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 fresh vegetables, no fresh milk or cheese, fresh fish or meat, no fress anything.
Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).
I can't believe someone can live eating only with this. I'm from north of Spain and we like people from France used to eat very well, but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.
>Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).
Not entirely surprised that someone else on HN knows of this obscure problem, yes it's very bad. Essentially, the Inuit and Inuvialuit used to be self-sufficient with a diet that had evolved over hundreds of years. Fish, caribou, polar bear in the winter, etc. But hunting and preparing these things in the inhospitable arctic ain't easy.
Then the Canadian government decided to try to domesticate them by sending the children to school down south, where they learned the RRR's instead of the traditional -50 degree climate survival skills passed down from generation to generation.
They'd come back reliant on the government to ship in food and other necessities, and the government resorted to chips and pop and since it's the only thing that can sit on store shelves for the long winter months (when there's too much ice to ship anything else) and not spoil. Obesity, health, and cultural problems were the result.
A classic case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. A good friend of mine is running research and intervention projects up there attempting to find healthier alternatives to replace the pop and chips, I hear a lot about it.
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. It's when the calorie ratio skews in favour of calories in that you start to put on weight―and in some cases its dramatically in favour of calories in.
Unfortunately people are even more adverse to exercise as they are to changing their own diets.
Most damaging in my opinion is how this affects children, not only due to its health risks: being obese as a child is often a social death sentence, and that has all kinds of repercussions.
"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 food decision, and even if you do exercise a ton, that's not going to reverse vitamin and nutrient deficiencies that may result from eating predominantly processed foods.
Moreover, the type of food you're eating has at least as much effect as its theoretical caloric content. 300 calories of raw carrots is not equal to 300 calories of potato chips, as far as your body is concerned. We're not calorimeters.
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 issue is a red-herring. Sure you can run for an hour and burn 600 calories, or you can just skip a meal. What's gone wrong with our diet is most likely occurring at the metabolic level with the types of processed foods we eat.
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/articles/magazine/it/2005/3/...
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 demographic segments are consuming large volumes or alcohol 2+ times a week. The average person should be consuming under 2,000 calories a day, not in an afternoon.
Once you do gain that extra weight thanks to a careless few months of eating (may be in college, may be at your first real job), its a lot easier to add to those pounds than drop.
I suspect that its not just the proliferation of on demand food that is causing the problem, but in the disinformation coming from the US government regarding healthy diet. People that want to eat healthy have no idea what they are doing. Decades of hysterical news stories about how XYZ is an amazing superfood and ABC is terrible and will kill you have just left a confused population that doesn't know what is good or bad for themselves.
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.
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.
> Moreover, the type of food you're eating has at least as
> much effect as its theoretical caloric content. 300
> calories of raw carrots is not equal to 300 calories
> of potato chips, as far as your body is concerned.
> We're not calorimeters.
Okay, but he was eating 1,800 calories of twinkies and lost weight, which is unsurprising. How much weight would he have lost if he ate only 1,800 calories of carrots, or maybe just a normal diet?
This was an experiment without a control. Not sure it proves anything.
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.
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.
"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 obese to normal weight, not merely shaving 3% off of someone clinically obese) weight loss without a diet change. I have not seen any evidence to the contrary, I am not aware of any evidence that exercise on its own actually works for weight loss, let alone that exercise can wipe away making your diet even worse.
He also observes that it is pretty rare for people in practice to get serious about exercise, but leave their diet completely unchanged. If you start exercising consistently and cut out sugary soft drinks and lay off the potato chips, how you do know which thing did what?
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.
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 him to be dishonest in that instance.
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 dropped that in my first two weeks of dropping carbs and have kept it off for a few years now in addition to a couple dozen other pounds and drop that amount pretty much at will when I accidentally gain it back from slipping on the carbs too much. (Which I am slowly but surely getting better at avoiding.) And I guarantee you that I did not exercise during that first period. (I do now, because it's much easier now.)
It might be significant if we could just assume that's a linear progression and you'll keep losing that every six months, but that's not a conclusion you can make. The bar for proving exercise works as a weight loss method in the literature is low, because it can't get over any higher bar than maybe ten pounds with a fairly large exercise load.
("But you're just citing your own anecdotal evidence!" In this case, only as a tidbit to show how unimpressed by that study I am, not because I consider it proof. Proof I'm leaving to others who have done it better.)
I was only arguing against this statement from your post: "I am not aware of any evidence that exercise on its own actually works for weight loss..."
I'm not disputing that the obese need both diet and exercise to reach a healthy weight (that's pretty easy to see, just by looking at the Harris Benedict equation), I'm just making you aware of evidence that exercise on it's own does work for weight loss.
As for whether 11lbs of fat loss is significant or not, I guess that's mainly a question of where you draw the line for "significant". If you want to label anything less than 20lbs in 6 months "not terribly significant", be my guest.
Also, jogging 4x/week (what the paper described as "high intensity") is not a "large exercise load".
My own personal experience always causes me to shrug, in reaction to the carbo-phobia that seems so rampant, of late. I put in several hundred kilometres per week on my bicycle during the warmer months. I eat a massive amount of carbs, including some with the dreaded "high glycemic index" that's so chic to discuss. I've never been healthier (great numbers for my weight, blood pressure, etc). But again, my personal anecdote does not constitute a scientific study.
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.
Nobody is saying exercise is a bad thing, we are just saying it isn't the best thing for making you lose weight.
I lost about 15 pounds earlier this year and it was entirely by changing my diet (and by changing my diet I mainly just cut out beer and pizza on the weekends which were a staple of my friday & saturday nights, and switched in sushi for the nights when i didn't want to cook and ate microwave food, that's it)
Now I'm going to the gym for 4 weeks, and I feel great. I have put on a little bit of muscle but I just plain feel better. But I'm working my ass off in the gym and my weight hasn't gone down 0.1 lbf, while I burned off 15 by just changing my diet and never stepping foot in a gym.
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.
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.
Gary Taubes is a journalist, not an expert in nutrition. He also has a track record of questionable academic honesty. He's an excellent writer who has been able to cash in on fad diets, but follow his advice at your own risk.
Having read GCBC, that is not at all my impression of Gary Taubes. As well, the piece to which you link is what comes across to me as dishonest, so I was glad to see Taubes' response:
Anecdotally, my experience is that exercise has very little to do with it. It's almost all diet. I switched to a paleolithic style diet just after Christmas. I did not cut out any meals, or reduce portions, and I did NOT start exercising (I work at a desk and drive to work, my exercise is virtually none). I lost about 40 lbs in about 3 months.
I say paleolithic "style" diet because I'm not being super strict about it. The main thing I did was totally cut grains and refined sugar out of my diet. I eat fresh meats (mostly beef), eggs, fresh vegetables and low sugar fruits (berries, mostly) and some nuts. I cut dairy as well, except for heavy cream in my coffee and butter which I use for cooking (I also use ghee). I try to avoid seed oils though I do use a olive oil for salad dressing.
I admit I miss good fresh bread but I can't argue with the results.
> Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet.
This might be true, and I suspect that it is, but it's not true of the trivial amounts of exercise prescribed by doctors to improve health. There was a Cochrane Review meta-analysis finding only a very small weight loss induced by exercise (something like 2kg) across a lot of studies, and this well-controlled experiment just published in the International Journal of Obesity found only a 1.8kg average weight loss in the exercise group:
But the mean duration of exercise per week in the exercise group was 178.5 minutes, just under three hours. The Afghans and Inuit being discussed here as a point of comparison probably get a great deal more than three hours of exercise per week. I'm thinking it's more like 30-60 hours.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any obesity studies comparing groups that are matched, except that one of them gets about 40 hours a week of exercise. Maybe a study looking at people who changed between physically-strenuous and non-physically-strenuous jobs?
(Me, I got three hours of exercise on Sunday. I bicycled 20km to go to two events, and at one of the events, I danced pretty intensely for more than an hour. I'm doing something similar tonight.)
Exercise has a lot of other good effects, though. Even the trivial amount of exercise often prescribed can substantially increase muscle mass, lower blood pressure, increase strength, reduce stress, and improve insulin sensitivity.
I really doubt almost everything you said. RE: Exercise being far more important, things like jogging, aerobics, etc. are a relatively new phenomenon, but the obesity problem has become much, much worse since their advent.
Also, the idea of calories vs. exercise being a simple balancing act is almost certainly wrong. The measure of calories is based on the amount of energy that can be gotten out of something by burning it, with fire. Your body is definitely not as even handed as fire when it comes to releasing energy from food.
> 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.
Sounds nice, but do not try this. Ask people who do this sort of thing a lot, or even for a living. E.g. bodybuilders. They have a saying: "you can out-diet bad exercise, but you can't out-exercise bad diet."
You need both, diet and exercise, dialed in reasonably well.
> 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.
The exercise theory doesn't make much sense. Old people would all have to grow fat because they can't exercise well anymore. Also I think most systems in nature are optimized for saving energy - humans would be a strange exception if they could only be healthy by wasting energy.
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.
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).
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.
It was a doctor's observation. While operating on Afghan soldiers who have limited access to processed foods and a western lifestyle the fat deposits were not found as abundantly internally.
It serves as a launching point to describe the point of the article and book.
Your premise and statistics are a bit on the hand-waving side, of course no one is calling Afghanistan and Pakistan models of health.
And life expectancy is not a proper measure of health either, as per capita (~2006) Afghan people had $29 as the total expenditure on health per capita. The United States? $6,714. We may live longer but we have a lot more help in getting there.
You cannot take life expectancy at birth as a model for how healthy adults are. That statistic is massively distorted by infant mortality (which is an astounding 13.3% for Afghanistan).
Actually yes you can and yes you should. Infants die in third-world countries because of lack of healthcare, but often because of weak immune system and other effects of poor health that children survive from in western countries.
If you compare dogs bought from reputable breeders and puppy mills, you can't exclude all the puppies that die in the first year from a puppy mill and get a fair comparison. You can't exclude puppies died from both suppliers and get a fair comparison. The only fair way to compare is between total numbers.
Life expectancy is a product of health and health care. The unhealthy live longer in places like the UK and US than the healthy in many places of the world. When the west has people with AIDS outliving people in the middle-east and africa with no recognizable condition, then those places cannot and should not ever be used in reference to a healthy place.
I think you're missing the point. No one is arguing that a high rate of child mortality is not an issue in and of itself. But if you're going to claim that life expectancy in Afghanistan is very low vs. the West, therefore the Western diet is healthier than Afghanistan's, and in the process ignore child mortality as a factor then you're entirely disingenuous.
As an example: if you take 2 groups of 10 people, 9 of which die at 70 of natural causes in group A while 1 dies at age 1 and 5 of which die at 90 of natural causes in group B while 5 die at age 1, the "life expectancy" of group A is 63.1 and group B is 45.5. But the average lifespan of adults is 70 in group A and 90 in group B. The health of adults is significantly higher in group B. The health of children is significantly higher in group A.
When many children die, the often touted "life expectancy" number plummets. And subsequently gets used in comparisons of health/activity/environment/etc of adults when in fact that "life expectancy" number is completely misleading when applied to adults.
Additionally, if one adult in group A lives to be 105, that outlier doesn't indicate a trending statistic.
Thank you for a lesson in basic averages. You're still completely clueless.
You're attempting to measure health based on diet between two groups. One group regularly receives medical and dental care. One group does not.
I don't care what bat-shit psycho crap you want, because if you find some hillfolk in the US who haven't seen a doctor in their lives, they're going to have a life expectancy in their mid 50's because most of them are likely to die from abscessed teeth or broken legs or a frigging cold.
You're literally comparing dogs to wolves for health. Dogs live in houses and go to vets, and yes get fed shitty food. Wolves live in the wild and face hardships with no access to care and die young.
You can't pick and choose who to factor in and out for health and get a useful result, it's idiotic. Total mortality figures is a better statistic than selected mortality statistic, because infant mortality is a golden example of the total capability of a countries health care. Basically, if you can't afford to wash your hands in alcohol before delivering a baby to make it hygienic, then you're fucked.
I don't care if my diet isn't causing me longevity, I have a doctor. He's called a Cardiac Surgeon and he performs heart surgeries. This is why I live in the west and did not die as a 7 year old of sepsis from a broken leg.
You're literally comparing dogs to wolves for health. Dogs live in houses and go to vets, and yes get fed shitty food. Wolves live in the wild and face hardships with no access to care and die young.
No, I'm not. Mainly because I'd have needed to use the words "dog" and "wolf" to literally be talking about them. Literally, Joe Biden. But also because I'm not even figuratively speaking of them.
But since you created the analogy:
The "wolves" that don't die young live far longer than the "dogs" that don't die young due to the "wolves" better diet and in spite of the "dogs" having access to vets and living in houses.
When you're comparing the health of adults you can't use information pertaining to the health of children. The factor is itself defined in the equation.
Reminds me of a cartoon with a caveman thinking, "Something's just not right - our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30." :)
It would be more interesting to limit the comparison to those who die of causes other than, say, gunshot wounds. It would also be interesting to see a comparison of health, rather than just length of life.
The real issue is child morbidity. There are plenty of old people in most poor countries but if 10+% of the population dies before age 5 the average life expectancy get's far shorter.
Sorry, I meant morbidity, but I should have been more clear. Childhood disease(morbidity) leads to a high infant/child mortality rate in poor countries due to poor nutrition, sanitation, and heath care. IMO, it's better to think of these deaths as a symptom than a cause.
PS: Nutrition is huge: According to Jean Ziegler (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for 2000 to March 2008), mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 millions people, all causes of death combined, die each year. In 2006, more than 36 millions died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients"[4].
According to the WHO information it appears that deaths due to intentional injuries are relatively low in comparison to most other forms of disease and illness in Afghanistan:
Even when looking at Males 15-59. Though it should be noted these numbers are from 2004. Additionally, I really have no sense of how accurate these numbers are.
I agree. It's horrible and it directly affects health and disease. I don't know how to quantify that, at least with respect to this discussion. I was replying specifically to the parent comment and whether intentional injuries were skewing the mortality numbers.
I'd have guessed that people from US and Canada are mainly of North European descent, and so much more likely to have adapted to a colder climate. To be honest you'd probably have to compare Afghan people to Southern Italians, and unsurprising enough, the difference would be much smaller.
The perpetual use of military hardware might have something to do with life expectancy in these countries however. I think your counter point to the argument is valid, but you support it with a stat that is completely without context in this discussion.
Poor public emergency care and unsanitary conditions would contribute to this very strongly. I bet they're mostly healthy until they get ill, or have an accident.
Good question and answer at the end of the article. Fat is not what's making Americans fat. It's the prevalence of carbohydrates in our diets, and overeating of the same. I was in KY last week interviewing my great aunt who is 108 years old. Do you think she never ate bacon, beef, etc? Haha, their diets would be today's poster child for meatlovers. They didn't eat too much sugar, or carbs, but more importantly they never over indulged, and worked hard everyday.
Now, we consider an 8 hour day in front of the computer as a hard day at work. But eat like we've been working in the fields...
When my friends ask about nutrition, explaining fat is the very first thing I try to do.
Eating fat does not necessarily make you fat, nor is it in itself a bad at all. Many fats are among the best things for your brain and heart. At the same time, fat-free foods can quite easily be bullshit.
A pound of sugar is fat-free, after all, but has an insane calorific value. (110 per oz)
Sugar is 100% total carbs.
A ounce of feta cheese has plenty of fat, and less calories per ounce than zero-fat sugar (feta is 75 per oz).
Feta cheese is 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% total carbs.
Then I try to show them some fat-free products that nonetheless has immense amounts of sugar and calories.
I think that using this topic as a lead-in has been the most effective way to get my friends to change their diets and consider what they eat.
His basic point is that "food science" doesn't know very much, is heavily politicized, and that we don't really know on a deep level how food, food-like substances, supplements, and so forth work. The war on "fat," as you note, doesn't make much sense because it counts the "fat" from a Big Mac and the "fat" from almonds the same way, which makes little sense. It counts the "sugar" from strawberries and Pepsi the same way. This is, to put it lightly, stupid, and it makes people stupid, since most people hear marketing slogans or public service announcements or whatever and follow those.
+1 recommended reading for "In Defense of Food". It's way outside my regular reading tastes (pop-ish science + nutrition related), but I enjoyed every moment of it, and it's definitely changed the way I think about eating.
Bodybuilders know a lot about diet, especially in the context of controlling the body fat percentage - mostly because in their case, the diet must work, or else they lose the competition. They can't rely on the latest fad on Oprah's that may or may not actually work. So the stuff they do tends to have a solid reality-based backing.
Any bodybuilder will tell you that low-fat diets are bullshit. Carbs are probably more aggressive fat-builders than fat per se, mostly because carbs are absorbed quickly, while fats are absorbed more slowly.
It's interesting to see the convergence from various sources. E.g., some diets recommended by weightlifters for "maintenance" (only to preserve a certain physique), and the diet recommended by Ray Kurzweil on health and longevity grounds, are similar in that the recommended daily intake of macronutrients is 33% carbs, 33% fat, and 33% protein as percentage of calories, or roughly 2:1:2 in weight.
As a comparison, that's slightly more protein that most people normally eat, a heck of a lot less carbs than the average intake, and a fairly average level of fat intake. I actually did this; reducing carbs was hard at first, but I got used to it after a while. It's amazing just how high you can raise the total caloric intake, if you keep the macronutrients at 33/33/33 relative ratios, without starting to gain fat. I was eating over 3200 cal / day, with 3 hours of lifting weights / week as my only exercise, and I was neither gaining nor losing fat (but I was gaining muscle).
In my mind, there's no doubt: By far the easiest way (in terms of effort spent, hours in the gym spent, etc.) to lose fat is to reduce the total calories by reducing the carbs intake (don't bother with tweaking the fat intake), and lift weights either 2 or 3 times a week, between 30 and 60 minutes each. 2 x 30 is the minimum that produces results, 3 x 60 is the maximum that allows you to keep it up a long time without burning out.
Don't eat carbs below 25% of your daily caloric intake, or you'll start to feel pretty weak. In other words, reduce carbs, but don't be a carbs nazi.
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.
You should also tell them that fat and carbohydrates are basically interchangeable. The body can easily convert between them, so there is little point in limiting just one of them.
In fact eating fat will probably lead to less calories overall since fat gives an earlier feeling of fullness.
That explains why mediterranean and asian diets, which are high on carbs but low on sugar (or artificial fructose), don't cause nearly as much obesity.
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 spectrum is entirely due to genetics and not lifestyle (e.g. Donald O'Connor led an active lifestyle, ate well for someone who lived through most of the 20th century, and lived to be 78 which is almost 25 years beyond the average life expectancy for someone born in 1925 -- he also was notorious for smoking several packs (2-5) of cigarettes a day for most of his life; shall we suggest that smoking has no health consequences since I can find examples of people who lived a long time and were also smokers?)
What is more useful is to see what the impact of diet/lifestyle options are on the larger chunks of the population and not use outliers as exemplars for points we might wish to make.
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.
I've been overweight my entire life, and honestly, I blame the Surgeon General in the 1980s for telling my mom that feeding me low fat foods (which end up being high carb foods) will make me skinny.
Everyone believed this cargo cult "science" and it has had a devastating impact for hundreds of millions of people.
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 instead of a big mac and large fries? But once again, I always have trouble finding any real data to verify my hypothesis.
The problem is that when the "low fat" fad started, a lot of the the fat in processed food was replaced by sugar. Read ingredient labels... there's sugar or corn syrup in almost ALL low-fat/fat-free foods. So not only were you not getting the fat that would have worked to satiate your appetite, you were getting sugar on top of the carbs.
I don't have any hard data for you but I believe you're right about the portion control.
Junk food is also popular in Japan, though probably not as much as in the US. However, in general portions are smaller here in Japan and people don't drink soft drinks all day. Apparently the average American geek needs as much food as a Japanese construction worker.
"According to the latest health ministry figures, however, 29% of Japanese men aged 20 to 60 are overweight - an increase of 5% in only five years and a long way off its 2010 target of below 15%"
That article tends to re-enforce my line of thinking, that Surgeon General's advice of less-fat, more-carbs, and more exercise isn't cargo cult science.
Some of the conclusions from that article:
+ [H]ealth experts have warned that dietary changes, coupled with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, are storing up trouble for Japanese children who, in their taste for burgers and instant noodles, have more in common with the average western teenager than with their tofu-loving grandparents.
+ "The Japanese used to eat food high in protein, but over the past few decades there has been a shift towards eating more animal fat, and that is at the root of the problem," said Shinobu Matsui.
+ [The Health Japan 21 program] has drawn up nutrition charts aimed at those most at risk of obesity - men, children and people living alone - encouraging them to eat more rice and vegetables and to cut down on meat.
National Geographic did a piece some time ago about the average servings at McDonald's and other fast-foods 40 years ago compared to now, but I can't find it, and I fail to Google it (if it is available online, that is).
I can tell you, the portions were significantly smaller in all cases.
Genetics plays a part. Diabetes in Asians is a different disease; the excess fat in Asian men is stored in the muscles rather than around the belly. 150 generations of eating rice will change things. By comparison, food like potato (now a stable) have only been around in northern Europe for 6-8 generations.
The rice portion is significantly smaller (about as big as your asian hands could carry if they shaped as a bowl) than the typical north american starch portion.
This is an appealing take but ultimately oversimplified. Calories in equals calories out, this is self evident. Assuming that calories in has no effect on calories out or vice versa is where you make the mistake - they are dependent variables and quite obviously so. Don't eat much and you get cold and lethargic, go work out and you work up an appetite.
Saying you're fat because you eat too much is like saying you're an alcoholic because you drink too much. It's true but it doesn't say anything about how to solve the problem and it mixes up cause and effect - in the former case you're eating more because you're getting fat (due to insulin resistance, caused by chronically high consumption of carbohydrates according to some or due to chronically high consumption of fructose according to others) and in the latter case you're drinking more because you're dependent upon alcohol.
"Saying you're fat because you eat too much is like saying you're an alcoholic because you drink too much. It's true but it doesn't say anything about how to solve the problem and it mixes up cause and effect"
I think you're really close to getting at the root of this problem right here. Fundamentally, we're talking about a behavioral compulsion here - people are literally getting addicted to food. Fructose is the substance that's hijacking the brain's reward system. A particular individual's susceptibility to obesity is very likely set up by the same factors that function in other addictions, whether chemical (as in alcoholism) or behavioral (as in gambling) - namely, dysfunctional family systems, psychological trauma, stress, etc. If this is, in fact, what's really going on then the solution is to (A) treat obesity as an addiction and (B) limit the proliferation of fructose in the food supply.
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 < calories out, weight loss.
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.
Not all carbs are equal. The glycemic index for rice can be much lower than the glycemic index for bread or flour. (Glycemic index varies based on type of rice.)
There is some possibility that you eat too much because you are fat. It goes something like this, (details are surely wrong, but just so you get the idea. Google gary taubes for more info):
1. Your body is expecting a certain amount of calories at any point during the day which is either being pumped into your bloodstream from your fat or food in your gut.
2. Your fat doesn't work right, (probably because you eat too many carbs), and doesn't release enough calories, so you get hungry.
3. You keep over eating until you have enough volume of fat so that even though your fat doesn't work as well at releasing calories into your bloodstream, you make up for it by just having more.
4. Voila, you have reached homeostasis. Your body conspires to keep you at this weight. You are either hungry and thin or full and fat.
As for exercise, well, I can only offer up a personal anecdote. I lost 50 pounds. At first by starving myself with a calorie deficit and now I've figured out how to keep the weight off with the food I eat. (I no longer calorie count -- hooray).
During this period of weight loss I attempted to increase the amount I exercised to speed the process along. It didn't work. The only thing that moved the scale was either counting calories or eating a low carb diet, (paleo to be exact). If I had it to do over I'd just start with changing the things I eat, although because of years of calorie counting I'm now very aware of what I put in my mouth -- a good habit to have.
Edit: I do actually believe exercise can help you lose weight. I am currently training to race bikes. I go for very long rides (3-4 hours twice a week) to train my body to burn fat. This is critical for endurance sports. But I don't think it's realistic to ask everyone to become an endurance athlete.
Try spending some time carefully defining "eat healthy." I know plenty of people that are skinny and don't really have any discipline about what they eat which flies in the face of "fat people are just lazy." Skinny people are lazy too! I think they have something different in their genes that lets them handle a modern diet better than I do. So I simply don't eat a modern diet -- voila, weight lost. The last 10 pounds came off without counting a single calorie and eating as much as I wanted. Not joking.
(Friendly HN advice: if you want to lose weight, have a read of Liam Rosen's guide[1], I personally recommend it. Running isn't the most effective way to do it.)
This guide is the most concise and bginner friendly introduction to an active lifestyle I have seen yet... I second the recommendation... additionally (sad as it is) I think a lot of "professionals" would also benefit from reading it.
I hope that if you eat the right things, it isn't a matter of discipline. As Taubes writes in his book, you can eat carbs indefinitely, but eating arbitrary amounts of fat and proteine is much harder - at some point the body says no.
Carbs are supposedly "habit forming", they make you crave more carbs sooner.
If you were the only one I wouldn't think otherwise―but obesity is now a worldwide problem (well, at the moment solely in more economically developed areas).
Ultimately it's up to the individual to control how much they eat and exercise, but we've been misinformed for decades (and still, to this day!) on how to live healthily. The reason obesity has become an epidemic is surely due, at least in part, to this.
I actually recommend them in reverse order. Good Calories, Bad Calories is information dense and the consequent fact that essentially nobody has actually read it and everyone is working off of third-hand summaries of summaries, even the people here on HN, is plainly obvious every time the topic turns to that book. Start with "Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It" and back up to GCBC if you still want more history and a list of citations longer than your arm (and slightly older science).
Also, I would adjust some expectations. The common "science" understanding seems to be that it's Gary Taubes, crazed whacko, against nutritionists, bearer of the holy and uncontested Peer Review. In fact it's Gary Taubes advocating that we take mainstream 21st century endocrinology seriously, with its actual biochemistry and explanation for the behavior of fat accumulation in the body in general, beyond mere obesity, and discard a scientifically unsupported nutrition philosophy unchanged since the 1960s that can not explain the matter of fat accumulation except in terms so broad and vague (and, ultimately, wrong) that I can't hardly even understand why it is still taken seriously when there's another branch of science that utterly subsumes it. This juxtaposition becomes much more clear and refined in his second book, though it is technically pretty much all there in GCBC if you go looking for it.
That is, not "nut vs. science", it's "science vs. science", and yeah, I make no bones about which science I think explains a hell of a lot more than the other.
The Inuit also traditionally live in the Arctic wearing Caribou and seal skin pelts. They are the hardest m-f'ers I've ever seen, and I can guarantee that a large part of their "health" is due to the tremendous amounts of energy used by the body just to stay alive.
Eat like an Inuit and live in Florida and you'll probably resemble something more like a manatee than a man.
I think the "not too much" is also redundant. If you eat bacon and eggs, your hunger will tell you when to stop. It's the non-food (sugar and grains) that mess up our hunger signals (mainly insulin).
He also has qualifiers on what "food" is, most of which are reasonable; stuff you can pronounce, stuff that your great-great grandmother would recognize as food (put away the chemistry set!)
Once we realize that obesity is (by and large) a modern lifestyle disease caused by needless stress and a diet consisting of mostly fake food perhaps we'll return to eating a whole food diet consisting of real food?
e.g. margarine (which has color added to it to make it look yellow, otherwise it'd be gray) is NOT a healthy alternative to butter.
the paleo diet is a growing diet/lifestyle based on eating real foods. If anything else its very interesting to read about. http://freetheanimal.com/ancestral-life-way is a great blog for anyone interested.
The general consensus though is to avoid processed foods and stick to whole foods. A big one is to eat animal fat instead of industrially produced vegetable and seed oils.
Also, limit carbohydrate intake (ideally eating only fruit and vegetables).
Do you think we'll ever get to a point where people make food choices and limit their intake based mainly on a rational weighing of available information? I like to think we will but so far the track record is not too encouraging.
There is evidence that people have followed the advice of the "experts" in the past 4 decades: eat low fat, more carbs, industrial oils and margarine. The big problem is the experts were irrational and wrong.
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).
healthy good DOES taste better. you've just been raised on rubbish so therefor you think that is how all food should taste.
I was the same. I hated peas, carrots, sweet potato, that sort of thing. A few years ago I was at a friends place and she grew all her own produce. It was the first time I had ever tasted fresh vegetables. Oh wow.
If (in Australia) the major super markets that advertise "We're the fresh food people" I'm sure more people would be enjoying something other than lollies (candy). As it stands at the moment any vegetable you buy from our two major players (coles and woolworths) are terrible.
When I was in Switzerland, I lived mostly on home made Greek salads (Tomatos, Cucumbers, Onions, Olive Oil and Feta Cheese -- eaten 4x a week for about a year). They were delicious.
I made one when I got back to Canada, but the flavor was gone. I haven't made another one in over 4 years.
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. :/
The very easy way to do that is cut processed sugars and carbs out of your diet for a few months, healthy foods will start tasting better, and you'll never be able to go back without getting sick.
I did that and the result is that Egg McMuffins - my old favorite - make me feel bloated, Girl Scout Cookies make me sick, and Wendy's burgers smell like cow manure.
That could be made for a dollar or two, and it's easy to make stuff like that quickly and with different ingredients. I'd feel pretty content eating like that every day, and most of the parts are things you can freeze.
Healthy food costs more per calorie. But most people with unhealthy food habits are fat, and therefore eat more calories than they need. Clearly they are not optimizing for cost.
If by "healthy" you mean the certified organic stuff, free range animals, yes that can be expensive. But you can do a LOT better than the typical junk food diet for the same money at any "big box" supermarket.
I think it would be more accurate to say "Western life style" is making the world sick. Meaning work all the time, mostly sitting down, and have no time to exercise or prepare a healthy meal. This leads to eating fast food and high preservatives foods that last a long time but aren't really healthy.
You could eat healthy but still not be healthy without a proper life style change. Meaning exercise, lowering stress and other harmful habits.
It's also making people tall. Every-time I'm in South Korea the difference between the height of High School kids and even people 10-15 years older (read: folks who didn't grow up under any kind of severe hardship or food shortage) is remarkable. I'm a fairly average height American guy 5'9", and often find myself looking up to youngsters over there.
A lot of broad conclusions are made in this article without citing specific sources of research or evidence. Mostly, it's just anecdotal evidence (fictionalized at that) and obscure references to plotting curves (I assume on a graph, though we don't get to see it).
Hah! I've just become so cynical about these kinds of things that I assume genetic adaptation will solve this problem better then education will. We've been tampering big time with our food supply since the 90's and only a few people seem to care so far.
You mean the inability to digest anything that hasn't been heavily machine processed to an extreme glycemic index? Granted, we required cooking of food to support the energy requirements of our large brains, but that's pretty much just a fire and a slab of meat. Is it really a good evolutionary path to depend on a whole industrial complex of food procesing machinery that is a big natural disaster away from being completely broken down?
You mean that people able to resist or live longer under such a diet will survive and that we will evolve to support such a died? If so, you are probably wrong.
It is not about survival it is about the ability to pass down genes. If the diet's problems appear later in life, it will not have a direct impact. It may have an indirect impact.
Starting to get off topic but I really don't think evolution is happening in humans anymore, at least in the first world. Sanitation, medicine, and surgery has advanced so far we've almost completely eliminated natural selection. In fact I'd be surprised if some "de-evolving" isn't happening.
I dont think its western diet, i am orginally from southern india and the number of diabetes there is one amoung the worlds highest. This is mainly due to the traditional vegetarian south indian diet (processed white rice & veg curry)
The TL:DR is: Rich people (what he calls Westerners) are fat. Poor people (like afghanis) aren't. Rich people get more diabetes which costs them money. Poor people don't. He's cut both types of people open and looked at their fat.
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 fresh vegetables, no fresh milk or cheese, fresh fish or meat, no fress anything.
Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).
I can't believe someone can live eating only with this. I'm from north of Spain and we like people from France used to eat very well, but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.