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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

#151

Post by xiaoma »

tomkarlo wrote: post #70
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. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy." Can you support this? I feel like most things I've read and most of what I've learned myself while training has been that diet in fact is a much bigger factor, to a level of say 75%/25%. It's very hard to exercise enough to undo a bad…

My own anecdotal experiences support it. Back when I was running seriously (i.e. 80-200km/week), I regularly got triple burger combo meals with huge fries at fast food places, drank soda like water, ate candy during my long runs and occasionally even dipped pizza in mayo or melted butter when I felt like it. Bacon was life.

I had a BMI a 21, a resting pulse of 47, incredibly good lipid levels and lower than average blood sugar.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#152

Post by tomkarlo »

zurn wrote: post #150
tomkarlo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Can you support this? I feel like most things I've read and most of what I've learned myself while training has been that diet in fact is a much bigger factor, to a level of say 75%/25%. It's very hard to exercise enough to undo a bad…

We are calorimeters. 300 calories of raw carrots is by definition the amount of carrots we would have to eat in order to extract 300 calories of energy from them. (but Taubes is right about the fallacy of the calorie counting-obesity connection).

I'm pretty sure the way calories are measured is using a calorimeter. There's no correction for the ability of our body to absorb calories from a particular food, because 1) it would be really subjective and controversial and 2) the junk food industry would go bonkers over it.

Here's how the FDA site defines it: Calories — on the Nutrition Facts label are the measure (amount) of energy in a serving of food. For example, there are about 110 calories in 1 cup (8 fluid ounces) of orange juice.

Note that they describe it as the "energy in a serving"... not the "energy absorbed from a serving." The measure is independent of our body's ability to extract that energy, which can vary wildly.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#153

Post by Florin_Andrei »

demallien wrote: post #128
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a salad contains any dressing, it's not a salad anymore, it's a dish. The only exception I allow is vinegar + olive oil. That's pretty yummy salad dressing (especially with balsamic vinegar), and pretty healthy.

Ummm, vinegar + oil is pretty much the composition of every dressing out there, sometimes with a small amount of emulsifier, such as mustard (vinaigrette) or egg yolk (mayonnaise). Is it the fact that you use olive oil that OS important? Or the fact that without an emulsifier the dressing is much thinner, and hence ends up on the plate, not the salad, so you eat less?

I just checked some random dressing in the fridge. It has 50% more carbs than fat. It has more sugar than fat. It tastes sweet. I should probably toss the piece of junk in the garbage, but then my wife would probably buy a replacement. :/

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#154

Post by Florin_Andrei »

mhb wrote: post #147
mhb wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read his stuff in a while, but in his book The 10% Solution For A Healthy Life , Kurzweil advocates 10% fat calories. Has he changed that?

Apparently this has changed: http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ShortGuidehtml.htm

Yes, the concern was that with only 10% fat you'd have to consume more carbs, which carries some risk of desensitizing the body to insulin. Not that fat is completely risk free, but consuming some healthy fat is better than eating lots and lots of carbs.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#155

Post by xiaoma »

richcollins wrote: post #123
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…

Diet is way more important than exercise for removing body fat. The insulin response causes the body to store fat. You can burn it off by exercising but if you're having a strong insulin response to the foods that you're eating, the unbearable hunger that you'll face will cause you to overcompensate for the exercise by eating even more.

Aerobic exercise greatly improves insulin sensitivity.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2009/04/23/48760.aspx http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901082406.ht... http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/02/01/Exercise-affects-i...

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#156

Post by narrator »

AJ007 wrote: post #122
Tichy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe there was a lot less industrial food around in the 60ies? Seems McDonalds only started to grow in the early 60ies, and frozen pizza didn't take off till the 90ies according to this: "through the 1980s, frozen pizza occupied an increasingly tight niche. Sales growth averaged a sluggish one percent a year, even with innovations such as French-bread and microwaveable pizzas." http://www.americanheritage.com/art…

People are radically underestimating just how much these high glycemic index calories, on demand, are contributing to the obesity explosion. Whether you stop in for lunch at McDonalds or Subway, you are probably tossing back at least 1,200 calories. Stop at Starbucks and add dairy to your drink and you've got may be another 300-400 calories that aren't going to fill your stomach up. On top of all of this, certain dem…

In line with the whole low glycemic index thing, I've been doing Tim Ferris's slow carb diet lately. The main thing about it that gets me endless ridicule is that Tim is big on eating the same few simple meals over and over again. This is absolute sacrilege in west coast foodie culture.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#157

Post by allwein »

beaumartinez wrote: post #52
kgo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking this sincerely, but don't people from traditionally healthy Asian countries eat a hell of a lot of rice? That's my first thought every time someone mentions how bad carbs are. But I have trouble finding any non-antecdotal data. I want to believe the obesity problem is more of a portion control thing, for example, when McDonald's opened, did a normal adult actually eat a hamburger and small fries for lunch…

Asians eat a lot of rice, but then again, they are a physically active people. (Please excuse the gross generalization.) (Weight gain/loss is ultimately a simple equation: calories in ‒ calories out . Eat more but exercise more and they'll cancel out.)

It's more complex than just calories in - calories out. Just to complete your simple equation, what you're saying is:

calories in - calories out = fat stored/burned.

So for calories in == calories out, stable weight. For calories in > calories out, weight gain. For calories in The mistake that most people make is that they assume that the left side is independent of the right side. We can rewrite the equation as:

//Assume that a negative fat stored is fat burned calories in - fat stored - calories out = 0 OR calories in - fat stored = calories out

Now in your original equation, assume that the person needs 1000 calories for their body to function normally. Also assume that the person eats 1000 calories a day. In your equation, since you assume that fat storage is a function of imbalance between needs and consumption, you get 0 fat storage.

However, in reality because of an insulin imbalance, what happens is this: 1000 calories are consumed. 200 calories are stored as fat.

This only leaves 800 calories to be used by the body. But wait, the body requires 1000 calories to function normally! Well there's two ways to compensate for that, either the person will consumed an additional 200 calories to get the body functioning normally, or the body will adjust it's needs, reduce the energy and movement of the individual, sleep more, etc.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#158

Post by demallien »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #153
demallien wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm, vinegar + oil is pretty much the composition of every dressing out there, sometimes with a small amount of emulsifier, such as mustard (vinaigrette) or egg yolk (mayonnaise). Is it the fact that you use olive oil that OS important? Or the fact that without an emulsifier the dressing is much thinner, and hence ends up on the plate, not the salad, so you eat less?

I just checked some random dressing in the fridge. It has 50% more carbs than fat. It has more sugar than fat. It tastes sweet. I should probably toss the piece of junk in the garbage, but then my wife would probably buy a replacement. :/

Ahh, yes, sorry. I forgot about premade sauces. I make all of my dressings myself, so they dont have any of that crap in them.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#159

Post by Verimius »

Tichy wrote: post #97
narrator wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any of you guys ever seen pictures of the Woodstock festival in the 60s? Everyone is skinny. It's something besides "The western diet" and meat-eating that's causing obesity to increase. A lot of diet news these days has the appearance of vegetarian activism with a severe case of confirmation bias, in that any study that remotely hints that meat eating is bad for health gets front page coverage. The exercise iss…

Or maybe there was a lot less industrial food around in the 60ies? Seems McDonalds only started to grow in the early 60ies, and frozen pizza didn't take off till the 90ies according to this: "through the 1980s, frozen pizza occupied an increasingly tight niche. Sales growth averaged a sluggish one percent a year, even with innovations such as French-bread and microwaveable pizzas." http://www.americanheritage.com/art…

It's popular to blame fast food in general and McDonalds in particular for the obesity epidemic, but probably wrong.

In Taubes' books, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat" he gives examples of populations which did not have access to fast food or supermarkets, but which nevertheless had high rates of obesity: early 20th century Pima Indians; many children in 1930s New York (pre-video games); 1970s Prague; 1960s to 1970s Jamaica.

In fact, with the latter there were many cases of obese mothers with stunted, malnourished children. How to account for that?

An early 1980s study of Mexican-Americans in Starr County, Texas found 40% of men in their thirties were obese, despite their working in agriculture or oil-fields.

Look, a lot of us middle class folks get our only physical activity from exercise. But many people do physical labor for a living. Ever seen a fat construction worker or a chubby motel maid? I have.

Physical activity has definite health benefits, but weight loss is not one of them.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#160

Post by elai »

Verimius wrote: post #159
Tichy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe there was a lot less industrial food around in the 60ies? Seems McDonalds only started to grow in the early 60ies, and frozen pizza didn't take off till the 90ies according to this: "through the 1980s, frozen pizza occupied an increasingly tight niche. Sales growth averaged a sluggish one percent a year, even with innovations such as French-bread and microwaveable pizzas." http://www.americanheritage.com/art…

It's popular to blame fast food in general and McDonalds in particular for the obesity epidemic, but probably wrong. In Taubes' books, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat" he gives examples of populations which did not have access to fast food or supermarkets, but which nevertheless had high rates of obesity: early 20th century Pima Indians; many children in 1930s New York (pre-video games); 1970s Pragu…

Diet will get rid of weight, exercise will determine what will be underneath.
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