Why is there an obesity problem?

[paddoboy]

When I was heavier I ate like an American. Now that I eat like an Asian, I'm at my optimal weight and I'm never quite full, but never very hungry either.

I do enjoy a cheeseburger now and again, though.

Why is it the things that taste best are always the worst for you? Pork crackling for instance on our regular Sunday Roast.
Seriously I tend to put on the blubber fairly easily, and have been on a few diets over my lifetime....all of my own doing. I never have yet cut out any one particular food stuff, but just a gradual cut down of my general intake over all food stuffs. It always takes a couple of months, but I always manage to lose between 5 or 6 kilos.
Then lo and behold Xmas comes around and I put it all back on!

 

[Seattle]

I think when people cut out sugar and processed carbs they can keep the weight off as you can eat all you want that way. Anytime you can't eat until you are full and can't eat anytime you are hungry it's not going to be sustainable.

Animals eat all they want and can't count calories but they aren't eating food designed to keep you coming back for more.

When we prepare all of our food and stay with protein, fruit and good fats we don't gain weight. When we eat at restaurants and eat pre-prepaid foods sold at the grocery store we are eating food that a business made to keep you coming back for more.

We just aren't made to eat primarily sugar

 

[Kittamaru]

I think when people cut out sugar and processed carbs they can keep the weight off as you can eat all you want that way. Anytime you can't eat until you are full and can't eat anytime you are hungry it's not going to be sustainable.

This is... pretty much untrue. The ultimate equation comes to calories out being higher than calories in to lose weight. People have this idea they can eat "all the fruits and veggies they want"... surprise, but many fruits and veggies are high in sugars as well, such as apples, oranges, grapes, apricots, plums, most berries, most melons, carrots, potatoes (honestly, most root vegetables), etc

Animals eat all they want and can't count calories but they aren't eating food designed to keep you coming back for more.

When we prepare all of our food and stay with protein, fruit and good fats we don't gain weight. When we eat at restaurants and eat pre-prepaid foods sold at the grocery store we are eating food that a business made to keep you coming back for more.

We just aren't made to eat primarily sugar

More accurately, we aren't made to be as sedentary as we are... due to convenience and technology, we loaf around far too much and move far too little. If we got our food the same way, say, a Lion did... then yeah, we could eat all that we wanted (presuming we can catch it).

 

[Seattle]

This is... pretty much untrue. The ultimate equation comes to calories out being higher than calories in to lose weight. People have this idea they can eat "all the fruits and veggies they want"... surprise, but many fruits and veggies are high in sugars as well, such as apples, oranges, grapes, apricots, plums, most berries, most melons, carrots, potatoes (honestly, most root vegetables), etc



More accurately, we aren't made to be as sedentary as we are... due to convenience and technology, we loaf around far too much and move far too little. If we got our food the same way, say, a Lion did... then yeah, we could eat all that we wanted (presuming we can catch it).

Have you ever seen a lion? They sit around most of the day. Weight loss isn't about exercise. Exercise is important for your general health but not so much for weight loss.

Walk 3 miles and you will lose about 100 calories and you will be hungry. Eat a cookie and you've just eaten more than you lost by exercise.

You can generally eat all you want with low carbs as long as you eat the right foods. Potatoes and corn aren't low carbs. Berries are good fruits to eat (lower in sugar than fruits like grapes, bananas which are starchy).

At the end of the day however fruits are dessert and not something to overindulge in. Low carb (which includes sugar) isn't all the fruit you can eat.

Most people can eat all the meat and non-starchy vegetables they want as well as food with good fat because they will be satiated at a reasonable point and the calories in meat and most vegetables are much lower than in most foods with carbs.

Ultimately they are eating less calories.

 

[Kittamaru]

Have you ever seen a lion? They sit around most of the day. Weight loss isn't about exercise. Exercise is important for your general health but not so much for weight loss.

Lions do lay around most of the day - in large part because it is so bleeding hot during the day. Hunting is mostly done during the dawn/dusk hours, and sometimes at night, in packs.

Walk 3 miles and you will lose about 100 calories and you will be hungry. Eat a cookie and you've just eaten more than you lost by exercise.

Uhm... no.
http://www.healthstatus.com/calculate/cbc

If I, as a 26 year old male at approximately 265 pounds, walk for an hour at 3 miles per hour (a fast walk, but easily doable), I would burn a little over 520 calories.

You can generally eat all you want with low carbs as long as you eat the right foods. Potatoes and corn aren't low carbs. Berries are good fruits to eat (lower in sugar than fruits like grapes, bananas which are starchy).

At the end of the day however fruits are dessert and not something to overindulge in. Low carb (which includes sugar) isn't all the fruit you can eat.

Most people can eat all the meat and non-starchy vegetables they want as well as food with good fat because they will be satiated at a reasonable point and the calories in meat and most vegetables are much lower than in most foods with carbs.

Ultimately they are eating less calories.

The thing is, eating a high protein low carb diet automatically reduces your caloric intake - in part because, while protein rich foods are calorie dense, they are nutrient dense and very satiating, so you stay feeling full longer. Simple carbs and sugars digest quickly, enter the blood quickly, and fade out quickly, leaving you feeling lethargic and tired, not to mention hungry.

 

[Seattle]

Lions do lay around most of the day - in large part because it is so bleeding hot during the day. Hunting is mostly done during the dawn/dusk hours, and sometimes at night, in packs.



Uhm... no.
http://www.healthstatus.com/calculate/cbc

If I, as a 26 year old male at approximately 265 pounds, walk for an hour at 3 miles per hour (a fast walk, but easily doable), I would burn a little over 520 calories.



The thing is, eating a high protein low carb diet automatically reduces your caloric intake - in part because, while protein rich foods are calorie dense, they are nutrient dense and very satiating, so you stay feeling full longer. Simple carbs and sugars digest quickly, enter the blood quickly, and fade out quickly, leaving you feeling lethargic and tired, not to mention hungry.

I would burn (on that same walk) 286 calories using your calculator (6'1" 190 lbs). If I ate a donut afterward I would have gained weight.

You can't out exercise a poor diet.

For the record, I'm not talking about a high protein diet...just replacing carbs not coming from non-starchy vegetables with more good fat (nuts, avocado etc).

I started out talking about low carbs and eating all you want and you switched the discussion to high sugar fruits and starchy vegetables That isn't low carb

 

[Kittamaru]

I would burn (on that same walk) 286 calories using your calculator (6'1" 190 lbs). If I ate a donut afterward I would have gained weight.

You can't out exercise a poor diet.

Oh, no qualms there - you need both to be healthy. You can run a marathon every day, but if you eat an entire doubleXL bag of M&M's, you're still going to gain weight!

For the record, I'm not talking about a high protein diet...just replacing carbs not coming from non-starchy vegetables with more good fat (nuts, avocado etc).

I started out talking about low carbs and eating all you want and you switched the discussion to high sugar fruits and starchy vegetables That isn't low carb

Fair enough

 

[iceaura]

Aside from setting up life so that children get little exercise and end up primed to be sedentary all their lives,

there is a factor that cut in about forty years ago, about the time of the onset of the obesity epidemic, and has been overlooked until recently: artificial sweeteners.

They screw up your metabolism of sugars, and lead to obesity: http://genie.weizmann.ac.il/pubs/2014_nature.pdf

Three takehome lessons:
1) The FDA approved each individual artificial sweetener, each one a food additive tested at the most rigorous level (far more stringently evaluated than any GMO food product), and they have been used for forty years with full "scientific" approval. http://monsanto.unveiled.info/products/aspartme.htm It turns out (face -> palm) the FDA had never investigated the effects of artificial sweeteners on sugar metabolism. Even scientists overlook the obvious, especially with big money on the line.

2) It took forty years of very high consumption rates with a labeled product for the effects to be recognized - despite the fact that they are physically obvious and often lethal. That's the timeline it takes for such issues to make themselves obvious - trans fat's lethality took about that long to show up as well, also despite being labeled and easily traced.

3) The hippie types running on informed and sober "common sense" were right. Again.

 

[Seattle]

I think it's broader than that as well. Artificial sweeteners aren't good (some worse than others) but the real problem is trying to make sugar free junk instead of just not making junk

Every time a product says "fat free" you can bet that they just added sugar (otherwise it just tastes like cardboard).

When they say "sugar free" that doesn't mean that it's not a sweet product it just means that it has artificial sweeteners.

We should just quit eating so many cookies, donuts, chips rather than trying to find a "healthy" cookie, donut, chips, etc.

In other words, the problem is that we need to be eating food rather than (as someone called it) edible product

Lettuce, meat, nuts are food. Twinkies is edible product

 

[CptBork]

My ex-wife dieted so often that she gained weight on a 1200-calorie daily diet!

If you want to lose weight, don't try to lose more than one or two pounds in a month. Anything more than that sends a signal to your body that the food supply has dried up so it had better become more efficient.

I've never dieted. I eat about 3,000 calories every day, and my weight has been stable (170-180 lb) for 40 years.

Sorry, but I'm calling baloney on these figures. 1200 calories a day is concentration camp level even for a small woman, not enough to sustain basic breathing, heartbeat and other bodily functions let alone moving around and gaining weight. As for 3000 calories a day, when I run for an hour I burn about 1250 calories, and even on those days 3000 calories feels like a lot of food. Do you exercise regularly to burn those extra 500 or so calories you say you're taking in?

I'm not trying to accuse you of intentionally lying, but I think you might be somewhat loosey-goosey with your estimates here.

 

[brucep]

Lions do lay around most of the day - in large part because it is so bleeding hot during the day. Hunting is mostly done during the dawn/dusk hours, and sometimes at night, in packs.



Uhm... no.
http://www.healthstatus.com/calculate/cbc

If I, as a 26 year old male at approximately 265 pounds, walk for an hour at 3 miles per hour (a fast walk, but easily doable), I would burn a little over 520 calories.



The thing is, eating a high protein low carb diet automatically reduces your caloric intake - in part because, while protein rich foods are calorie dense, they are nutrient dense and very satiating, so you stay feeling full longer. Simple carbs and sugars digest quickly, enter the blood quickly, and fade out quickly, leaving you feeling lethargic and tired, not to mention hungry.

A good idea is to make your carb intake low glycemic for the same reasoning. They take longer to digest.

 

[wellwisher]

Here is an idea for weight loss. Some people have a really high digestive efficiency, while others have a lower efficiency. If both ate 2000 calories and exercised the same, a higher digestive efficiency will get more our of the same food. The lower efficiency, tends to crap out more of the food value that is not digestive. If you ever had a puppy, most of their food goes right through them. The bigger dogs and even the mother dog, will often eat it. As their digestive efficiency increases, their food changes from the higher calorie puppy food.

One concept for weight loss, is to lower the efficiency of the digestive system, so there are more wasted calories, allowing one to eat more, or lose weight with the same eating schedule.

One idea that came to mind, I got indirectly from my puppy. When a dog or puppy gets worms, worms will build up a symbiosis in their digestive system, and will eat a share of the dog's food.

Say if we could come up with a harmless parasite, like a diet worm, that reproduces and piggy back;s in the human gut, and will eat a good share of their digested food. This lowers the efficiency without touching any of the enzymes in the digestive tract. Once you and the worms, get down to the desired weight, one is given medicine to eliminate or reduce the efficiency of the worms. It is question of finding a safe diet worm.

 

[cosmictraveler]

 

[river]

I'm frequently surprised when I listen to doctors and nutrition experts discuss the obesity epidemic and wondering what can be done about it.

I agree there is a problem but the solution is simple. Eat a low carb diet without sugar, starchy vegetables, high sugar fruits and processed carbs and there will be no obesity epidemic and no one will have to exercise (for weight loss) and no one will have to reduce their intake of food.

We shouldn't eat less than we want and we can't do that long-term anyway. If you are only eating vegetables and meat and high quality fat (nuts) you can eat all you want and not gain weight. Those foods are naturally lower in calories anyway for the most part so you just naturally eat less calories and those foods are satisfying so that you automatically stop when you are full (unlike when you eat sugar and other carbs).

The problem isn't one of eating too much and too little exercise. That's not why people get fat in the first place. It's not that they are eating too much food but that they are eating the wrong foods.

If you don't eat sugar, pasta, rice, bread and drink soda you don't get fat.

The obesity crisis is only about 30 years old. Some people were fat before then but not to the degree that we see today. Soft drinks and pastries existed long before that but people didn't get fat to the same degree.

That's because they didn't eat them like they were going out of style!

When people bought real food at the grocery store or raised it on the farm and actually cooked their own food their was no obesity epidemic.

People can't lose excess fat when they continue to eat sugar and other highly refined carbs because the body doesn't burn fat when insulin levels are high in the bloodstream and eating carbs triggers the production of insulin.

As far as I can tell (and from what I've read) this crisis started when it began to be recommended that we cut fats from our diets. This leaves a nutritional gap and therefore it was filled with more sugar and other carbs. This is when everyone started to become fat.

I don't understand why there is still a problem when the solution is known. If you know what makes you fat...don't eat it

Do any of you have weight problems that you just haven't been able to address?

Obesity is about affordability of good food and knowledge of good food(s)

And books on this subject

 

[Seattle]

I don't agree that it's primarily a money issue. You don't need to drink soft drinks and eat potato chips and it's cheaper to not eat/drink those things.

I think most people have "knowledge" of good food as well. What they don't have is good eating habits.

 

[Stoniphi]

Wow guys. Lots of hand waving for sure.

I note that we have missed the importance of the microbiome in your intestines and the contribution those little bogs make in how you uptake nutrients from the foodstuffs you consume.

I have seen plenty of fat animals out there in the wilds, even though they lack our...sophistication in food choices.

I suggest a balanced diet and moderation with such things as alcohol, candy and the like, combined with exercise and plenty of rest. But then, that is just my opinion. Carry on.