Big Sugar’s Secret Ally? Nutritionists
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
No, I don't see a way around any of this. Lots of money is spent on food, and will be for the foreseeable future.
You are lumping every Doctor, Biochemist, Farmer, and John Doe who call themselves a "Nutritionalist" together. They are really, really different people and some of them are totally right and some are dead wrong.
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
To your second point, the problem is that we don't know who is right and who is wrong. The studies are conducted so poorly or with such bias that it's near impossible to have concrete recommendations.
I also see this as a symptom of the very low barrier to entry. Anyone can make food, make money off of food, and everyone buys food, which means the participants aren't required to be specialists and can be supplanted by anyone playing a factor differently, even if this means telling bold lies about the utility of the product (e.g. "Vitamin Water" being an intentional misnomer or "all natural" meaning nothing).
However, the RD exam is a mishmash of several ill-specified fields with dubious claims & ad-hoc practices, much of which aren't scientifically verifiable.
RD exam: 12% - food and nutrition 40% - nutrition care 10% - counselling 17% - food service 21% - management
Its a multiple-choice US-centric exam which most likely any American housewife/househusband/anybody-who-cooks-regularly could pass, if (s)he just showed up on a spare afternoon. There are actual questions[2] like
Q. What is the best way to cook a roast? A. Cook it in oven at 325F
Q. What gives structure to bread ? A. Egg and Flour
Q. Glucose test should be plotted on what graph? A. Line graph.
Once you pass the exam and become a government certified nutritionist, you can tell a sick overweight person with authority- "don't eat that egg, it has cholesterol, you will get a heart attack" and people will actually take you seriously because you now have the license!
If you have some money to burn, you can purchase 3 random RD exams at eatrightprep[3] for $199 (!), which should "only be used by one person and should not be shared" heh heh heh!
The whole space is crying out for disruption. Serious startup opportunities abound.
1. https://www.cdrnet.org/vault/2459/web/files/Licensurelawsreg... 2. http://www.cram.com/flashcards/domain-1-inman-review-questio... 3. https://www.eatrightprep.org/rdn-exam
No, "Dietitian" requires the requirements for the RD (which are not just an exam, there's also an education and clinical practice requirement for registration.)
"Nutritionist" is generally unregulated, though there are "certified nutrition specialist" with a required test and other requirements.
Eggs in bread?
Where? Why?
The calorie is a calorie argument is old and dumb. It ignores insulin which is a BIG deal. It also ignores that high blood sugar can cause a temporary endorphin rush. Ever hear anyone talk about a "protein high" or "fat high"?
I agree with you - but saying a calorie is a calorie makes people feel like they are gifted physicists preaching to people that live in the dark ages.
Nutrition's become a bit of a religious/political issue.
https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Firmicutes_and_Obes...
The article didn't tread much into the satiety effect: while sugar- and carb-laden foods generally leave you wanting more, it's difficult to overeat naturally fatty things like bacon, cream, or eggs. Until just now, these foods have been frowned upon so hard that few people think of combining them with veggies to create tasty, affordable, satisfying, and nutritious meals.
Metabolism doesn't happen in the gut, but in the cells and mostly in the mitochondria. It is controlled by the hypothalamus, which keeps your body at the same temperature, as this is the bulk of what food energy is used for.
It just makes sense if you believe that studies are biased. It seems like trust in authorities (in this case to determine dietetic recommendations) would be a common factor with religious/political differences between persons.
Edit: or you could say that some people seems to trust facts more, other ones trust persons more.
Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Has the concept been abolished in the last decade?
Another tidbit in evidence of CIAC holding true is that 99.9% of people would lose weight if they cut their meal sizes in the same proportion (let's say by 20%).
They wouldn't lose equal amounts, but they would all lose weight.
Also, more anecdotally, how many people do you know who get hangry from low blood sugar? How many people eat when they are sad to feel better?
A medical condition means I can get hypoglycemic, and when I do I can become completely irrational and very aggressive. Also, a drop in blood sugar can signal hunger.
A substance A can be a net promoter of both a compound B and a compound C, even if the compound B suppresses C, provided that the direct promotion of A on C is greater than the direct suppression of B on C per the changed in B.
In other words, when I ignite a pile of wood(A), the wood releases (among other things) both water(B) and smoke(C). Now, independently high amounts of water will tend to put out smoke, but in these quantities much more smoke is released than the water required to put it out.
I don't have a source on how much endorphins sugar releases but I would imagine it's an analogous case. In fact, things like this are really common in the human body because if the half lives of action are different, they can help return the body to homeostasis. In this case, I hypothesize that the endorphin effect on insulin could serve to reduce insulin to more normal levels in the blood-stream after the initial spike due to sugar intake.
It is physically impossible not to. You could be fed a drip of pure sugar and you will lose weight as long as you receive fewer calories that you burn.
Side note: "as long as you receive fewer calories that you burn" ignores the fact that how much you burn can change.
If you're managing satiety and glycemic index and ignoring calorie intake, you're not going to manage weight well. These are all tools in managing calorie inputs, not replacements for it.
Here's a blog post breaking down a recent paper on the topic: http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/boiled-mash...
So saying there is some truth to that is extremely snarky and dismissive.
Humans are also not known for keeping track of how fast they run to millisecond precision but people do it to achieve a goal.
If your goal is to lose weight, track calories to do it. I can lose weight on demand eating nothing but junk but keeping track of how much of it I'm eating.
No, not even if you keep your exercise regimen constant. The body is a complicated self-regulating feedback control system. It's not even surprising for it to reduce the burn rate when the input gets leaner.
"The results of our study challenge the notion that a calorie is a calorie from a metabolic perspective. During isocaloric feeding ... total energy expenditure differed by approximately 300 kcal/d between very-low-carb and low-fat diets, an effect corresponding with the amount of energy typically expended in 1 hour of moderate-intensity physical activity."
"In conclusion, our study demonstrates that commonly consumed diets can affect metabolism and components of the metabolic syndrome in markedly different ways during weight-loss maintenance, independent of energy content. The low-fat diet produced changes in energy expenditure and serum leptin42- 44 that would predict weight regain. In addition, this conventionally recommended diet had unfavorable effects on most of the metabolic syndrome components studied herein."
Too simplistic? Okay, try drastically increasing or decreasing your salt intake and keep all other factors the same - you'll see a weight change from water retention.
Again too simplistic? Okay, try substituting 500 calories a standard diet with 500 calories of celery. Note that even keeping all other factors constant, you lose more weight with the celery.
[1] Because the sugar replacements are artificial 'plastics' that apparently don't burn when set on fire; how can that possibly be healthy?
The magic trick is being able to measure your weight for the first week or two and then keep the same habits until the goal is reached. No fancy apps or diets or nutritionists or whatever required. So a calorie is a calorie.
Also, I wouldn't count 10 lbs over 3 month proof that a calorie is a calorie. Actually, I think it proves the opposite. A person who is 30+ lbs over weight should drop 10lbs in around two weeks with a 500 calorie deficit per day. (Generally considered the max safe range for sustained weight loss)
I'd really be curious to how much you would lose if you cut the sugar completely.
For an "average" person they store 400g of glycogen in their muscles and 100g of glycogen in their liver. In this form, it is bound to 3-4 times as much water. So 500 * 3.5 is 2250g = 5 pounds just from this depletion.
As far as fat burning, a pound of fat has about 3500 calories. A 500 per day deficit will lead to 1 pound of weight loss. However, fat is also bound to water in a roughly 1:1 ratio so you'll also lose a pound of water too. So call this 2 pounds for the second week.
Add in all the weight in your digestive system over that two week period and you'll be ~10 pounds or more in two weeks. Again this assumes a person that is 30+ pounds overweight and has full glycogen stores.
As an interesting sidenote: fat people have relatively a lot less water in their fat tissue than lean people.
You can also think about the fact that when you drop triglycerides in water, it will not solute at all. Also, human body creates fatty membranes (cell walls) to absolutely _prevent_ the influx / efflux of water.
Overweight from start was minimal (4, maybe 5 kgs over BMI 25) but I got rid of the "gut" that was starting to form and it was extremely successful. I actually have no idea what the calorie deficiency was: I just ballparked it for the first two weeks and then kept that while measuring my weight every morning. I'd say it's about 600-700 max with the weekends reserved for no fat-loss.
It certainly helps (in many ways) to e.g. increase protein in leue of sugar, but that you will certainly ly lose weight if calories burned > calories consumed.
I don't know about the margins of food, but I consider preparing food from the basic ingredients somewhat time-wasting and costly (when I actually order or buy and prepare them myself). As they can have fine nutritional values, I don't think processed foods can be generalized to be bad per se.
In the short term, they'd absolutely lose weight. After a certain point (probably about six weeks), their basal metabolic rate will drop though, in adaptation to the new situation where their body adapts to living off a lowered caloric intake. Then the weight loss will plateau, or at least significantly slow down, while any deviation from the diet would generally result in a sharp uptake in fat storage (because now the metabolism is significantly slower and more greedy)
4 of my buddies are doing a weight-loss challenge ahead of this spring's local marathon. They're each losing about 10-12 pounds over the month of January.
3 of them kept their calorie intakes roughly the same but changed their macros to favor protein and fat (and no changes to their exercise regimes). All 3 have already reached their goal without significant loss of muscle mass. One guy switch to the keto diet for January (<25g carbs/day), and is at 16 pounds lost as of last night. The 4th guy lowered his caloric intake but maintained his carb-heavy diet. He's lost 4 pounds, and he's struggling with hunger and trying to lose more weight.
You'll definitely still lose weight if you calories consumed < calories burned. But you'll lose more fat if those calories are consumed in the proper ratios. Increasing protein consumption while at a caloric deficit minimizes muscle loss, especially when combined with (even minimal) weight training.
Moreover, losing 4 kgs or more of fat in a month increases the risk for cardiovascular disease: the blood cholesterol levels of the subjects may rise to unhealthy levels. Some are resistant to high cholesterol, but statistically it's a risk.
Also, some people up their carb intake a little before their workout, so it'll burn off and they'll still be in keto afterwards while not risking performance loss.
Finally, you don't double your protein intake on keto, you replace your carb intake with fat, so you wouldn't be at 2g/kg/day danger levels you're suggesting if you're doing the diet properly.
This is all I was really trying to emphasize. When it comes time to burn energy, calories are the same, but this isn't true when eating.
High sugar affects insulin and other things that may it hard for people to stick with it. Eating meals high in fat provides higher satiety (you feel full longer). Eating vegetables high in fiber fills your stomach with large mass but low sugar so you'll feel full longer while that breaks down.
Caloric restriction seems to fail large groups of people to the point where short-term weight loss that is followed by respective gain (and more) has its own Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo_effect
Many people who try caloric restriction suffer from pangs of hunger, general weakness, brain fog, lack of energy, daytime sleepiness, loss of mental clarity and focus, etc. Diets based strictly on calorie restrictions are not sustainable for their specific age+gender+body type combo, but might be effective for yours.
Humans aren't ideal furnaces and food/drink energy content isn't just its temperature output when burnt in a furnace.
It's maybe fine that that's our current best approximation, but seeing it as anything more than a seriously crazy, wild eyed approximation is not good math or science.
How many people don't agree with this ? our body is full of variables that can impede or accelerate processes.
I could eat a nutella jar and not weight a gram, some people almost get fat at the sight of sweets.
Yes we are. We get all our energy from oxidizing reduced carbon. The chemical equation is exactly the same and thus the energy produced must be as well. Burning a gram of sugar will yield 4 calories of heat, whether in a furnace or in a mitochondrion.
And because the waste heat is useful in keeping us warm, it's a 100% efficient process.
The sugar, fats or protein you ingest cannot simply stay in your body, and it's not leaving you either (feces has no nutritional value and unless you have diabetes your urine won't be sweet either). So if your body is already at the right temperature, it is going to be stored as fat. There is simply no other way for it to go!
There is no significant interperson difference in metabolisms. Any difference would raise your body temperature, which is what banned dieting aids used to do (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol)
Your comparison to phlogiston is frankly insulting. As a physicist, I'm not too fond of the practices in nutrition either, but this is just basic biochemistry that has been known for decades.
That's why I like the comparison: it's designed to be insulting to anyone that has studied science. It's also a pretty good summary, I feel, of the state of nutrition "science". Key foundational figures of nutrition "science", especially in America, were fellows like Mr. Kellogg that very much were phlogiston-based snake oil salesmen, and we still use a lot of the same methods to view nutrition, just slightly updated.
So in your analysis we have a black box system where the body is a machine (which you claim to be highly efficient) whose inputs are only food and outputs are merely heat, feces, urine, and stored fat. Looking at even just the Wikipedia page on Biochemistry [1], and assuming I have no further training on this subject, this analysis seems to me to be such a gross oversimplification of a lot of very complex processes.
Can you honestly tell me, as a person of physics, that this doesn't look like the biochemical equivalent of the "spherical cow fallacy"? Assume the body is a furnace / assume the cow is spherical.
If we want to cherry pick simplifying assumptions, allow me to bring up the toroidal simplification of the human body. The toroidal simplification suggests that the human body can be simplified to a donut: the gastrointestinal tract being the "hole" in the donut. This assumption is equally "silly" to the "spherical cow", but I think is also a useful simplifying assumption to point out some immediate holes in bare CICO "furnace" assumption. From the toroidal point of view, the GI microbiome is "outside" the body, it's complex signals and hormone productions and biochemical processes are definitely inputs into the body. That brings up the question of how much input the microbiome on the epidermis/skin may input/output, and the obvious other factors that your simplified model above fails to account for outputs such as sweat and exhalation...
Yes, calories can be a useful approximation model, but I have a hard time believing its the best possible approximation model science can build for us.
This is barely nutrition, this is just basic thermodynamics. Again, because energy is a state function, no assumptions need to be made about the efficiency of any of the intermediate processes or about how the muscles/mitochondria/liver/kidneys/... work, energy conservation keeps us from having to mess with that.
The reason this analysis is so useful is because we're an endothermic species. The core of all of our bodies are at pretty much the same temperature. And as anyone who's had to pay a heating bill knows, heat isn't cheap. In fact, the bulk of our food energy is expended on keeping us warm. This is why there are no such things as slow or fast metabolism. If your metabolism were too slow to burn your resting energy expenditure in 24 hours, you'd die of undercooling. If your metabolism were significantly faster than normal, you'd die of overheating (or at least you'd feel significantly warm to the touch, be constantly sweating/flushed). In fact, a person's resting metabolic rate can be accurately predicted from their body composition [0], and doesn't differ between age or gender, as would be expected. This puts a pretty high lower limit on one's energy expenditure, absolutely nobody can maintain their weight on, say, 600 calories per day. You simply can't keep a 70 kg sack of mostly water at the right temperature with that energy budget, not with how badly isolated we are.
Even if it does seem oversimplified, it's no spherical cow. The energy balance is exact, because of basic physics and biochemistry: we have only one way of generating energy (oxidizing reduced carbon), only one way of storing energy for the long term (long chains of reduced carbon), no energy is lost (because heat generation is a 100% efficient process) and our digestion is very efficient (not feces, urine nor sweat contain significant amounts of carbohydrates, lipids, protein or any other high-energy compound). It's also useful because we have an unflexible lower limit to the amount of energy we expend in a day because of the way our bodies work. The wiggle-room on the previous assumptions only serves to make calories-in smaller (e.g. malabsorption) or calories-out larger (e.g. exercise), and thus would only make it easier to lose weight.
I won't deny the microbiome is important. There is a probably a correlation between gut biome and obesity. But that can only because it influences things like satiety or mood, because none of those bacteria seem to change the eventual energy equation, nor do they change how much heat you need to produce to keep warm or energy expended when lifting a weight. They're relevant because willpower is a finite resource, but they don't change the fact that any diet will in some sense need to consist of eating less calories than you burn in a day
Which is a simplifying assumption that I'm having trouble with here. "Energy balance" does not directly correlate with mass. Yes, there are a lot of indirect relationships and I appreciate you expanding upon them, but in the supposed logic chain of balance energy and thus balance mass, I think there are too many simplifying assumptions that black box the variety and depth of biochemical processes without factoring for them or building an error model for them. There is nothing wrong with using a black box model for a first order estimation/approximation, knowing your error bars and limitations and what next steps you would need to get more accurate data. I think there is something wrong with putting blinders on and pretending that your black box model is the entirety of the facts and can contain no error.
You mention enthalpy, but roughly ignore the entirety of entropy in the equation; you are essentially handwaving it as an unimportant. I think it's lack in the model is telling. (There are multiple reasons the SI switched from calories to Joules as the measure of energy, and phlogiston-influenced thermodynamic baggage is part of that.)
« we have only one way of generating energy (oxidizing reduced carbon) »
We absolutely have anaerobic energy processes at work in our bodies every day. Muscle tissues are an example. The long tail variety of microorganism in our microbiome certainly includes plenty of other examples, our old friend yeast being a prime example.
I could pick apart the other incorrect assumptions from your oversimplifying model, but this one alone is telling enough.
« They're relevant because willpower is a finite resource »
Here's the real problem: there is no direct correlation between mass and "willpower". Bringing up willpower here is slippery slope attempt to make a connection between weight and morality that is unjust at best. That is where the "calories in, calories out" rhetoric absolutely swerves to become more religious revival (the Protestant work ethic applied to food and exercise) than anything resembling science. Teach the controversy.
Entropy is irrelevant and I can't explain why if I don't know why you think it is (possible retorts: we don't use heat engines to perform work, the bulk of our food energy goes to heat and producing heat is always 100% efficient, the reaction rates are not dependent on Gibbs energy because of enzymes etc..).
I never said my black box model is completely accurate. It would be if we had all the parameters, but we don't. The calories-in part is 99% accurate and it helps that it's an upper limit. The calories-out part is harder to predict, but one can get close enough when considering just the basal metabolic rate necessary for survival, that even mechanically ventilated people need to live.
> We absolutely have anaerobic energy processes at work in our bodies every day. Muscle tissues are an example. The long tail variety of microorganism in our microbiome certainly includes plenty of other examples, our old friend yeast being a prime example.
First of all, I explicitly mentioned exercise as one of caveats. But unless you're a top athlete, it's a pretty small part of the energy balance anyways, and on my usual day my muscles are rarely starved of oxygen. And it still doesn't matter because it doesn't change the energy equation! The rest product of anaerobic fermentation in our body is a relatively high energy compound called lactate. We don't expel most of it, so it's not part of calories-out. It gets converted back into glucose and stays part of our mass. Same with the anaerobic microbiome. They don't make our feces more nutritious and they don't perform useful work (in the physics sense), so either they make heat or they expel high energy compounds that we then absorb and metabolize as part of calories-in.
I think it's unfair for you to accuse me of having blinders on. I don't pretend to know everything about the biochemistry of the human body. But I do know the constraints physics puts on it. I'm lucky that our body just so happens to work in a way that I can quite confidently state these things because of a few key assumptions that allow me to abstract over it using basic physics. I'm more than willing to revise my ideas, but you or someone else will first have to give strong facts which is not what I've seen here. One would also have to explain why caloric restriction works perfectly fine in a controlled environment (as many, many articles prove). Or simply explain how with a reduced caloric intake, one could supposedly stay alive without losing mass. Heck, as much as I rue anecdotal evidence, you can try it yourself.
> Here's the real problem: there is no direct correlation between mass and "willpower". Bringing up willpower here is slippery slope attempt to make a connection between weight and morality that is unjust at best. That is where the "calories in, calories out" rhetoric absolutely swerves to become more religious revival (the Protestant work ethic applied to food and exercise) than anything resembling science. Teach the controversy.
Good thing I'm Catholic then, and not even American. Diet is nothing but willpower. I won't pretend it's easy. Life is already hard and dieting takes a long time of fighting a basic instinct. But even if you don't believe in "calories-in, calories-out" (which I still don't think is justified), everyone believes in conservation of mass. If you eat less, you'll lose weight: http://blog.ifac-control.org/2016/12/05/closed-loop-weight-c...
I don't make any moral judgments about this, as I rarely do: I could never pretend to know another person's struggle. I don't think the recent obesity epidemic is a sudden widespread moral failure, but rather an change in environment that had an unexpected effect. But I also don't like ungrounded excuses, nor how quite a few of the comments on this page don't provide any evidence for quite extraordinary claims.
The protected professional designation is "dietitian". When the NYT calls out "nutritionists", I have no idea who they're talking about.
Edit: a good analogy would probably be a licensed counselor/therapist vs and unlicensed one.
Here's one example: http://www.irinnews.org/fr/node/238092
Where they say
>>the report noted confusion about the role of nutrition in HIV, which was being exacerbated by a dual system of medicine regulation that subjected "Western" medicine to much more rigorous controls than complementary medicines, such as immune boosters and nutritional supplements.
They're alluding to Matthias Rath. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Rath
My mom had a dietician as a next door neighbor. This lady was never seen without a 1 liter big gulp filled with diet soda. We had her family over for Thanksgiving one year; Mom puts on a big show with white table cloths, fine china, crystal, etc. They all showed up with big gulps and even went home to get some diet soda when they ran low because we only had regular.
The kicker was this lady didn't eat vegetables. Only bread, meat and diet soda.
It would be like a dental hygienist that didn't floss, or a personal trainer that never did squats, or an arms control advocate with armed bodyguards, or an envronmentalist that never separates recyclables from the garbage.
The fat dietitian might be self-experimenting to support they hypothesis that their fat-loss diet plan works (at n=1), or becoming familiar with the effects of various unhealthy eating habits.
But we weren't talking about a fat dietitian. It was a dietitian that apparently does not eat vegetables.
So I lasted until today, Jan 18th, when I had a small bottle of Sprite. (In my defense, I was at a restaurant using the wi-fi and had to order something).
Within five minutes my heart rate was through the roof, I had the shakes and felt really, really lightheaded. It lasted at least three hours.
Wow. Three weeks without sugar and then ONE drink did that to me. Now I'm ten times more motivated to never have one again.
Of course, you could just have undiagnosed diabetes too.
[1] http://www.yalescientific.org/2010/09/mythbusters-does-sugar...
Edit: I stand corrected, Sprite does not have caffeine
I'm a diet coke addict and the way I deal with it is that I drink half a bottle and keep the rest for latter. The fact that I know that I still have a half-full soda makes me not want to buy another. And if I feel like drinking some soda I just take a sip. The soda is at room temperature so it tastes like shit. This crappy taste makes not want to drink anymore and I can go without buying a new bottle of diet coke for more than a week. Sometimes I can last a month. By using this method I don't feel guilty if every once in a while I have a soda and I've been able to reduce my daily intake of a bottle of soda to just one small bottle (20FL oz) every one or two weeks.
Of course I have a lot more fat on me now than back when I averaged (guessing) 1.5L/day of soda and probably 4000+ total calories a day, almost all junk food. Lots of effort just to slow the progression away from a fit (looking) body toward a middle-aged one. And I feel way, way less healthy and get sick all the time, as opposed to never. Man, being a teenager was great. :-/
I've been eating mostly just fruit for dessert after dinner. It's really good because after dinner is one of my sweet tooth triggers. Well I got the dumb idea to eat a piece of a chocolate turtle candy instead and within 5 minutes was sweating and my heart was racing. I had the lightheadedness too. I felt awful. On the plus side like you said this kind of experience helps me not want to eat it more.
I started an open facebook group with a few friends so we support each other in not eating it. It's been super helpful too to have someone help keep you accountable. It's pretty new but if anyone wants to join feel free: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1411638028861122/
Edit: A lot of the reasoning behind quitting can be found in this lecture by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology titled "The Bitter Truth". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM&t=1s This, in addition to a lot of reading about world history of sugar trade and how disease is usually right behind the introduction of sugar is a large part of my personal decision to try to stop eating it.
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/10/physiological... < blog on the topic (sorry to link this blog again, he really has some good posts on topics like this with research linked in)
I had really annoying side effects from medication until at one point I realized I got the same side effects almost like clockwork even when I had forgotten to take it. At that point the side effects just disappeared completely I haven't seen them since.
(That said, the effect you felt might be real or not but I still agree with you that cutting back on sugar is smart.)
Between a fruit or a chocolate bar at identical prices, the vast majority of Americans will choose the chocolate bar. Most people will scoff at eating only veggies, whole grains, legumes, fruits (aka Mediterranean style diet). They will cheat and get their sweets, sugar and refined bakery products, even knowing the evidence.
Sugar (or bad food) is an addiction. It's not about nutritionists or scientific evidence, it's about having enough mental strength to stay away from bad foods.
You're close. Attempting to do so while not having any understanding of why things happen is a recipe for disaster.
It must be reasoned that obesity is a disorder caused by something more then just 'poor eating habits'. There are physiotypes that will simply resist obesity on the worst of diets. I don't need to link a paper for this, this should be common sense from anyone's experience around enough people.
So, if you reason that obesity is a disorder or sickness... you would then try to treat the cause, not the symptom. In the same sense that a person with a peanut allergy would simply avoid peanuts, a person with obesity may have this state caused by disturbed leptin/insulin signaling. A diet must then be designed to compensate for that disorder. (we know that once surplus white adipose tissue is grown, there's no going back, a modified diet must be adapted for life or those buckets just start filling again)
Mind providing more references/reliable pointers on this?
Paper to get you thinking on how WAT acts on signaling: http://www.cambridge.org.secure.sci-hub.bz/core/journals/pro...
Paper on WAT quantity and its effects on metabolic syndrome. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.12519/pdf . Where this one gets me thinking is that for some people, growing WAT may actually be an adaptation to prevent metabolic disorder from a poor diet.
What we know is WAT can hold about 4x its size in fat before it divides into more. What we don't really know for humans is whether long term weight loss allows us to lose some of these, or whether they just deflate.... some rat studies show there can be a reduction, but for humans it would require repeated biopsy......
Yet the glycemic index of whole wheat bread is higher than Coca Cola. (Look it up!) I.e. the same amount of calories of bread will spike your blood sugar more quickly than Coke.
Metabolically, starchy foods including grains are a lot more like sugar than people who think they are making rational health decisions want to believe.
1) fewer total calories,
2) way, way, way less candy (to include soda, many breakfast cereals) and dessert food (milk shake with those fries? Dessert. Donut? Dessert. Coffee cake? Dessert.) on average,
3) fewer convenience foods, and relatedly, less added sugar in diet,
4) less deep frying
I'm less confident about these, but would guess dairy and fruit juice consumption also tends to be way lower in healthier societies. More cream sauces, yoghurt, and cheese, but much less drinking milk on its own, milk over breakfast cereal, grande Frappuccinos. Fruit juices more likely to be real and unadulterated, pricier, and less often consumed.
Not cutting out carbs period, or even limiting them to a tiny percentage of calories. This makes me suspicious of painting too much of the carb kingdom as problematic per se.
[EDIT] Formatting, "desert" to "dessert" because apparently I failed kindergarten.
[EDIT2] Looks like I was wrong about milk ("fluid milk consumption") as a common difference: http://www.dairyinfo.gc.ca/index_e.php?s1=dff-fcil&s2=cons&s...
It's anecdotal, but I'm on sugar-free diet right now (just out of interest, since Jan 1) and all I feel is that it's annoying that now I can't eat half of all I ate before. So may be it's a habit, but not attraction by any means. Now I'm considering two options: cancel this silly experiment or move ahead to higher level of insanity and stop eating anything that have sweet taste, like apples or bananas.
My doctor told me to try cutting carbs to a level where I don't crave carbs. At that level, supposedly you're not whacking out your insulin/blood sugar levels. Speaking anecdotally, I have found that this level exists.
At certain point taxpayers en masse will have to make a decision between taxing sugary foods to control the rise of type 2 diabetes (removing the corn subsidies might also help) or reallocating an ever-increasing share of public funds to treating type 2 diabetes, foregoing other public spending priorities.
> even knowing the evidence
USDA food pyramid still treats fat as humber one enemy, stores still carry a wide variety of low-fat products, a Subway commercial as of two years ago still advised the hapless obese character to "eat less fat", and a caring daughter in the morning commercials still pours her father a bowl full of sugar-laden Cheerios because those "can lower your cholesterol".
I think you're overestimating the level of nutritional prowess the average American has. Even if the evidence is out there, few people aside from Gary Taubes are reading nutritional journals.
Also if you want to increase transparency for nutrition, consider contributing to Open Food Facts (we need Perl, Android, iOS volunteers and barcode scanners to help) https://world.openfoodfacts.org https://github.com/openfoodfacts
And we're translating it to Hindi :)
More seriously, Open Food Facts is a mobile crowdsourcing effort, and we have volunteers from all the planet :-)
Are we really to think that the American diet is so unhealthy because of the opinions of unknown dietitians and researchers? Was Fred Stare ever a household name? (Maybe Fred Astaire). Or is it more likely that the manipulation of the diet to use more salt, more sugar, more oils and thus more food, is really the problem. Authorities have been saying for plenty of time to avoid sugar, overeating, processed foods and sedentary lifestyles.[1] This isn't a new thing. Taubes and similar authors act like they discovered a conspiracy among scientists and thought leaders to make Americans sick, but it just doesn't add up. The obvious culprit has been food processors' desire for growth the whole time, and that was visible at least 40 years ago.
1. Healthy People: The Surgeon General’s Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, 1979. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/NNBBGK.pdf
People can eat the same amount of cals that are diffrently processed for various reasons:
- Insulin resistence
- Specific cancers
- Thyroid disfunction
- Level of amylaze expression (how good we absorb complex carbs)
- Microbiota status
- Even viruses (https://www.wired.com/2016/12/mysterious-virus-cause-obesity...)
In all casses people/animals did eat the same amount of food and got different amounts of fat.
Since anybody is in a differerent biochemical spot here the default should actually be that cal. is NOT a cal, depending on your (meta/epi)genetics.
Any proffessional claiming otherwise should find another job IMO. I use this claim as a marker for incompetence.
Imagine saying to someone that has bad vision to focus on the object.
- Faster eating will stretch your stomach muscles more which is trigger for satiety
- Faster eating will produce lower blood sugar as salivary amilaze doesn't break complex carbs into simple sugars.
There are papers on that, but CBB to find them now.
It looks like they might actually be getting out of the business, though. Good luck on replacing the corn syrup now that the Midwestern corn states are their own lobby...
A demonstration of the ease in which it is possible to become an accredited nutritionist can be seen in Dr Ben Goldacre's successful application to have his dead cat Hettie accredited as a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants.
This is not specific to nutritionism. See "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" is an actual science paper accepted by a journal
Better put that crap on your packaging now, confectioners. I see mandatory warnings like "consumption of this product increases your risk of developing type 2 diabetes" in your future.
The big, glaring, obvious problem with this is "how much you eat is the only thing that determines weight gain/loss" doesn't imply that what you eat doesn't matter. What you eat can easily change how much you eat; it's much easier to consume a giant pile of calories if it's a cake than if it's spinach.
The only way to prevent this is to count precisely with an app or something, which is obviously a big challenge for most people.