U.S. obesity problem intensifies

casebro said:
So it looks to me like obesity isn't the gross villain it is made out to be. Weight loss is of little benefit. And, temporary weight loss through "dieting" is totally useless. I'm thinking the weight is caused by some 'disease' state. Losing the weight does not fix the disease, but fixing the disease would cause weight loss.

Maybe the disease is a psychological need to eat, maybe a neurological lack of satiety, maybe a common gastric anomaly that makes many hungrier than they need to be? Or a genetic difficulty with the mix of food we eat?
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Maybe bad "food" ? Or actually, lack of sufficient amounts of "real food"?

I'm surprised that in a thread like this one, noone has yet mentioned Michael Pollan's books: In Defense of Food, or also The Omnivore's Dilemma. Learned about this author not long ago in this forum in fact, and am so glad I did.

The human species is extremely capable of adapting to very different diets living healthy and long enough non-obese lives without diabetes or heart diseases. These diets go from the mediterranean diet, to the Japanese diet, to the Masai diet of just meat, milk and blood, to the eskimo's diet of basically meat and fish, to some vegetarian diets, to some australian tribe diets of some small game that includes mammals, fish, reptiles and even some fatty larvae, fruit and grains and vegetables; and so and so forth. We can live on significantly different types of diets and food. Yet, what evidence shows is that humans haven't adapted well at all to the so called "Western diet" prevalent in the US, which aims for quantity and not quality, which lacks true variety and lack sufficient amount of real whole foods, makes people overfed, and at the same time, undernourished, greatly contributing to the development of the most prevalent western diet diseases: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

That is just a lame gist summary. I highly recommend Pollan's books to anyone interested in nutrition and health. He presents his case against the Western diet and "non real food" so compellingly and so clearly. Just recently I finished reading In Defense of Food, and it dramatically changed my eating and cooking patterns even before I was mid way reading the book, and even though I'm not overweight at all (for the record, my weight is 82 kg and I'm 6.1 tall)
 
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Living to our seventies isn't adapting well to a 'western diet'?

A cheeseburger leaves people undernourished?

Cancer?

Call me skeptical.
 
tyr_13 said:
Living to our seventies isn't adapting well to a 'western diet'?

A cheeseburger leaves people undernourished?

Cancer?

Call me skeptical.
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Always good to be skeptical. But you'd need to check the statistics and historical trends and all the large scale research that is synthesized and referred to in Pollan's book. Better read it directly in any case, don't judge so quickly from my lame summary.
 
kellyb said:
A lot of the science promoting the obesity epidemic is really, really low quality, and doesn't factor in really basic facts, like the fact that people gain weight as they age as a biological norm for our species, and the fact that we have more older people living longer now and comprising a larger percentage of the population.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/jfs-special-report-obesity.html

Also, the research showing "the obesity paradox" regarding longevity (overweight obesity being protective, and morbidly obese being the same as normal weight) does correct for smoking, illness, etc.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/even-obesity-paradoxes-cant-excuse.html


If anybody can debunk the Junkfood Science chick, I'd love to see it. I've tried and been unable to, which is why, for now, I think she's probably more or less correct.
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Good reads. Thanks for the links,KellyB.

The gist is yes, we are all older, and we all weigh 7-10 pounds more, and that even the Obese have no greater death rate.

Fat Fobia is unreasonable. And weight is all genetics.
 
rsaavedra said:
Always good to be skeptical. But you'd need to check the statistics and historical trends and all the large scale research that is synthesized and referred to in Pollan's book. Better read it directly in any case, don't judge so quickly from my lame summary.
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It's just that largest study I know of on weight and cancer found absolutely no correlation. I think I'll go look for it. It was the woman's health something or other, and was the largest, longest such study in history if memory serves me.
 
kellyb said:
Also, the research showing "the obesity paradox" regarding longevity (overweight obesity being protective, and morbidly obese being the same as normal weight) does correct for smoking, illness, etc.
<snip>
If anybody can debunk the Junkfood Science chick, I'd love to see it. I've tried and been unable to, which is why, for now, I think she's probably more or less correct.
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I think it's in the part I bolded. If part of what they "correct for" is diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease and the like (stuff caused or exacerbated by obesity), wouldn't making similar "corrections" prove that HIV doesn't correlate with reduced longevity? (After all, it's pneumonia and such that kills AIDS patients, not the HIV itself.)
 
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tyr_13 said:
It's just that largest study I know of on weight and cancer found absolutely no correlation. I think I'll go look for it. It was the woman's health something or other, and was the largest, longest such study in history if memory serves me.
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It was originally the "Nurses Study", then as the world became PC, it became the 'Womens Health Caregivers Study" ersumthin.

The male side was the "Doctor's Study" but it got off to a later start.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I think it's in the part I bolded. If part of what they "correct for" is diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease and the like (stuff caused or exacerbated by obesity), wouldn't making similar "corrections" prove that HIV doesn't correlate with reduced longevity? (After all, it's pneumonia and such that kills AIDS patients, not the HIV itself.)
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Excellent point. I've never heard of anyone dying from being fat.
 
kellyb said:
A lot of the science promoting the obesity epidemic is really, really low quality, and doesn't factor in really basic facts, like the fact that people gain weight as they age as a biological norm for our species, and the fact that we have more older people living longer now and comprising a larger percentage of the population.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/jfs-special-report-obesity.html

Also, the research showing "the obesity paradox" regarding longevity (overweight obesity being protective, and morbidly obese being the same as normal weight) does correct for smoking, illness, etc.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/even-obesity-paradoxes-cant-excuse.html


If anybody can debunk the Junkfood Science chick, I'd love to see it. I've tried and been unable to, which is why, for now, I think she's probably more or less correct.
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Hi Kellyb, I agree that its difficult to sort out the good information from the bad in nutritional and weight control science.

I took a quick look at the junkfoodscience blog.

From your first link: http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/jfs-special-report-obesity.html:


Others cite individual responsibility for diet and lifestyle habits. Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and a staunch supporter of a vegetarian diet, says dietary modification could be a crucial step in solving the problem. "U.S. eating habits are nowhere near where they should be," he says. "The average American eats 50 pounds more meat and 20 pounds more cheese per year, compared to the 1960s... I would strongly encourage Americans to adopt more vegetarian meals. [According to the latest data from the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, and the total food supply of meats, poultry and fish produced in the United States was 18.1% of available food (579 kcal/day) in 1970 and went down to 13.4% (522.6 kcal/day) in 2004. An dairy products also went down, from 11.3% to 8.6%.]
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The blogger, Sandy Swarc, is apparently using the information in between the brackets to discredit the data Dr. Barnard cites. But Dr. Barnard is talking about lbs and the blogger is talking about percentages. Both sets of data could be true if the overall amount that Americans have eaten has increased enough.

Why doesn’t she link to the studies where she gets her statistics from? It seriously annoys me when writers fail to do that.

Anyway, you can take a look at this web site:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/November05/Findings/USFoodConsumption.htm

from the US Dept. of Agriculture showing how US food consumption per capita has increased in lbs in every category from 1970 to 2003. If you wanted to, you could take the extra step and plug the numbers into a spreadsheet and see how while we may have cut back percentage wise in a few categories compared to others – that doesn’t take away from the fact that, per capita, we now eat more food than we did in the 1970s.

The bell curve (and NHANES surveys)also isn’t corrected for age and the population is aging, significantly so since the 1950s and 1970s, especially in the baby boomer age group. Animals and the human species naturally gain weight with age, especially during middle age. As Dr. Friedman said, aging could notably contribute to the perception that weights in our population are increasing.
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Perhaps what Swarc is saying is true, or partially true, for the adult population. For example I don’t recall seeing any articles that explain what percentage of the adult population falls within each age bracket (18 – 27, 28 – 37, 38 – 47, and etc) during the 1960s compared to this decade. But I couldn’t help but wonder why she didn’t dig up this information herself, and link to it, since it is so integral to her point. One could say that I’m arguing from incredulity here which is frowned upon in skeptical circles. But … I do think its legitimate when reading or listening to another person’s explanation to take into account how carefully they cite their sources. Invariably I’ve found that poor citation correlates highly to flawed conclusions.

And there are articles easily available on the web explaining that the BMI has increased significantly for children. See http://aspe.hhs.gov/HSP/97trends/hc2-5.htm
Her explanation conflicts with that fact.

By this point, I stopped taking her blog seriously.

My two cents ...;)
 
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johnny karate said:
Hilarious in its pointlessness. Within a couple of years, a size 10 will have the same stigma a size 14 once had.
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True, but in the meantime some executives will get some nice bonuses based on increased market share over the past 12 months.
 
Fallout (or is that slopover?) from the obesity craze..
 

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tyr_13 said:
It's just that largest study I know of on weight and cancer found absolutely no correlation. I think I'll go look for it. It was the woman's health something or other, and was the largest, longest such study in history if memory serves me.
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Pollan's book (In Defense of food) in fact indicates that a large and federally funded study (Women's Health Initiative) found in 2006 that a low-fat diet may not protect at all against cancer. Not only that, that study also failed to correlate low-fat diets and lower risk of coronary heart disease.

Once again, don't make quick assumptions about the book from my lame summary of it. Better check it directly if interested.
 
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rsaavedra said:
<snipped>

I'm surprised that in a thread like this one, noone has yet mentioned Michael Pollan's books: In Defense of Food, or also The Omnivore's Dilemma. Learned about this author not long ago in this forum in fact, and am so glad I did.
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I just wanted to say that Michael Pollan's books are indeed excellent reading and can really change the way you eat. I read In Defense of Food first, and try to live by his simple seven words on what to eat: Real Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

I haven't quite finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I haven't consumed any HFCS since I started reading it last fall. If I ever win the lottery (which I never play), forget the big house. I want my own farm.

I've also just seen a few episodes of Jamie Oliver's recent show where he's trying to get people in the U.K. to learn how to cook real food for themselves.
 
rsaavedra said:
Pollan's book (In Defense of food) in fact indicates that a large and federally funded study (Women's Health Initiative) found in 2006 that a low-fat diet may not protect at all against cancer. Not only that, that study also failed to correlate low-fat diets and lower risk of coronary heart disease.

Once again, don't make quick assumptions about the book from my lame summary of it. Better check it directly if interested.
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That's it! But I'm not making quick assumptions about the book. I'm talking about the claim put forward about mal-nutrition and cancer based on the information that I do have.

I'm sure it's a great book. However, I don't want this discussion to degrade into 'RTFMN!'.
 
Dymanic said:
How in the world did you manage that? The stuff is in everything.
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In everything processed, but not in real food. That's the point in the beginning of the subtitle of Pollan's book: "Eat food." By food he means, real whole foods, not processed foods or food-like substances.

tyr_13 said:
I'm sure it's a great book. However, I don't want this discussion to degrade into 'RTFMN!'.
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Certainly, neither do I, wasn't the intention.
 
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