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How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

177 points by pavel 16y ago

mikecarlucci 16y ago
It's scary that KFC and processed food is now equated with "Western diet." Michael Pollan says it best: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
- aaronblohowiak 16y ago
  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!)
  - jchrisa 16y ago
    my rubric is, if they sell it at the gas station, it's not food.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  The article is mostly about Inuits. Their traditional diet was pretty much 100% meat and was healthy. So maybe Michael Pollan's advice has to be reduced to "Eat food. Not too much."
  - run4yourlives 16y ago
    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.
  - mike_organon 16y ago
    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).
d2 16y ago
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.
gcheong 16y ago
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.
- johnny22 16y ago
  or we just make healthy food taste better.
  - city41 16y ago
    The other factor is cost. Healthy food costs more, often significantly more.
    - mkr-hn 16y ago
      Stuff labeled "healthy" tends to be, but you can make healthy food for cheap. You can make a lot of meals out of a couple dollars in ingredients. Example: http://imgur.com/RYSLX http://imgur.com/RYSLX [1] and http://imgur.com/xjJXR http://imgur.com/xjJXR [2] 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. [1] Tuna + slightly melted shredded cheddar + cucumbers + salad mix + hot salsa + boiled egg + pepper [2] Cabbage base, tuna, carrots, mozarella cheese, bell pepper
      - ezy 16y ago
        Have you tried to eat this way regularly, and did you end up spending less? How long did you last?
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - Florin_Andrei 16y ago
deveren 16y ago
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...
- mikecarlucci 16y ago
  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
  - evgen 16y ago
    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.
    - graywh 16y ago
      This is an important point. Don't be fooled when the outliers are the only ones left.
aantix 16y ago
Am I the only one that felt like he was holding the Afghanistan people up as a model of health because they lack fat? Their life expectancy is a mere ~44 years (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:AFG&dl=en&hl=en&q=afghanistan+life+expectancy http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...). Neighboring Pakistan is 66 years (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:PAK&dl=en&hl=en&q=pakistan+life+expectancy http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...).
- shasta 16y ago
  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.
  - jmatt 16y ago
    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: http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates_country/en/index.html http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimate... 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.
    - run4yourlives 16y ago
      War, especially when it lasts for a generation, causes a lot more than gun shot wounds.
      - jmatt 16y ago
        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.
wmboy 16y ago
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.
- ryanfitz 16y ago
  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 http://freetheanimal.com/ancestral-life-way is a great blog for anyone interested.
  - wmboy 16y ago
    The Paleo diet is interesting but is not the be all and end all. Check out http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ , http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ and http://www.westonaprice.org/ http://www.westonaprice.org/ for more viewpoints. 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).
    - pizza 16y ago
      You might be interested in www.reddit.com/r/keto
  - flocu 16y ago
    2 days ago Kurt Harris posted a very readable article about what paleo is and what it probably isn't. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/p-nu/201103/dietary-manifesto-paleo-20 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/p-nu/201103/dietary-mani...
forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
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.
- beaumartinez 16y ago
  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.
  - tomkarlo 16y ago
    "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.
seanalltogether 16y ago
And the flip side of the coin. "How western diets are driving the next stage of evolution in humans"
- Andys 16y ago
  Talk about taking the long view! While you're watching that I'll watch the rain making a new valley outside my window.
  - seanalltogether 16y ago
    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.
- igrekel 16y ago
  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.
  - beaumartinez 16y ago
    Actually, I think he means that the people who eat the Western diet will eventually die out.
- OstiaAntica 16y ago
  You jest but many Europeans have already evolved greater capacity to digest milk and alcohol than other races with less exposure.
  - commanda 16y ago
    Or maybe Europeans consume milk and alcohol because they can easily digest it?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
viggity 16y ago
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.
- 3am 16y ago
  I'm overweight and I blame myself for eating too much and not getting enough exercise.
  - SMrF 16y ago
    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.
amitraman1 16y ago
Excercise daily!
sklivvz1971 16y ago
Relevant Skeptics.SE link here: What's wrong with processed food? (http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/whats-wrong-with-processed-food http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/whats-wrong...)
Xodarap 16y ago
For those interested, peta will give you a free starter kit to help you eat more vegs (http://bit.ly/hpGK0b http://bit.ly/hpGK0b). (Although of course they approach it from an ethical perspective. But it makes you just as healthy.)
frankus 16y ago
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I can't recommend Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories highly enough. If you're not so interested, he wrote a TL;DR version called Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. He also has a blog: http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/ http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/
- jerf 16y ago
  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.
  - tcskeptic 16y ago
    Actually I think it really is a case of "scienceyness" vs. science.
postfuturist 16y ago
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).
radioactive21 16y ago
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.
nhangen 16y ago
What they failed to mention was that people in Afghanistan are starving and left to eat bread and whatever they can scrounge up. We're fatter because we have more to eat.
bane 16y ago
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.
wil2k 16y ago
Not much time to reply right now, but I really, really recommend this book: The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Implications/dp/1932100660/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301492092&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Im...
- gstamp 16y ago
  Some counter arguments for those interested. http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...
gopi 16y ago
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)

177 points by pavel 16y ago

It's scary that KFC and processed food is now equated with "Western diet." Michael Pollan says it best: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

aaronblohowiak 16y ago
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!)
- jchrisa 16y ago
  my rubric is, if they sell it at the gas station, it's not food.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bryanlarsen 16y ago
The article is mostly about Inuits. Their traditional diet was pretty much 100% meat and was healthy. So maybe Michael Pollan's advice has to be reduced to "Eat food. Not too much."
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  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.
- mike_organon 16y ago
  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).

d2 16y ago

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.

gcheong 16y ago

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.

johnny22 16y ago
or we just make healthy food taste better.
- city41 16y ago
  The other factor is cost. Healthy food costs more, often significantly more.
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    Stuff labeled "healthy" tends to be, but you can make healthy food for cheap. You can make a lot of meals out of a couple dollars in ingredients. Example: http://imgur.com/RYSLX http://imgur.com/RYSLX [1] and http://imgur.com/xjJXR http://imgur.com/xjJXR [2] 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. [1] Tuna + slightly melted shredded cheddar + cucumbers + salad mix + hot salsa + boiled egg + pepper [2] Cabbage base, tuna, carrots, mozarella cheese, bell pepper
    - ezy 16y ago
      Have you tried to eat this way regularly, and did you end up spending less? How long did you last?
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
    - Florin_Andrei 16y ago

deveren 16y ago

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...

mikecarlucci 16y ago
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
- evgen 16y ago
  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.
  - graywh 16y ago
    This is an important point. Don't be fooled when the outliers are the only ones left.

aantix 16y ago

Am I the only one that felt like he was holding the Afghanistan people up as a model of health because they lack fat? Their life expectancy is a mere ~44 years (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:AFG&dl=en&hl=en&q=afghanistan+life+expectancy http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...). Neighboring Pakistan is 66 years (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:PAK&dl=en&hl=en&q=pakistan+life+expectancy http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...).

shasta 16y ago
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.
- jmatt 16y ago
  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: http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates_country/en/index.html http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimate... 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.
  - run4yourlives 16y ago
    War, especially when it lasts for a generation, causes a lot more than gun shot wounds.
    - jmatt 16y ago
      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.

wmboy 16y ago

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.

ryanfitz 16y ago
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 http://freetheanimal.com/ancestral-life-way is a great blog for anyone interested.
- wmboy 16y ago
  The Paleo diet is interesting but is not the be all and end all. Check out http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ , http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ and http://www.westonaprice.org/ http://www.westonaprice.org/ for more viewpoints. 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).
  - pizza 16y ago
    You might be interested in www.reddit.com/r/keto
- flocu 16y ago
  2 days ago Kurt Harris posted a very readable article about what paleo is and what it probably isn't. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/p-nu/201103/dietary-manifesto-paleo-20 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/p-nu/201103/dietary-mani...

forgottenpaswrd 16y ago

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.

beaumartinez 16y ago
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.
- tomkarlo 16y ago
  "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.

seanalltogether 16y ago

And the flip side of the coin. "How western diets are driving the next stage of evolution in humans"

Andys 16y ago
Talk about taking the long view! While you're watching that I'll watch the rain making a new valley outside my window.
- seanalltogether 16y ago
  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.
igrekel 16y ago
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.
- beaumartinez 16y ago
  Actually, I think he means that the people who eat the Western diet will eventually die out.
OstiaAntica 16y ago
You jest but many Europeans have already evolved greater capacity to digest milk and alcohol than other races with less exposure.
- commanda 16y ago
  Or maybe Europeans consume milk and alcohol because they can easily digest it?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

viggity 16y ago

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.

3am 16y ago
I'm overweight and I blame myself for eating too much and not getting enough exercise.
- SMrF 16y ago
  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.

amitraman1 16y ago

Excercise daily!

sklivvz1971 16y ago

Relevant Skeptics.SE link here: What's wrong with processed food? (http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/whats-wrong-with-processed-food http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/whats-wrong...)

Xodarap 16y ago

For those interested, peta will give you a free starter kit to help you eat more vegs (http://bit.ly/hpGK0b http://bit.ly/hpGK0b). (Although of course they approach it from an ethical perspective. But it makes you just as healthy.)

frankus 16y ago

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I can't recommend Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories highly enough. If you're not so interested, he wrote a TL;DR version called Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. He also has a blog: http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/ http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/

jerf 16y ago
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.
- tcskeptic 16y ago
  Actually I think it really is a case of "scienceyness" vs. science.

postfuturist 16y ago

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).

radioactive21 16y ago

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.

nhangen 16y ago

What they failed to mention was that people in Afghanistan are starving and left to eat bread and whatever they can scrounge up. We're fatter because we have more to eat.

bane 16y ago

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.

wil2k 16y ago

Not much time to reply right now, but I really, really recommend this book: The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Implications/dp/1932100660/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301492092&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Im...

gstamp 16y ago
Some counter arguments for those interested. http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...

gopi 16y ago

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)