6 ms·

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 g

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/...
    - AJ007 16y ago
      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.
- adrianbye 16y ago
  he can't support it. you're discussing the concept of "empty calories", just like alcohol has.
- zurn 16y ago
  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).
  - tomkarlo 16y ago
    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.
- xiaoma 16y ago
  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.
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.

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/...
  - AJ007 16y ago
    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.
adrianbye 16y ago
he can't support it. you're discussing the concept of "empty calories", just like alcohol has.
zurn 16y ago
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).
- tomkarlo 16y ago
  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.
xiaoma 16y ago
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.

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.