the processed food industry.

I think I need one of those “bang head here” signs on the wall today.

John Yudkin’s Low-Carbohydrate Diet

Nicole — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:35:16 +0000

I’ve been reading chapters of Good Calories, Bad Calories again, and I was finally moved to look for Dr. Yudkin’s books on Amazon. His books Pure White and Deadly and Sweet and Dangerous cost way too much, but I did buy a copy of Eat Well, Slim Well.

Normally, I love diet books that are all about the meal plans, as this one is, but the recipes and meal plans were pretty disappointing. I think, for my taste, the original Atkins book (1972) is better.

Anyway, the introduction *was* interesting, and I’ve put up a PDF of it.

Here is a list of “unrestricted” foods: those, that is, which you don’t have to limit but which limit themselves. They are meat, poultry, fish, eggs, butter, margarine, cream, leafy vegetables. In addition, you should take between half and one pint of milk a day, up to half a pound of fruit, and up to two ounces of cheese.

The margarine is not something anyone recommends now, but in 1982 (the copyright date), people were a lot more warm and fuzzy about it.

Anyway, I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap copy of Pure White and Deadly.

American Children Moving Towards “Constant Eating”

Nicole — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:38:23 +0000

Towards? Children? We’re all doing it!

“This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating.”

This is one of those news bits for the day. I heard it on KMOX while I was still in bed – I’m sure it will be repeated as a snippet all over the place.

All anyone will get out of it is that it’s too many calories as that’s primarily what the article is about. I’m sure calories matter, but I can’t believe this many researchers are totally disinterested in other effects beyond a surplus of energy.

Follow Up On Saturated Fats

Nicole — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:24:30 +0000

One of the blogs I read regularly has a nice summary of studies related to saturated fat and health.

You’ll find it here: The Dirty Little Secret Of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis

Component Analysis

Nicole — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:18:16 +0000

I’ve been working my way through a lecture called Sugar: The Bitter Truth, and Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study came up. The discussion at hand was about the fact that the conclusions drawn were clearly incorrect and that its data could not easily easily be subjected to regression analysis because it pre-dates computers. This doesn’t matter much in this case, because it fails the main test – it does not predict the future. We’ve followed the advice, and wound up fatter and sicker than ever. (The freshest data I can get is 1998.)

	1977	1998	Change
Calories	1,878	1,938	3%
Protein	72	67	-8%
Fat	81	71	-15%
Carb	219	265	17%

We eat 3% more calories than we did before conventional wisdom started striking us over the head with the idea that eating saturated fat is akin to worshipping satan, but you can see where the changes are. We eat less meat and less fat and as a result, we eat more carbohydrates. A lot of this is in the form of what the USDA calls “fruit drinks and ades” and some more of it is from soda, but we do eat 10% more fruits and vegetables (mostly because we eat more *fruit*) and grains (44% more than 1977). We consume 47% less whole milk than in 1977 and 230% more skim milk (no one drank skim milk before, apparently). We have shifted 50% of our meat consumption from red meat to poultry and fish.

We did what we were told to do, and low and behold, the future was NOT sunnier. The future is instead full of fat Americans. Poor people and children are even fatter and sicker as a group then Americans on the whole. Kids, of course, eat a lot more government provided meals via WIC and school lunch programs. If Keys was right, we should not have wound up where we are today.

This yogurt is part of the problem:

People who are healthy and therefore eat a healthy diet eat more fiber, therefore we will be healthier if we eat more fiber. Why would we think this is true? We eat more fiber than we used to – fruit and grains (whole or not) both contain fiber. We also eat 14% more legumes and 17% more nuts and seeds than we did in 1977, so there’s more fiber there too…and yet we still aren’t healthier.

I will posit that people with more fiber in their diet are healthier because they also happen to be eating less food out of boxes, bags and cans. Once you take foods apart into components to process them, they taste worse because they lose their more subtle flavors, so salt and sugar are added to make them palatable again. Most grain products lose virtually all their fiber during the process. Processed food has very little fiber because that makes it spoil faster. Even 100% whole grain breads have added sugar (well, high-fructose corn syrup anyway) because it retards spoilage.

The solution is always to add more of some magical component, in this case, fiber.

Look at olive oil, for instance. We were told that the Mediterreanan Diet is very healthy and since they eat a lot of their fat in the form of olive oil, having us switch to more olive oil is healthy. This data comes largely from the Seven Countries Study, but what you don’t know is this: 60% of the study participants [warning! PDF!] were members of the strict Greek Orthodox Church that prescribes almost 180 days of fasting per year. This was the easiest way I could make my main point here: they follow a system through their culture and lifestyle, and eating more olive oil, fish and yogurt doesn’t even come close to emulating that.

We often hear about the “French Paradox.” While I like wine as much as the next girl, I really doubt an entire country is being protected from heart disease because they drink more wine than we do. French culture has a system of eating that values culture and tradition. If you check that article, you’ll find that most of the French women questioned claim they just eat less, ultimately. That may be true, but their meal size and order is actually quite different from ours.

They start their days earlier than we do, and they eat a Continental Breakfast. That term separates it from the idea of an English Breakfast, which is a closer to what Americans consider to be traditional breakfast. When you’re offered a “free” Continental Breakfast in a hotel in the U.S., it’s generally of much lousier quality than what a French person would be willing to eat, but in any case, they eat early and their pastries are smaller. The French eat their largest and most leisurely meal at lunch time, and that’s not the middle of the afternoon. If you don’t eat when you’re supposed to eat, you aren’t eating because restaurants close in the afternoon. The French eat slower, take food more seriously and eat a smaller dinner. They certainly eat fewer processed foods than we do, and as a result, that breakfast contains butter, not some ersatz-low-cholesterol-processed-crap that you’d find at a Residence Inn. Lunch isn’t a microwaved Lean Cuisine, and it also includes wine. Americans don’t drink at lunch, for the most part, but maybe a glass of wine at lunch reduces stress in the afternoon.

I wouldn’t discount *any* of these things. Getting up early and eating lunch on time probably play a part too.

Adding red wine is not going to help all by itself. Switching out olive oil for butter isn’t going to make much difference, and adding fiber for the sake of fiber is not going to help either. Eating less saturated fat hasn’t caused us to get thinner – it’s had the opposite effect. Taking whole milk away from children over two (yes, that’s what the government says is good and proper) seems to have the opposite effect.

We’re told that we are just not following the USDA recommendations perfectly enough. We’re always told the next component change will make the difference. Kids cereals are now having whole grains added because they can be made palatable and be preserved by the buckets of sugar that are already in there. So, conventional wisdom says that kids will be healthier just because they eat more fiber. I can hardly wait to see the results.