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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

#131

Post by wisty »

jerf wrote: post #111
yummyfajitas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is evidence that exercise on it's own works for weight loss. https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car... You can find lots more in sports medicine textbooks. Plenty of studies have varied exercise and diet in order to fine tune muscle gain vs fat loss for various purposes (mostly related to weight class). I would not trust Gary Taubes in general. I've only had one exposure to him, but I found…

With all due respect, that perfectly fits the theories that Taubes is advocating. "High intensity" exercise over six months manages to drop only 3.5 kilograms on average (and add 1.4 kg in muscle). That is not terribly significant by any definition, let alone the one I gave, and based on my (other) reading it seems likely that actually happened fairly early in the study and everyone has plateaued by the end. I droppe…

Exercise can decrease appetite, makes you feel better (which decreases binge eating), and makes unintentional exercises (like climbing stairs and moving furniture) easier.

On the other hand, it takes 15 minutes to lose 100 carbs on a treadmill, and about 3 seconds to get them back at McDonalds.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#132

Post by deveren »

evgen wrote: post #25
mikecarlucci wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. My great-grandparents lived well into their 90s and some of the stuff they ate was "terrible" but it was all cooked from home. Meats and sweets

Wow. My great-grandfather died when he was 35 and was apparently also an prolific eater of meats and sweets of the age. I guess it was the meats and sweets that killed him. See, I can use useless anecdote too... Your great-grandparents may have lived well into their 90s, but they are the outliers on the curve of lifespans for people born at the same time as them. Most of the variance at this extreme end of the spectr…

In most other countries that eat a much, much, higher percentage of saturated fats that us westerners, also have little to no heart disease. Why? Because they don't eat sugar! The latest studies show that a prevalence of sugar in our diets is what turns LDL cholesterol into its artery clogging form. BTW LDL cholesterol is also needed in our bodies. However, if we eat sugar it causes the LDLs to break down and attach to the arterial walls. These aren't outliers, just real world examples of how people around the world have eaten for years without developing diabetes and becoming overweight.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#133

Post by sasvari »

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…

but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.

maybe it is more about people taking less time for cooking as a result of falsely put priorities - people do have time to watch countless of hours of TV every single day, but no time for preparing fresh meals - not about having less and less time (I doubt people 100 years ago had more spare time than today, anyway).

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#134

Post by marakas »

jerf wrote: post #99
beaumartinez wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." When Gary Taubes surveyed the literature to find the evidence that exercise is useful for losing weight, what he found is that the scientific literature itself proves this statement is either not true or even slightly false. There aren't any studies where exercise has lead to persistent, significant (which I would define as taking someone from clinically…

Just now, looking around the office here in Tokyo - most of the engineers here sit at their screens day in day out from 9.30am through to past 10pm. Most of them don't exercise more than walking to the elevator and maybe standing on the train for the half hour daily commute. They are all, with a couple of exceptions, "skinny" by western standards. Why are these sedentary office workers not gaining the pounds? It's got to be the diet.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#135

Post by GeneralMaximus »

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. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy.

No. A hundred times no. I say this from experience: you are what you eat. No amount of exercise will do you good if you don't eat clean, fresh, natural food. The only reason I'm not the fat fuck I was an year ago is that not only did I stop eating out, I started avoiding any kind of food that comes ready-to-eat out of a plastic bag[1].

Then again, people in my country still cook and Coke is viewed by some as the embodiment of absolute evil (which it is, by the way).

--

[1] In some scenarios, eating out is unavoidable. I don't worry about eating out once a week or so.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#136

Post by tomkr »

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…

Something else I've read (Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food) is that diets are connected to the culture they are in as well. So taking an Inuit diet and moving it to Spain would indeed not work, but then taking a diet that works in Spain and moving it to the Arctic won't work either. The food you eat is balanced out by what your daily activities are and vice versa. To that end the modern Western diet does not work well with a modern Western lifestyle, which leads to problems.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#137

Post by someperson »

marakas wrote: post #134
jerf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet." When Gary Taubes surveyed the literature to find the evidence that exercise is useful for losing weight, what he found is that the scientific literature itself proves this statement is either not true or even slightly false. There aren't any studies where exercise has lead to persistent, significant (which I would define as taking someone from clinically…

Just now, looking around the office here in Tokyo - most of the engineers here sit at their screens day in day out from 9.30am through to past 10pm. Most of them don't exercise more than walking to the elevator and maybe standing on the train for the half hour daily commute. They are all, with a couple of exceptions, "skinny" by western standards. Why are these sedentary office workers not gaining the pounds? It's go…

...or genetics.

(I'm not arguing the specific cause, just pointing out that it's not as simple as diet alone.)

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#138

Post by marakas »

someperson wrote: post #137
marakas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just now, looking around the office here in Tokyo - most of the engineers here sit at their screens day in day out from 9.30am through to past 10pm. Most of them don't exercise more than walking to the elevator and maybe standing on the train for the half hour daily commute. They are all, with a couple of exceptions, "skinny" by western standards. Why are these sedentary office workers not gaining the pounds? It's go…

...or genetics. (I'm not arguing the specific cause, just pointing out that it's not as simple as diet alone.)

yes there is that too.. but I would like to add some anecdotal evidence.. I am not Asian and while living here I've gradually adopted the same diet ( and adapted to the portion sizes ) and it has done me wonders.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#139

Post by jpr »

martythemaniak wrote: post #15
johnny22 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or we just make healthy food taste better.

I think we need to make it cheaper (via subsidizing fresh produce instead of the corn and cattle industry) relative to processed food and the rest will take care of itself. Funny thing is, people will scream "social engineering" if you say this, yet they're perfectly content to ignore the current social engineering.

I think it's shortsighted, naive and optimistic to expect that subsidization of "fresh produce" would produce any better results than the current system.

After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with corn or cattle when they are produced in traditional ways, ie. corn that is not optimized for yield, sacrificing it's taste, and cattle is fed on grass, not on corn (which makes it sick).

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#140

Post by danssig »

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 wish I could vote up your first paragraph and vote down the rest. Given how little real science has ever been done on the subject why are you so confident about causes?

You can't get a 6 pack by exercise, you have to eat correctly.

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