16 ms·

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 ag

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.
  - pyre 16y ago
    > 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. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
    - tomkarlo 16y ago
      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.
  - narrator 16y ago
    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.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      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/2005/3/2005_3_12.shtml http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2005/3/...
- kragen 16y ago
  > 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: http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n3/full/ijo2010147a.html http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n3/full/ijo2010147a.ht... Adiposity changes after a 1-year aerobic exercise intervention among postmenopausal women: a randomized controlled trial 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. But it's not adequate to cure obesity.
- ericd 16y ago
  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. For a simple example, look at the atkins diet.
- Florin_Andrei 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. 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.
- jerf 16y ago
  "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?
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Here is evidence that exercise on it's own works for weight loss. https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.cardiologydomain.com%2Fimages%2Fuploaded%2Fdukeh%2F2_Slentz_BodyCompWt_STRRIDE_2004.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car... 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. http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000-words-tried-to http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...
    - jerf 16y ago
      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.)
- Tichy 16y ago
  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.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- ams6110 16y ago
  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.
  - mooftard 16y ago
    What about lentils and beans? Are those in or out?
- GeneralMaximus 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. 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.
- danssig 16y ago
  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.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
>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.
sasvari 16y ago
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).
tomkr 16y ago
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.
antihero 16y ago
> people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet. Why exactly is this? Surely Capitalism has created a wonderful system where we all have more money and time due to technology?

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.
- pyre 16y ago
  > 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. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
  - tomkarlo 16y ago
    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.
- narrator 16y ago
  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.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    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/2005/3/2005_3_12.shtml http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2005/3/...
kragen 16y ago
> 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: http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n3/full/ijo2010147a.html http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n3/full/ijo2010147a.ht... Adiposity changes after a 1-year aerobic exercise intervention among postmenopausal women: a randomized controlled trial 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. But it's not adequate to cure obesity.
ericd 16y ago
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. For a simple example, look at the atkins diet.
Florin_Andrei 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. 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.
jerf 16y ago
"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?
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Here is evidence that exercise on it's own works for weight loss. https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.cardiologydomain.com%2Fimages%2Fuploaded%2Fdukeh%2F2_Slentz_BodyCompWt_STRRIDE_2004.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car... 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. http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000-words-tried-to http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...
  - jerf 16y ago
    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.)
Tichy 16y ago
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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ams6110 16y ago
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.
- mooftard 16y ago
  What about lentils and beans? Are those in or out?
GeneralMaximus 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. 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.
danssig 16y ago
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.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

>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.

sasvari 16y ago

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).

tomkr 16y ago

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.

antihero 16y ago

> people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet. Why exactly is this? Surely Capitalism has created a wonderful system where we all have more money and time due to technology?