Biohacking Lite

There's a difference between "being around" and "everyone routinely consumes them". American diets change drastically in the middle of the 20th century.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/12/look-...

e.g.

The average American woman weighs 166.2 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As reddit recently pointed out, that's almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed in the early 1960s.

Men, you're not looking too hot in this scenario either. Over the same time period you gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the 60s to 195.5 today. Doing the same comparison as above, today's American man weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from the 1960s.

This is NOT a subtle change! And it has severe consequences.

I think it's clearly due to diet and the "hidden" choices in the food supply, but if anyone has contrary information I'm interested. It's a tremendous change that needs an explanation.

As an American who has traveled a lot, I think a large part of the problem here is Americans’ over reliance on restaurants for food. You can rightly criticize the processed, sugary, or fried foods that many people habitually cook, but to claim that Americans don’t know how to make plain foods or have access to the ingredients is ignorance: every proper grocery store sells good proteins, fresh vegetables, and unprocessed grains, and they do it because it’s profitable, because people do largely cook pretty standard meals at home (and as others noted, your yogurt example is wrong). But regardless of how healthy our cooking is, why is it so rare for Americans to eat a home cooked lunch, and so strikingly common to meet people who never cook their own dinner when compared to other countries? Your country has on average healthier foods than we do (not sure by how much once you account for the dishes people actually order), but the portions at restaurants are still too big. People are healthier in France because they cook most of their meals at home, not because the restaurants give them a proper diet. If we all started eating like the French do we’d probably have a more balanced diet, but we’d still be fat if we ate at restaurants all the time.

And here we get at the root of the problem with the North American diet... The fact that people think an ingredient list like this is acceptable or 'not that bad' is a problem.

The 'white bread' ingredient list looks nothing like real bread. Sugar? Oil? These are ingredients in muffins and cakes, not bread. The wheat they use has been processed to the point that a few key vitamins have to be added back just to make it legal again.

The ketchup and pickles are basically jam and sliced candy, there's so much sugar in them.

Not to mention the salt levels in everything.

If you eat low quality white bread and cheap condiments with every meal, you might as well have a candy bar and a bag of chips instead. But we've normalized it, we think we're eating home cooked food each time we reach for a plastic bottle or bag.

I also want to point out that "100% Pure USDA inspected beef with no fillers or extenders" doesn't mean what it sounds like. What this doesn't list are all the things that are allowed to be in your cheap, factory farmed beef and still be called 100% pure beef, like ammonia-treated lean highly textured beef (LFTB or 'pink slime': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime), HGH, antibiotics, etc.

By all means go out and enjoy some junk once in a while, but we've gotta stop normalizing ultra-processed foods in our homes.

I guess one question is: how big was it? If it couldn’t fit more than 25 people, it was definitely not a US supermarket...

> I'm not saying that every person must study these metabolic pathways in detail, but rather that the quick and simple rules and choices people make in daily life should take advantage of what is known, hopefully for a better outcome than what is currently observed.

I agree. I'm simply pointing out the fact that with the picture as complex as we know it is I have a knee jerk reaction to people going from "how to have normal BF%" to "ok, let's talk about insulin". It's the same thing with people talking about brain, attention span and productivity. 10 seconds into the discussions it's "dopamine, dopamine ... DOPAMINE"

> So in the case of adipose tissue, it does require glucose in order to store fat. The glycerol backbone for intracellular triglyceride synthesis is provided by glucose.

Yes. And? Glucose to some extent is always present in the blood. Drop the glucose low enough and brain will die. One could say that adipose tissue will always figure out how to store fat.

As we go on you reference Fung (and defend him) a fair bit. I'd like to take this opportunity to state the obvious. Jason Fung is a trained and certified nephrologist, book author, popular doctor and so on. He does not hold (to my knowledge) a PhD nor has he published any peer-reviewed studies.

Thus calling him a quack on my part was bad (I was pulling your leg a bit) but he cannot be considered a scientist either. He's an expert in his field but his books can't be considered textbooks on human endocrinolongy. He's allowed to have his own opinion but asking anybody to agree or disagree with his views without in-depth study of them is asking too much and he haven't (to my knowledge) presented them in the form of some kind of scientific paper it's not worth arguing whether he's right or not.

That being said - the link you provided on FFA is about cholesterol. I fail to see how that's relevant to discussion about FFA impact on insulin resistance?

Alas, to make my point. Obesity is certainly a multifaceted problem. Thermodynamics certainly matter, human psyche, inflammation, hormones - essentially all of that has its place. Looking from a systems point of view there's no reason (and probably there isn't one) to look for single causative agent though some certainly play a grater role.

In my experience both time-restricted feeding, caloric restriction and macro restriction work and have their place depending on the individual. Generally as a rule IF and low-carb are certainly good ideas, I'm not a fan of keto for everything.