The obesity era: The problem may be bigger than any of us (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The obesity era: The problem may be bigger than any of us (2013)

aeon.co

66 pointskevbin74 comments

>>It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities.

As the top commenter points out, this is incredibly misleading. Just because the macronutrient ratios of lab animals has remained the same does not say anything about the contents of what they are being fed. For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference.

The fact of the matter is that the companies that are producing the foods that the lab animals eat are under the same market pressures as those producing food for humans: they try to do their best to minimize costs, even if it comes at the expense of the consumers' health. So it isn't at all surprising that lab animals have gotten fatter along with humans.

I think as a nation we need to stop chasing overly complicated explanations of the obesity phenomenon and apply Occam's Razor. A ton of people have been able to successfully lose weight by paying attention to what and how much they eat. Go to any bodybuilding forum on the Internet and look at before-and-after photos and read accounts of how the transformation was accomplished. It really, really isn't rocket science. If someone isn't able to lose weight when they eat less, it is much more likely that they are doing something wrong than that there are hidden factors that are preventing their weight loss. (I don't blame them because there is an insane amount of misinformation on the topic these days, partially thanks to "experts" who try to justify their research and employment by sowing doubt and muddying the waters.)

> A ton of people have been able to successfully lose weight by paying attention to what and how much they eat. Go to any bodybuilding forum on the Internet and look at before-and-after photos and read accounts of how the transformation was accomplished. It really, really isn't rocket science.

Survivorship bias. We have no sense of how many failed using the same methodology. The incentives to post results are biased heavily toward the successful end of the spectrum, for both internal and social incentives. More cognitive science, less rocket science.

> For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference.

Do you have a citation for this? For what it's worth, I avoid soy products in general because of concerns about hormonal effects, but I'm not quite up on the state-of-the-art in terms of the research.

What's funny about the lab animals getting fatter is that the guy who figured out that BPA was an endocrine disruptor figured it out because they were having problems with test tubes. The test tubes activated endocrine sensitive cells and the test tube maker refused to tell him what they made the test tubes out of..

http://www.fastcompany.com/1139298/real-story-behind-bisphen...

90% of people tested have BPA in them.

There was a professor who lost weight on the twinkie diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie#Twinkie_diet.

He just ate less calories than he needed.

He almost certainly felt very hungry and unhealthy during that short term experiment.

Hey I fully agree with your overall point. If you don't eat more than you need in calories, you won't gain weight. Simple as that.

I did have an objection regarding egg protein v.s. soy protein - perhaps you meant impurities etc. If you are feeding them protein, and protein only, you won't notice a difference. Proteins = amino acids. Egg protein is the same thing as soy protein, which is the same thing as "meat" protein.. All of life uses the same set of amino acids, which are made according to the blueprint in genes (i.e. DNA), using essentially the same genetic code. It's literally the same physical thing.

This is as uninformed as it is vigorously stated.

Different foods have different amino acid profiles, meaning that the amount of each amino acid varies, in some cases considerably, from food to food. Some amino acids the body can make itself; others can be gotten only from food. As ever, Wikipedia has a good starting point[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid

For caloric purposes this makes no difference. Thus - again, soy protein = egg protein. Both will give you energy.

Even with fairly low levels of food consumption (i.e. not average american), as long as it is varied, we get all the essential amino acids. Please note that even people on pretty intense weight loss diets don't suffer from "essential amino acid depletion"

The bacteria in our gut can synthesize all the amino acids by the way, including essential ones, from pretty much any source of nutrients.

Note however that in practice it is very hard to construct a diet (evan a vegan diet) lacking in essential amino acids, unless you use an extreme monoculture such as.... Only corn.

Yes, but with some nuances, each has differing amounts of the various amino acids. That said, soy stands up well to egg as a source of essential (and non-essential) aminos.

> A restaurant on a warm day whose air conditioning breaks down will see a sharp decline in sales (yes, someone did a study).

Ugh, then link to the fucking study! I've spent a few minutes in Google/Google Scholar trying to find said study, to no avail. Would love to see it if someone finds it.

This is where the article pulls that quote from I believe [1]:

> Herman cited a consumer survey suggesting that after an air-conditioning breakdown, restaurant sales drop dramatically.

Which refers to this paper [2], it references this survey to support some conclusions in the paper.

> This literature has been supplemented by a survey designed specifically for this chapter (consumer survey, University of Toronto, unpublished data, 1991). Because of the anticipation that the scientific literature, especially on humans, might be skimpy, a questionnaire was sent to a number of restaurant and grocery chains in the metropolitan Toronto area asking about shifts in customer purchasing behavior as a function of environmental heat. This survey is by no means scientific, but it reflects the accumulated experience of merchants whose livelihood depends to some extent on accurately assessing how people's food purchases vary with the heat.

> More parochially, one Toronto restaurateur (unpublished data from consumer survey, 1991) conceded that "sales plunge during a heat wave .... People do not have the appetite for a large heavy meal when it is hot."

So not that much of a study...

[1] http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v30/n11/full/0803326a.html...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236229/

It would be nice if articles like this didn't attack a strawman: Most people who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness.

I disagree. Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people. This is not helped by the rather silly trend of the fat-is-beautiful group, which only encourages the opposite fat-shaming groups.

> Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people.

"Most people who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity" and "the loudest voices on the internet forums Afforess frequents who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity" are not the same groups of people.

> Most ... don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness

Can you support this claim? I think "most" still may think that and would be interested to see data.

The article takes a simplified theory about obesity based on caloric intake and thermodynamics and pokes holes in it. But of course there are holes, it is a simplification!

Perhaps the US tax code should stop subsidizing corn syrup and other processed food inputs. As it is now, the tax payers pay twice -- once for the subsidy, and then again for healthcare.

Indeed. Also, why not do the same that worked before with big tobacco? Ban soft drink sport sponsorships. Ban advertisement of high sugar/hfcs foods to children. Add surgeon general notes to junk foods.

Health consequences are paid by the rest of society, in one way or another. Nurses say hospitals are filled with obese patients. It's getting out of control.

Or just add a calorie tax. That would pretty effectively do the trick. Would negligibly affect the cost of low-calorie-density food, but boy that soda and/or butter becomes expensive.

I always wonder how did alcohol get away with not having to put the calories in it. That would become quite more expensive as well.

That'd be great way to establish a regressive tax. Luxury foods don't have more calories than cheap ones so as a percentage of cost cheap food prices would increase more. Not to mention that percentage of income spent on food for low income people is much higher than % of income spent on food by rich people.

Then add: a more aggressive earned income tax, a more generous child tax credit, or a guaranteed minimum income (or some kind of hybrid plan). If the problem is that some people can't afford things, attack that problem directly.

Legally guaranteeing that parents can put their 26-year-olds on their family healthcare plan is also regressive (it doesn't help uninsured families), but that didn't stop it from being enacted.

Real butter is quite healthy in moderation. And already expensive enough!

Why blame it on the foods?

I'd rather have obese people paying a plus for healthcare.

There's not any reason to think corn and corn syrup are any worse than sugar or rice. Which is to say they're not really a problem at all. Corn syrup products are just tasty things that people with poor self control overeat.

What does appear to be an actual policy problem is polyunsaturated fats. Soy and canola oil accumulate in tissues and slow the metabolic rate, interfering with mitochondrial respiration. If you eat a lot of margarine and fried foods and ranch dressing, your resting metabolic rate will measurably decrease over time, leading to fat gain even with static calorie intake.

The fact that animals have experienced significant weight gain is by far the best evidence the author provides to support a factor exogenous to the calories-in-calories-out model. What are the leading explanations for this phenomenon?

I can't answer your question, because I don't know (the OP covers the leading explanations, as far as I know) but... calories-in/calories-out is technically correct, but there are some complexities.

Calories in: calorie counts are guesswork. For the healthier foods, there's even more uncertainty about calories. You know exactly what you're getting with Coke, but you shouldn't be drinking much of that if you're trying to lose weight. If you eat an apple instead, you're talking about 10 to 20% variation each way in calorie count. Finally, there are individual variations based on the microbes in our gut, and how we absorb nutrients.

Calories out: people vary in basal metabolic rate (BMR) and we don't always know why. Even if we could get a good idea of how many calories we were taking in each day, and we can't, most of us have no idea of what we're burning. There are ways to tip the scale (build more muscle, spend more time in cold temperatures, and, obviously, be more active) but it's impossible to know, in general, how many calories you burned in a day.

Given that an error of 50 calories per day is 5 pounds gained per year, precise calorie counting isn't possible. It's largely a problem with two factors:

1. Individual metabolic variation. People with shitty metabolisms are going to get fat if they eat restaurant meals portioned for 24-year-olds. For 40-50% of the population, eating portions that the median person can is going to lead to fatness.

2. Silent failure. The body punishes calorie errors on the negative side (hunger) or even tries to adapt (low energy, starvation mode) in ways that are counterproductive in modern times. It doesn't punish, in any immediate way, positive calorie errors.

Also, a calorie is not a calorie. The body spends much less time and energy digesting simple sugars and starches, compared to proteins and fats, and because carbs are digested so much more efficiently, they contribute more to weight gain. It is possible to lose weight simply by reducing carbohydrates as a percentage of diet, even if total caloric consumption remains constant.

Satiety is also a major factor, probably the most underrated factor in successful weight loss. Because the body digests them more slowly, high fat and protein foods stave off hunger much longer than high carb foods do, so people naturally tend to consume fewer total calories on a low carb diet, due to reduced hunger and cravings.

This is absurd. You're overestimating and basing all your theory on the thermic effect of food while failing to understand how hormones affect our metabolism.

Fat and protein are not an optimal source of energy and its use as such will force the body to open up certain pathways that are metabolically inefficient and potentially ruinous in the long term.

Cronic ketogenic dieters for example have extremely slow metabolisms and present symptoms of hypothyroidism.

You're reading too much into what I said. None of your claims actually contradict mine. This part actually supports what I said:

Fat and protein are not an optimal source of energy and its use as such will force the body to open up certain pathways that are metabolically inefficient and potentially ruinous in the long term.

Yes, that's exactly why low-carb diets work. They force your body to use a less efficient fuel, which is an effective way to counteract the problem of having too much fuel. And while ketogenic dieting may be "potentially" ruinous in the long term, obesity is definitely ruinous in the long term.

I'm not really a pro-keto person, I think strict keto diets are too extreme for the long term. On the other hand, it's evident that a high carbohydrate diet provides energy that is excessive and unsuited for modern, sedentary lifestyles. Most of us would be a lot less overweight if we simply ate fewer carbs (like <40% of total calories)

> Given that an error of 50 calories per day is 5 pounds gained per year, [...]

As people get fatter, they need more food just to stay the same. So if I took my exact current caloric needs to stay the same weight at my level of activity, and added eg a constant 500 kCal each day, I would not in fact gain kg after kg year in year out. But rather, my weight curve would look like the charge/time curve when loading up a capacitor.

If your calorie count remained constant (which is an assumption that I'm not sure I share) as you gained the weight, then you'd gain weight until the calorie surplus was zero. However, it's quite possible that, as you gained weight, you'd also be eating more calories, and if you kept a constant calorie error, you'd keep gaining weight.

Also, metabolism slows with age. However, people are heaviest around 55, and start losing weight as appetite decreases beyond that.

This is not how metabolism works. It's not mechanistic. Extra calories rapidly ramp up the resting metabolic rate, and deficits dramatically slow it. Minor protein or sleep deficiencies slow the metabolic rate. Endurance exercise slows the resting metabolic rate. Low calorie intake is a major risk factor for obesity.

> Low calorie intake is a major risk factor for obesity.

That sounds fishy. Especially on evolutionary grounds. Why would anyone ever starve, if metabolism was so variable?

This is interesting. Thanks for the insight. So, how would you solve the obesity problem? Do you think it's about food quality rather than quantity? What exercises work and which don't?

Out of curiosity, why isn't the state of medicine able to speed BMR up to the level of the 95th-percentile 17-year-old, a rate we know to be safe? It seems like getting metabolism to that level would have minimal side effects. (Obviously, metabolism can't be increased without limit, since there's a point where a person would get heatstroke.) Is it just that hard to control it like that from day to day?

You can easily take thyroid hormones and raise the metabolic rate. That is not tricky at all. Bodybuilders do it all the time to lean out. Some say a substantial fraction of the population is mildly hypothroid and meds are appropriate, cf. Broda Barnes.

Ari Whitten's "Forever Fat Loss" I think covers all the causes of obesity and debunks the major myths. There is no simple solution because the totality of modern industrialized life conspires to produce obesity. Emotional stress, lack of sleep, lack of daylight exposure, micro-nutrient deficiencies, pollution exposure, and so forth all tank metabolism. The body is made for near continuous low level outdoor activity and "working out" is not a proper substitute. You're designed to burn through large amounts of calories daily doing stuff like walking 8 miles at a leisurely pace and moving things around. Whereas the stress of a daily running habit is apt to adaptively lower the resting metabolic rate to the point it's barely useful.

Everybody unduly obsesses over the food aspects, but to the extent there is a particular food villain it's probably seed oils. Soy oil and canola oil suppress metabolism (directly interfere with mitochondria) and are quite new inventions, and are now consumed in huge quantities. Aside from that there is simple calorie over consumption driven by food reward. People are naturally attuned to much more monotonous and lower flavor diets than are readily available now.

The real issue is nobody wants the slow and steady option.

If you are overweight you can lose a pound/month with only a few minor changes to your diet. You won't feel any more hungry than you usually do. You won't feel a lack of energy or ability to think.

But a person who is 60 pounds overweight won't do this because it will take 5 years to lose the weight. Instead they will jump from one diet to the next to the next binge to the even stricter diet and in 5 years be no better off than when they started.

It's frustrating. You get a LOT of fat shaming, you get discouraged at a slow pace, you don't see the firsthand/obvious benefits for a long time.

I've lost ~30lbs since February, which is around one pound a _week_. I still can't tell the difference. The only thing that's changing is the number on the scale every week. Still the same clothes, the same fat arms, the same belly fat. Just a little more fit because I've been doing more exercise. And because I'm female, I get the additional hassle of being assumed I'm pregnant when I'm not, and clothes are hard to fit (and I can't even look at plus sized clothes most days... too big for me, what).

I aim to lose another 50lbs or so (the low end of normal weight) in the next couple years and I need to maintain the diet/exercise I'm doing now in general, but I only do this because I need to be in good shape for trying for kids in the future and for myself/my spouse. Can't think about any other objective because I will fail miserably if I do. I don't see myself ever fitting into my little black dress, or avoiding fat shaming from random strangers... not even walking around with a huge grin on my face for crossing the 30lb mark at a weighing at the doctor's office counteracts how terrible shaming feels. :(

People who have been fat and then lost weight have a different metabolism than people who stayed at the same lower weight throughout. Most people who lose a significant amount of weight gain it all back and then some within three years. Your theory that losing slower would be more sustainable than losing faster is interesting, but do you have any actual evidence for it? If calories in/calories out were all there was to it, shouldn't it take no willpower to merely stay at the lower weight once achieved, regardless of how quickly that loss were achieved?

As for me, I think the real issue is that we still really have no idea why people have collectively gotten fatter and thus have no advice to give that consistently works to completely reverse that process. What we have are guesses as to what might work. And most of these guesses are wrong.

"Your theory that losing slower would be more sustainable than losing faster is interesting, but do you have any actual evidence for it?"

I think losing weight quickly for a short period of time (4-6 weeks) works very well (e.g. V-Diet). I also think losing weight slowly over the long term (max 1 pound per month) also works well.

I think most people try somewhere in the middle of the two extremes and it just doesn't work. Trying to lose weight quickly for an extended period just doesn't work for all but the most motivated people.

For evidence in support of losing weight slowly and almost effortlessly take a look at the book Mindless Eating. It covers a lot of interesting research.

Obesity is a great example of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure.

Having been overweight and borderline obese I have a certain mindset that my level of fitness is achievable by anyone who puts in the effort. I firmly believe this.

There is a load of research supporting this, that a calorie is a calorie, and I suspect it will stay that way...

I have found it to be MUCH easier to get regular exercise when I live in a reasonably pedestrian safe neighborhood. I have found that the perceived level of effort to maintain fitness varies wildly with my external conditions (stress, neighborhood, prosperity, relationships, etc.). Saying that everyone can do it if they just give it the old college try may be a result of your circumstances.

Yes, and anyone should be able to hold their breath for 3 minutes. Oh wait, that's hard? Is it possible there is a strong biological drive that makes it difficult? So does that mean these drives affect our behavior? Imagine there was a similar drive for food. Let's call it "hunger." If such a drive existed, it is conceivable it would vary from person to person, and things would be more complicated than "a calorie is a calorie" because there's this whole strong drive drive influencing things. What if other factors could mess with the strength of this drive?

Thank goodness this is all hypothetical, otherwise "a calorie is a calorie" might be just a meaningless platitude.

Your analogy and message would be more pleasant if you didn't wrap it in the confusing and unfriendly sarcasm.

A fair point.

I have tried putting this in friendlier terms at times, but my perception is that most people who hold the reductionist view want fatness to be a morality tale where bad things happen to people who deserved it. That notion offends me, and it seems far-fetched since this is happening in animals, too. That or someone is generalizing from their n of one anecdote to all people.

Even worse, I feel like this platitude is used as an excuse to stop thinking. The least interesting part of this whole thing is the thermodynamics--to the point of being so uninteresting that I can't believe it gets talked about. How about why are people eating more? Do some foods satiate hunger better? Why is the problem accelerating over time? What is causing animals to weigh more--has their willpower diminished? A calorie is a calorie misses the point so thoroughly it infuriates me.

Apologies for the tone.

Capacity to "put in effort" varies, for person to person and task to task. And trying to do the same thing and expecting a different result is obviously crazy. For most (myself included) it is sufficient to be educated in diet and exercise and have access to simple healthy foods. But not everyone's brains are wired the same way.

You won't fix that minority of people no matter how often you shame them or say it is their fault. You need a different tool, be that professional counseling, restricted environments where they cannot access their drugs in the doses they desire, gastric bypass surgery, or, in many cases, simply accepting that they will lead uncomfortable lives and die early.

Might I add my "effort" to this conversation -

I've lost almost 30lbs this year. I know a couple people that have also lost a similar amount of weight with me. We all _look_ like we do the same things - eat less, eat better, walk/jog/gym more. But they're healthy with no chronic problems like me, and their worst problems just don't even compare. I'm the only one completely hopped up on asthma meds and painkillers for nerve damage in my legs while burning through what limited effort I can put in every day (yay ADHD) because I feel my health is more important than working. (Might I add I've had all these issues before I was overweight/obese, or they were caused by something out of my control... so while losing weight is good, it doesn't make anything better.)

This is before I even get started on the horror that is telling people to eat healthy while earning a low income - one of the people above is someone I hired for my restaurant, and the drastically increased wage she's been earning under me with a better job in general enables her to eat well and lose weight.

You're right. I hate people who fat shame. Everything is conveniently just swept under the rug of "just put in effort" like it doesn't matter, but it really does. I have already come to terms with what it's taking me to lose weight (on a better day when my leg isn't on fire, I'd call my diet/lifestyle change "pretty easy") but to act like that's trivial is beyond insulting.

Mmm... pound of cure.

First, a snark admission. I read the article and the comments concurrently. I was not disappointed in how quickly the reductionists came out to defend their favorite theory of caloric thermodynamics.

That said, I will provide an personal anecdote for your perusal and make one suggestion. First, the anecdote: I dropped from a weight of 205 - 210 pounds to a weight of 145 pounds over the course of three years. I am back up to 155 pounds. Yes, that last detail is important to my story. I am 5-foot-8-inches, so this is a radical change of BMI. Why did I lose so much weight? A radical change in diet.

I have a medical condition for which I was trying to avoid the most expensive treatments. I moved (not overnight) to a diet that removed virtually all grain-based and tuber-based carbohydrates. My carbohydrates came from fruits and leafy vegetables. No, I do not advise this diet for anyone unless they are trying to avoid the drugs that comes with my condition.

It worked. I went off the over-priced 1890's-era anti-inflammatory medication and stayed it for three years. Then, my symptoms returned.

New doctor, who said nothing about my diet and threw steroids and more anti-inflammatory meds at me. Those did not work. I lost even more weight, down to 135 pounds. I even went off my diet. Yes, it was good to eat bread, potatoes, and rice again.

Finally, I gave in and accepted that I would be on a ludicrously priced biological. Symptoms arrested. Now, back to my old diet. I have ten pounds to lose to get to my target weight.

What I am suggesting is that reductionism works. My diet notebooks shows a slight reduction in calories by removing grain-and-tuber carbs. However, it only takes you so far. There is room for wholism and seeking an understanding of exactly how a given source of nutrients is metabolized.

If you don't mind my asking -- what is your condition? I've got Ulcerative Colitis, and tried a similar diet (the Specific Carbohydrate Diet) to reasonable success. I've also had a few rounds of Infliximab (Remicade), which has helped me reach remission.

You quite correctly diagnosed my ailment and diet. I wasn't (and still am not) wild about being on Infliximab, but it's better than the alternative. I'm also quite thankful for my University position and the very good insurance that comes with it.

To take this completely off-topic: I was surprised when the SCD had a good effect. I found it wasn't 100% accurate; there were certain food groups I could tolerate, and others that I couldn't. Which the diet accounts for; everyone's physiology is different. However, for what it's worth, I (and a group of people in a local UC group) found the low FODMAP diet correlated well (which is more recently researched than the SCD, and a little easier to manage). Unfortunately for me, my illness also overcame the strengths of the diet.

Here's the "one weird trick" part though. There's a documented negative correlation between appendectomies and occurrence of UC/Crohn's. There's early, but growing evidence that an appendectomy may work as a treatment for some types of UC (at least in the young). After my last flare, we tried an appendectomy -- the alternatives were a lifetime of Infliximab (which is expensive for our public health system), or a full colectomy (which, in all honesty, I was leaning towards anyway). It worked, and I'm now in full remission. I don't know whether it'll be lasting, but my related eye conditions (which persisted during a limited round of treatment with Infliximab during an earlier flare) have vanished too. I've since relaxed my diet, although I still have a lot of probiotic yoghurt.

It's worth checking Google Scholar -- there are some openly available literature reviews. I believe there's some discussion on https://crohnology.com/ too :).

Good luck with your illness. It's a hard road, no matter which path you take.

If the lab animals were getting "fatter" decade over decade then I have to wonder if the lab animals were living in lab environments that were increasingly air conditioned or steady state temperatures decade over decade as well.

Seeking out some kind of mystery trace compound seems like an invitation to overlook more basic environmental factors like the living conditions.

One recent model estimated that eating a mere 30 calories a day more than you use is enough to lead to serious weight gain.

The article here is being a bit misleading. The calories in/calories out model says that if you add 30 calories/day to your diet, you will get a little fatter and stop.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html

If you actually experience serious weight gain, it's because you first added 30 calories/day to your diet, then added 30 more, and continued for a long time.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/inanity_of_overeating...

This is nonsense that Gary Taubes was pushing a few years back - it's sad to see that it's become a mainstream meme, particularly when simple arithmetic shows it's misleading.

The article goes further off the rails: Why, if body weight is a matter of individual decisions about what to eat, should it be affected by differences in wealth or by relations between the sexes?

Clearly, a woman living in India will make the exact same choices as a woman in Sweden - her environment will never lead to different choices.

This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. I do it regularly. About 7 months ago I was finishing up a bulk - I weighed 240lb, and added an extra 45lb for chinups. After my cut I was 196 and rocking a 6 pack.

I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control.

> This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense.

Fat people have it easy, they only have to deal with the discomfort of eating too little.

Gaining weight is on a whole different level. I can try to play through the pain and eat more when I'm already full but it doesn't do me any good if I throw it back up or have diarrhea. Both of which happen frequently as soon as I start trying to bulk.

Yeah, I should have been clearer that a bulk can be difficult - I was mainly focusing on the cut, which is what most people claim is hard.

Certainly there are people who gain a lot more muscle from a bulk than I do. I'm on the wrong side of 30...

> This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense.

This isn't necessarily true. Everyone is different. Extreme ectomorphs, for instance, can have a very difficult time gaining weight, even with professional assistance and much effort.

> I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control.

It's also called unhealthy. Bulking and cutting may be appropriate for competitive bodybuilders, but repeatedly gaining significant amounts of weight and then cutting to body fat percentages not much above essential levels is almost certainly no better a model for overall health and wellness than a lifestyle that results in obesity.

I'm a skeptic. But this article rings way too much like what the tobacco industry published back in the 50s and 60s. And what climate change deniers published more openly in recent times. Ask any dietician, in particular pediatrics. Ask any obesity researcher. They are super clear on what's going on with the current obesity epidemic. And they squarely blame soft drinks and processed foods with their multibillion dollar advertising budgets.

Confusion and distraction. That's what trillion-dollar industries do when they are cornered.

Remember, many contrarian science authors were later exposed as shills. Like Malcolm Gladwell. Also, it might not be a matter of influence. Contrarian articles get a lot more viewers by people in denial, guilt-shifting and all.

So, I'm very skeptical to this skeptical piece. But it's worth reading.

I work in public health research and the blame on soft-drinks is not unanimous. Soft drinks are pointed-at because they're the simplest target. Dropping soft-drinks is not a life-shatteringly hard change to make, and it's effective.

But at the same time, other things are being assessed for their contribution. Suburban sprawl, the dual-income household, and the rise of more sedentary hobbies are all being examined.

Now, soft drinks are still a cause for the modern obesity epidemic, just not the cause. There are many other shifts in modern lifestyles that are also contributing.

edit: clarification. Also, caveat: I'm IT in public health, not a researcher.

Anything that spikes blood sugar is going to cause problems because the individual is stuck riding a sugar high and attempting to prevent or get out of the following crash. This is a daily, hour to hour struggle. Describing it as anything less would be a disservice. Trying to not eat after a blood sugar crash is as difficult as a male with peak testosterone passing up sex.

Dropping soft drinks, if you substitute with water/tea/coffee, will be a life altering change. I did it, dropped 10 pounds within a month, never gained it back, (already fairly thin at that point) and stopped getting cavities. Over the following years it made it so much easier to convert my diet from pizza/frozen foods to fresh vegetables and unprocessed meat. I drink minimal alcohol, but for those individuals who drink heavily giving up soft drinks may not prove to have much or any impact.

There are food products that should be consumed rarely -- holidays, and humans are consuming them every day. The behavior goes from every day to perhaps 50% of the food consumed is stuff that any registered dietician will say isn't very healthy for you. Just sit in a grocery store and watch what morbidly obese people purchase verse someone who is thin and fit (and not a drug addict.) Night and day.

The science has come a really long way since I was a child in only the 1990s. We believed the only healthy diets were extremely low fat. Get rid of fat whenever possible, exercise, and you will be very healthy. No on credible believes that anymore. The problem now is largely behavior modification methods. Perhaps a success with behavior modification will trigger challenges pivoting the US food supply off corn/soy/wheat production but that is solvable.

What's wrong with soy, as a health concern? I have only heard monoculture GMO and industrial land mismanagement concerns

Sorry, what I meant by life-altering is that it doesn't require you to completely rearrange your life like other weight-loss strategies. I agree it can have great impact. Soft drinks are obviously the lowest-hanging-fruit, but they're not the only one.

Ugh, please knock it off with the taubsian glycemic misinformation. Nobody with a clue buys into this carbs and insulin story. The 90s science hasn't changed and is right as far as obesity goes. Low fat is a good way to lean out. The human body is very inefficient at lipogensis and so carbohydrates in isolation tend not to contribute to body fat gain. All stored fat is simply swallowed fat.

Anecdotal...

I have two co-workers who are extremely overweight. I don't care, nor do I judge. I do however scratch my head when they both come in with 44 ounce full sugar sodas at least once, and sometimes twice a day.

I couldn't drink one of those even once without my body feeling like absolute poop. I guess I'm just kind of amazed at their fortitude.

Really? I read a lot about diabetes since several people in my family suffer it. It seems quite unanimous on most journals.

I'd love to see links to independent research stating sugary soft drinks are not related.

I never said that soft drinks aren't a cause for the modern obesity epidemic, just not the cause. They're noteworthy, though, because cutting out soft-drinks is incredibly straightforward and simple and effective.

You are quite correct to be skeptical. See my reply below. That said, a single pattern noticed is only correlation. It is far better to ask three questions: What do we know? How do we know it? What does the shape of what we don't know look like? Hence my call for a match on the wholism side to the reductionist methods on weight management.

I can't imagine being overweight. But I don't consider this some sort of virtue. I think I just don't have the appetite some people do. Sometimes I get tired and worn out and then consciously realize it's because I haven't eaten. And this before I actually feel hunger. I assume some people just feel hunger more than others. Maybe this is because I don't eat a lot of junk. Who knows.... but we do vary. Why the epidemic? Maybe junk?

I was 293 pounds as of last November, 199.6 as of last night(although that was after a run and before dinner so I'd actually place my weight at ~203 right now). I'm 6'3".

What follows is anecdotal opinion based upon my own inherently flawed perception and interpretation of said weight loss. Even if my experiences/difficulties are representative of societies as a whole, the nature of self-analysis over a long period of time is such that any conclusions I draw here should be taken with some degree of skepticism.

The three most difficult aspects of weight loss for me were:

a.) Accepting that there wasn't a quick fix.

b.) Accepting that I'm not rational.

c.) Accepting that it was my own actions that got me to this point. (and, to some degree, forgiving myself)

I ate ~600 calories a day from November 2013 - June 2014. From June 2014 - Now I've been eating ~1600 calories a day.

Before that I had attempted(among a myriad of other things) eating nothing(hhehehe) with the full intention of starving myself until I had reached a healthy weight range. In retrospect, it seems entirely illogical, so many of my decisions in that time period did.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to accept that the starvation-relapse cycle was likely doing more harm than good. Similarly, the acceptance that one day of too-intense exercise wasn't worth the following 3-day recovery/justification period of inactivity. It's better to intake a sustainable amount of calories and to partake in a sustainable amount of exercise.

With this realized(and a plan-of-action of some sort in place), the largest difficulty for me was irrationality. I found fighting it with logic, reasoning, and fact was the solution. Weighing myself regularly was hugely important. It was interesting to see how transient my interpretation of my own self-image was; having a record of my actual weight made it much easier to overcome any unjustified self-loathing.

I had bad days, relapses, especially towards the beginning. I _strongly_ believe that weight gain, much like depression, is a vicious self-feeding cycle. Weight-loss/fitness is a self-feeding cycle as well, the difference being that eating _will_ provide you immediate satisfaction, whereas the benefits reaped from exercise/diet need to be manufactured in your own head.

With regards to exercise, I started with running one mile a day, eventually two/three(and so on), I would take several day breaks in between at the beginning; as of now, the last time I ran less than six miles was over a week ago. I also started lifting back in June when I increased my caloric intake.

I'm definitely interested to see how I handle maintaining my weight once I reach my target of ~185.

The differences in energy/mood/confidence are amazing, highly recommended my fellow humans :)

The article notes a fact that so far hasn't come up in the discussion here: "For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years." This is a good corrective to many theories about obesity, because cross-national comparisons will show that people can become obese on a variety of diets, and not all countries that have rising rates of obesity have the mix of foodstuffs as the United States.

I saw the submission and the first few comments before I cooked a home-cooked meal for my sons. (My wife is coming home from a soccer tournament trip with our daughter, so it is definitely my turn to cook this evening.) A book recommended in an earlier thread by a Hacker News participant, The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work,[1] intrigued me enough when it was recommended here that I checked it out of my public library and read it cover to cover. The book is sensible and based on both scientific research and the author's own experience as someone who likes to eat a lot. The advice in the book boils down in large part to 1) do your own cooking, 2) know that your diet will fail every time you eat out, and 3) keep a food diary if you really want to be aware of what you eat. I do number 1 almost all the time. By the official designations on the United States federal government body-mass index website,[2] my current body mass index classifies as "overweight," but that is the optimal weight range for a middle-aged adult, epidemiologically, for longer lifespan. But correlations found in observational studies do not prove causation, and I might not be any worse off if I lost a bit of weight to come down to the "normal" weight range I was in during most of early adulthood. Until I was in my late twenties (that is, until after I got married), was thin--no, make that gaunt--because I did all my own cooking and I tried to spend as little as possible on food. I wonder how much my experience is different from that of other people I see commenting here on Hacker News because of age--I am a generation older than most participants here--and how much is different because of birth cohort--just about everyone I knew when I was growing up was slim.

All around the developed world, Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising.[4] But obesity (overweight that is more excessive than just being "overweight") is still increasing in all those countries, and indeed in nearly all countries of the world. Animal experimental models are pretty convincing about obsesity-as-such causing many kinds of illness and early mortality, and it will be an interesting question to see if obesity trends outrun the other trends that are improving healthy lifespan for most people in most places at all ages.

The article reminds us of the astonishing fact that this trend even cuts across species, as long as the species are in the care of current human beings: "Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. 'Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,' he told me." Exhorting lab animals to exercise more is of course not likely to help them much.

After the author reviews a number of hypotheses about obesity and possible causes for obesity rates rising, most of which we have discussed before here on HN, the summary paragraph makes an important point: "No one has claimed, or should claim, that any of these 'roads less taken' is the one true cause of obesity, to drive out the false idol of individual choice. Neither should we imagine that the existence of alternative theories means that governments can stop trying to forestall a major public-health menace. These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word. It might be that every one of the 'roads less travelled' contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn't a simple school physics experiment." In other words, we still have to do a lot of research, and as I noted as I began my comment, maybe different countries have different obsesity problems with different causes.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Fix-Diets-Yours/dp/0804137579

[2] http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmic...

[3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-obesity-paradox/

[4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

What's amazing to me, and a bit shameful, is that we haven't figured out a safe way to speed up the body's metabolism to the rate of a 95th-percentile 17-year-old. That's a level that we know is safe. (Obviously, if you increased the metabolism too far, you'd run into issues with heat stroke and malnourishment.) I'm astonished that we haven't found a treatment that can let everyone have that.

I think that obesity is maybe 10 to 20% personal fault. Some people overeat, or eat stupidly, and I've seen that. However, I think that socioeconomic forces (and food supply issues, and I wouldn't be surprised if ambient toxins were involved) produce most of the remainder. There are a lot of people who eat reasonably, exercise as much as they reasonably can given their work commitments, and are still fat. We're not supposed to live in the psychological monoculture of modern work, or to have inflexible 8- to 12-hour commitments on the majority of our days. Inactivity and low energy levels (a consequence of living amid hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations in which almost everyone's a subordinate) do a lot of damage. The trans fats and high fructose corn syrup aren't doing people any favors.

That is an amazing title. Bravo.

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