Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

Refined flour has a high glycemic index, so do starches like potatoes.

It spikes your blood sugar levels very quickly.

Perhaps I was unclear. It was my intention to point out two things. First, that the base ingredient grains we eat now are a great deal different from what was regularly consumed in 1914. Second that our sources of grains are more likely to be prepackaged foods containing ingredients that were very uncommon in 1914. This was done as a means of pointing out a significant logical fallacy in the original article.

Seems like we've got some scope mismatch here. I very specifically want to point out that what goes into a loaf of bread now is not the same as what went into a loaf of bread in 1914. Fine white flour (and sugar) were still somewhat dear around the turn of the century. It's no surprise that a dishonest baker would extend it with chalk. The less close you were to the city, the more dear they were or the more likely you were to grow your own or do without. I made the assumption that most people would eat more coarse bread. Just for kicks, I looked up the ingredients of three different brands of bread. The main ingredient was, indeed, flour. Typically followed by HCFS, water, yeast and less than 2% of stuff like barley malt, soybean oil, diglycerides, and guar gum. Thus I am willing to accept "exaggerated" over "wrong" -- while I was writing, my frustration over the afore-mentioned ingredients in DAIRY products was foremost in my mind. If you haven't already read it, I recommend _Food Politics_ by Marion Nestle. http://www.foodpolitics.com/

It just so happens that I've got a stack of very old cookbooks that belonged to my great grandmother. Well, half of it. My mom has the other half. I started baking using recipes from those books around the age of 9. The backs of these books are full of notes written in her spidery handwriting. Notes about substitutions (she lived through two world wars), notes about compensating for ambient conditions, and the recipes from her childhood. Well, longer than that -- she didn't come to the US until she was 30. When my results did not match hers, I assumed her base ingredients were different from mine. This partly responsible for what lead to learning how flour is typed by ash in Europe. It's also how I learned that most of the oats consumed in the US around the time my great grandmother emigrated here would have been imported from Scotland and Canada, and that they would have been steel-cut to increase cooking time. And that rolled oats came into being sometime around 1910. It's also what eventually lead me to read _Day of St Anthony's Fire_, but that's a whole 'nother topic of conversation. From this, I'm making an "educated guess" as to what a cup of flour would have been like in 1914. And you have to admit, it read well.

This would be one of those deals where I have zero credentials to offer other than the claims made in the last paragraph. Or you can ask tptacek... pretty sure he'll provide a glowing reference for my cooking skills. Having no phone, television or computer in my childhood, I turned to the big stack of cookbooks and the abundance of fresh ingredients available on our small farm. Doesn't make me an expert, but I am quite facile at slinging some tasty hash.

As for non-grain foods, jam is, more or less, flavored pectin. Why is there pectin in Stonyfield Farms yogurt? So they have to put less actual yogurt in there. Why is there 'modified food starch' in Breakstones's cottage cheese? "Mouth feel," is what they'll tell you. But I've had hüttenkäse that had much better "mouth feel" with nothing in it but milk, salt and culture (likely due to higher fat content).

And thanks for the links. It amazes me to think that my great grandparents -- the ones I knew, at least -- lived into their late 90s with plaster, alum, strychnine, sawdust and bean flour in their food. Maybe the fact that the latest act cited in the second article was passed in 1899 helped, somehow.

Here's the funniest thing, and the prime reason why the BMI is totally useless for measuring obesity. I immigrated to Canada, and passed a full physical. My pulse is 60bpm (I actually hit full-blown bradycardic of <50bpm when I lived in the UK), my blood pressure was 125/80. But I'm allegedly morbidly obese.

I can lift 200+ lbs, I can climb a 20' ladder without getting out of breath when most skinny people I know get out of breath going up a flight of stairs (incidentally I live on the 11th floor of an apartment building and I started running out of breath at the 7th floor racing with my dog).

I can eat a double bigmac, large fries, large drink and two burgers off the dollar menu. I can do it regularly and it doesn't effect my weight. I've gone on diets eating mostly salad and calorie restricting myself, and it doesn't effect my weight. The only diet that genuinely works to make me lose weight has been the Atkins, and even coming off of the diet, my weight remains stable at that point like I reset my weight slider or something.

I get told by doctors who are flabbier than myself that I need to lose weight and all I can think is "I can Hulk-throw your fat ass out of your office window and you're struggling walking around the exam table with a coffee".

The obesity epidemic is a product of medical organizations adopting the BMI as a weight reference when it was deemed too inaccurate to study the weight changes in soldiers and was dropped. That was a height and age restricted group, and the BMI couldn't produce usable results to demonstrate fitness. So why medical organizations around the world have adopted it as a holy grail just clearly demonstrates their incompetence.

The other factor is increased sedation, but this isn't necessarily causing obesity. This is causing a general and whole shift in our society to being fat. I'm not talking obesity as a contagious disease, I'm talking that people are probably on average 30-40lbs heavier than what they should be.

Although, it should be noted that most western societies are facing a much more frightening anorexia and bulimia epidemic. Why is it more frightening? Because I'm 80lbs over the male long held 'average' of 180lbs, and likely 120+lbs past what my ideal is allegedly for my height. I can't go 80lbs below my ideal weight, and I certainly can't go 120lbs below my ideal. However I can quite easily go 200, 300, 400lbs above my ideal and have virtually no long term health complications for staying there for a decade and losing the weight. If I was at 60lbs, I would likely be dead or do serious permanent damage to my heart and organs even if I was only there for months and regained the weight.

We wholly don't understand weight in humans. We've got 7 year olds who are anorexic and 7 year olds who are morbidly obese, and no one is doing anything but blaming society when it's happening throughout dozens of cultures.

Practicing physical activity indirectly increases a series the expenditure for the basal life processes, so it increases the calories consumption more than the raw amount of energy spent doing it.