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How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

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Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#71

Post by kragen »

beaumartinez wrote: post #49
forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #23

Misleading title, it is not "western diet" what is bad for health, it is fast food, and sugar sweety food what is. What Americans were eating 70-50-30 years ago was healthy and "western". It has been people eating industrial foods instead of someone making the food what has changed. I use to look at obese people shopping cart and I see a lot of Coca Cola, pizza, industrial bread, industrial buns,cookies, chocolate,no…

So, then, what is the "Western diet" if it isn't what the Western people eat? (I see your point, though; it's been changing over time, and you're right: it is getting more and more processed and less balanced {and dare I say "healthy"}). Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy.…

> Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet.

This might be true, and I suspect that it is, but it's not true of the trivial amounts of exercise prescribed by doctors to improve health. There was a Cochrane Review meta-analysis finding only a very small weight loss induced by exercise (something like 2kg) across a lot of studies, and this well-controlled experiment just published in the International Journal of Obesity found only a 1.8kg average weight loss in the exercise group:

http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n3/full/ijo2010147a.ht... Adiposity changes after a 1-year aerobic exercise intervention among postmenopausal women: a randomized controlled trial

But the mean duration of exercise per week in the exercise group was 178.5 minutes, just under three hours. The Afghans and Inuit being discussed here as a point of comparison probably get a great deal more than three hours of exercise per week. I'm thinking it's more like 30-60 hours.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any obesity studies comparing groups that are matched, except that one of them gets about 40 hours a week of exercise. Maybe a study looking at people who changed between physically-strenuous and non-physically-strenuous jobs?

(Me, I got three hours of exercise on Sunday. I bicycled 20km to go to two events, and at one of the events, I danced pretty intensely for more than an hour. I'm doing something similar tonight.)

Exercise has a lot of other good effects, though. Even the trivial amount of exercise often prescribed can substantially increase muscle mass, lower blood pressure, increase strength, reduce stress, and improve insulin sensitivity.

But it's not adequate to cure obesity.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#73

Post by param »

Retric wrote: post #44
shasta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more interesting to limit the comparison to those who die of causes other than, say, gunshot wounds. It would also be interesting to see a comparison of health, rather than just length of life.

The real issue is child morbidity. There are plenty of old people in most poor countries but if 10+% of the population dies before age 5 the average life expectancy get's far shorter.

I think you mean mortality, not morbidity.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#74

Post by evandavid »

jseliger wrote: post #31
simonsarris wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my friends ask about nutrition, explaining fat is the very first thing I try to do. Eating fat does not necessarily make you fat, nor is it in itself a bad at all. Many fats are among the best things for your brain and heart. At the same time, fat-free foods can quite easily be bullshit. A pound of sugar is fat-free, after all, but has an insane calorific value. (110 per oz) Sugar is 100% total carbs. A ounce of…

This is one reason I find Michael Pollan's work so interesting, like "Unhappy Meals": http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.... (advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.") and In Defense of Food : http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/01431... . His basic point is that "food science" doesn't know very much, is heavily politicized, and that we don't really know on a deep l…

+1 recommended reading for "In Defense of Food". It's way outside my regular reading tastes (pop-ish science + nutrition related), but I enjoyed every moment of it, and it's definitely changed the way I think about eating.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#75

Post by d2 »

The TL:DR is: Rich people (what he calls Westerners) are fat. Poor people (like afghanis) aren't. Rich people get more diabetes which costs them money. Poor people don't. He's cut both types of people open and looked at their fat.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#76

Post by Retric »

param wrote: post #73
Retric wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is child morbidity. There are plenty of old people in most poor countries but if 10+% of the population dies before age 5 the average life expectancy get's far shorter.

I think you mean mortality, not morbidity.

Sorry, I meant morbidity, but I should have been more clear. Childhood disease(morbidity) leads to a high infant/child mortality rate in poor countries due to poor nutrition, sanitation, and heath care. IMO, it's better to think of these deaths as a symptom than a cause.

For comparison US death rate in the 0 - 5 range is really low. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Causes_of_death_by_age_gro...

PS: Nutrition is huge: According to Jean Ziegler (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for 2000 to March 2008), mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 millions people, all causes of death combined, die each year. In 2006, more than 36 millions died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients"[4].

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#79

Post by mike_organon »

johnny22 wrote: post #6
gcheong wrote: post #4

Do you think we'll ever get to a point where people make food choices and limit their intake based mainly on a rational weighing of available information? I like to think we will but so far the track record is not too encouraging.

or we just make healthy food taste better.

Bacon already tastes as good as it's going to get! (No, this is not sarcasm.)

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#80

Post by ericd »

beaumartinez wrote: post #49
forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #23

Misleading title, it is not "western diet" what is bad for health, it is fast food, and sugar sweety food what is. What Americans were eating 70-50-30 years ago was healthy and "western". It has been people eating industrial foods instead of someone making the food what has changed. I use to look at obese people shopping cart and I see a lot of Coca Cola, pizza, industrial bread, industrial buns,cookies, chocolate,no…

So, then, what is the "Western diet" if it isn't what the Western people eat? (I see your point, though; it's been changing over time, and you're right: it is getting more and more processed and less balanced {and dare I say "healthy"}). Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy.…

I really doubt almost everything you said. RE: Exercise being far more important, things like jogging, aerobics, etc. are a relatively new phenomenon, but the obesity problem has become much, much worse since their advent.

Also, the idea of calories vs. exercise being a simple balancing act is almost certainly wrong. The measure of calories is based on the amount of energy that can be gotten out of something by burning it, with fire. Your body is definitely not as even handed as fire when it comes to releasing energy from food.

For a simple example, look at the atkins diet.

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