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Before you go off giving yourself brain cancer, try changing your diet first. Reduce or eliminate foods that spike your glucose, which reduces your insulin lev

Before you go off giving yourself brain cancer, try changing your diet first. Reduce or eliminate foods that spike your glucose, which reduces your insulin levels, which makes your body burn stored fat instead of food glucose for energy. Good overview here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/04/new-evolution-diet-insulin-and-obesity-how-to-eat-like-a-caveman.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/04/new-evoluti... Much of what we eat today - grains, legumes, starches, processed foods - our body hasn't genetically adapted to yet. We've had these foods for no more than the past 10,000 years when agriculture was invented, yet Homo Sapiens have existed for the past 200,000 years, and our various Homo X and primate ancestors for several million years before that. Obese people have a worse reaction to these foods, but no one is completely unaffected by them. Obesity 'cures' like in the OP are just the insanity that results from trying to hack solutions to a problem without fully understanding it.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
You're pretty hard on the OP - they didn't mention cure, or obesity, or humans. You read that into it.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Actually, I think he's speaking to the people that are reading it like "Hey! I could use this to fix my weight problem!" That's my reading of it.
CodeMage 15y ago
our body hasn't genetically adapted to yet And it won't, because natural selection isn't working anymore. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, though, just pointing it out.
WiseWeasel 15y ago
Irradiating the hypothalamus is not intended to be a treatment for obesity; that's missing the point. The point of this research is to elucidate the significant role of the hypothalamus in the regulation of body fat, so that other studies can now be done to hone in on the mechanism at work, in the eventual hope of finding a pathway to target in order to induce weight loss in a more specific and less harmful manner. This is a first step towards finding a potential treatment, a clue as to where we might look, not the treatment itself.
hcarvalhoalves 15y ago
Well said, sir. I wish more research went into actually understanding what are the dietary needs on humans and the links with our evolution and genome instead of crazy solutions like stomach reduction, hormonal treatments, etc.
m_eiman 15y ago
We've had these foods for no more than the past 10,000 years when agriculture was invented, yet Homo Sapiens have existed for the past 200,000 years 10,000 years is about 400-500 generations, which sounds like quite many to my genetically untrained eyes. Since the human population boom has occurred during those 10k years and more or less wholly thanks to agriculture, pretty much everyone alive now is a descendant of people who did much better on that diet than they had been doing on previous foods. Maybe someone who knows genetics could share an opinion on this: aren't 400-500 generations enough to filter out genes incompatible with agricultural food from the gene pool?
- Homunculiheaded 15y ago
  I've never understood why so-called "paleo" dieters have to push this point so hard, which as far as I've ever read is pure speculation (in roughly this time milk drinking populations have evolved a lactose tolerance). I'll easily buy the idea that we eat way too many refined carbohydrates and that has an ill effect on our health. Why harp on the "we're not evolved to eat grains!", if this were definitively proven to be false would paleo dieters jump back to eating bagels? I doubt it. This seems more to be the case of people taking up an extreme position and then cliaming "science!" Eat more fruits and veggies, and less refined grains? sounds great. "Science" tells us to stop eating all wheat products! Sounds more like fanaticism.
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    >I've never understood why so-called "paleo" dieters have to push this point so hard, which as far as I've ever read is pure speculation... You're right that it's probably unneccessary to even mention that aspect, the salient point is to avoid foods that spike your glucose, and as a result your insulin. It just so happens that anthropologists realized that once you eliminate those foods from your diet, what you're left with is the exact diet of paleolithic era man. >Science" tells us to stop eating all wheat products! Sounds more like fanaticism. Read the Intro and first chapter of Arthur De Vany's book, The New Evolution Diet. It explains the science.
- jcampbell1 15y ago

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

You're pretty hard on the OP - they didn't mention cure, or obesity, or humans. You read that into it.

sukuriant 15y ago
Actually, I think he's speaking to the people that are reading it like "Hey! I could use this to fix my weight problem!" That's my reading of it.

CodeMage 15y ago

our body hasn't genetically adapted to yet And it won't, because natural selection isn't working anymore. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, though, just pointing it out.

WiseWeasel 15y ago

Irradiating the hypothalamus is not intended to be a treatment for obesity; that's missing the point. The point of this research is to elucidate the significant role of the hypothalamus in the regulation of body fat, so that other studies can now be done to hone in on the mechanism at work, in the eventual hope of finding a pathway to target in order to induce weight loss in a more specific and less harmful manner. This is a first step towards finding a potential treatment, a clue as to where we might look, not the treatment itself.

hcarvalhoalves 15y ago

Well said, sir. I wish more research went into actually understanding what are the dietary needs on humans and the links with our evolution and genome instead of crazy solutions like stomach reduction, hormonal treatments, etc.

m_eiman 15y ago

We've had these foods for no more than the past 10,000 years when agriculture was invented, yet Homo Sapiens have existed for the past 200,000 years 10,000 years is about 400-500 generations, which sounds like quite many to my genetically untrained eyes. Since the human population boom has occurred during those 10k years and more or less wholly thanks to agriculture, pretty much everyone alive now is a descendant of people who did much better on that diet than they had been doing on previous foods. Maybe someone who knows genetics could share an opinion on this: aren't 400-500 generations enough to filter out genes incompatible with agricultural food from the gene pool?

Homunculiheaded 15y ago
I've never understood why so-called "paleo" dieters have to push this point so hard, which as far as I've ever read is pure speculation (in roughly this time milk drinking populations have evolved a lactose tolerance). I'll easily buy the idea that we eat way too many refined carbohydrates and that has an ill effect on our health. Why harp on the "we're not evolved to eat grains!", if this were definitively proven to be false would paleo dieters jump back to eating bagels? I doubt it. This seems more to be the case of people taking up an extreme position and then cliaming "science!" Eat more fruits and veggies, and less refined grains? sounds great. "Science" tells us to stop eating all wheat products! Sounds more like fanaticism.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  >I've never understood why so-called "paleo" dieters have to push this point so hard, which as far as I've ever read is pure speculation... You're right that it's probably unneccessary to even mention that aspect, the salient point is to avoid foods that spike your glucose, and as a result your insulin. It just so happens that anthropologists realized that once you eliminate those foods from your diet, what you're left with is the exact diet of paleolithic era man. >Science" tells us to stop eating all wheat products! Sounds more like fanaticism. Read the Intro and first chapter of Arthur De Vany's book, The New Evolution Diet. It explains the science.
jcampbell1 15y ago