Posted in QOTD on August 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Food for thought (pun intended):
Economically speaking, overeating is a required condition for the survival of American food corporations because it is the only way they can turn large enough profits to satisfy their shareholders.
Read the whole article for more. HT Childhood Obesity News.
Posted in QOTD on August 27, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
From Harry Rutter’s Where next for obesity? comment (free, registration required):
There is a seductive simplicity to the conceptualisation of obesity as a straightforward problem of energy balance—calories in versus calories out. But the physiological, behavioural, and environmental influences on this relation are asymmetrical. Therefore, although the basic arithmetic holds true, in practice it is much easier for people, and populations, to gain weight than to lose it.
Read other comments and papers in The Lancet’s recent series on obesity.
Posted in Friday cat blogging on August 26, 2011 | 1 Comment »
This week’s FCB is for the science geeks out there! (Ref: Schrodinger’s cat).
Posted in Ancestral health, Obesity on August 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Via Conditioning Research comes this 2008 talk by Dr. John Ratey at Google.
Watch the whole thing for a compelling view on the benefits of exercise re brain health. But for the purposes of this post, he makes an important point (around the 4:00 mark) that there are two traits we inherited from our ancestors:
Thrifty genes ... drive us to load up on calories and take it easy. Because tomorrow we will have to walk for days without food.
I thought this a perfect complement to a post today over on engrevo (emphasis mine):
Weight loss is not caused by eating less food or fewer calories. Eating less is caused by weight loss. The “trick” is in convincing your brain that you have more fat than you need. Then hunger decreases, expenditure increases, satiety increases, satiation comes sooner… and so on. In short, your body goes into “lose fat mode,” and does so in a hurry.
The way to switch to this mode, it is proposed, is to eat a low-reward diet. I’d prefer to say that we should avoid obesity by avoiding an artificially high-reward diet.
So you could say: Eat real, unprocessed food with no ingredients list.
I have a quibble about the first two sentences (I don’t think eating less is caused by weight loss). But I think the highlighted sentence is spot on.
I’m not yet convinced that the answer is to eat bland food (sorry Stephan!). But limiting artificially high-reward foods is certainly the answer (or a large part of it). And I say limit because I like Harry’s idea of “intelligent control” of high-reward foods.
But as they used to say, your mileage may vary.
Posted in QOTD on August 25, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
~ Gustave LeBon
HT Dr. Ernest Curtis via Jimmy Moore.
Posted in Food addiction, Macronutrients on August 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
This is an amazing series of videos (thanks Tom Naughton’s commenter!). What really boggled my mind was that you could take all of these folks, plop them down 25 years later and all of their concerns re sugar hold up very, very well.
[As an aside, I know I’m dating myself, but I totally remember watching John Rubinstein (the narrator) in the TV series Family.]
Links to the other parts of the 6-part series: part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6
Posted in Brain & appetite, Food addiction, Macronutrients on August 21, 2011 | 2 Comments »
From UCSF (home of Robert Lustig) comes this presentation by Kent Berridge (UMich) at the Sugar Highs and Lows COAST/UCOP Symposium this past March. His presentation looks at “how food pleasure is generated in the brain, the neural bases of wanting and liking, and how fear and stress relate to desire.”
The content is pretty heady stuff. But even if you don’t speak neurobiology (or speak it poorly like I do), I cannot imagine watching this and not starting to think that there’s something more to obesity than calories in vs out.
I hung in til the end of the video, and the interchange that starts at 52:00 suggests (to me anyways) how important it is to explore how diet can be used as treatment.
Q: So what’s your opinion given the similarities with drug addiction and what we know about treatment for drug addiction and pharmacology … do you think there’s any hope that there’ll be medications that help?
A: I think we’re a long way from effective medications that can tap into this system, at least for drug addiction that could reverse sensitization changes but not have all kind of unwanted side effects. We’re a long way. I think the best therapies are still cognitive behavior sorts of therapies and learning to accept the cravings and things. But in principle — in principle — it could happen that a medication could, it’s just not in our career lifetime probably.
Berridge is certainly correct about the timeline and hazards (ref: fen-phen). So as I mentioned, I think that there’s a great opportunity to explore the usefulness of a diet that supports the brain, chiefly by providing sufficient nutrients and avoiding/minimizing trigger foods.
UCSF has posted a couple of other videos from the event, including one from Yale’s Ashley Gearhardt, who makes a telling remark (around the 21:00 mark) about our obesogenic environment:
The role of cues is especially important … think about the amount of floods of advertisements and food cues that you saw today. Just imagine, shifting in your head, thinking if those were all alcohol cues and you were someone who was struggling to control your alcohol use. That’s going to be a really difficult challenge. The role of cues, potentially dealing with the cues in our environment, is an especially important area to look at in the future.
Um, yeah!
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! More »
