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Inside Every Fat Person (Health)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Consider the Three Ages of Dietary Man.
The first is from the year dot to the Neolithic Revolution(cultivation of grain) c 8000 BC
The second is from the Neolithic Revolution to the advent of Industrialised Food c 1950
The third is from 1950 till now.
So far as we know the Ages of Dieting Man are as follows
Year dot to 8000 BC: not much obesity
8000 BC to 1950: not much obesity
1950 to now: epidemic of obesity
So what's the explanation? No, dear hearts, it isn't all down to Macdonalds and Monsanto. Let's try, just this once, not to be utterly orthodox in our thinking.

First, let us consider the diet of pre-Neolithic Revolution Man. This was fish, meat, eggs, nuts, fruit, mushrooms. It was therefore made up of a) proteins b) fats but c) no carbohydrates. They just weren't there except in trace amounts in fruit and maybe the odd tuber grubbed out of the gound. In other words human beings evolved eating a strictly Dr Atkins diet.

This is important to remember next time you read in your Daily Mail that some nutritionist or other has just said to somebody in the pub "That Atkins diet, no long term studies, that's the problem, it's bound to end in all kinds of health problems a little ways down the line". If you're the other person in the pub, the line to take is: "Them carbohydrates....they're the problem, we've only had ten thousand years to evolve systems to cope with them, bound to lead to health problems a little ways down the line. Whoops, it already has."
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Year dot to 8000 BC: not much obesity

The "Goddess Figurines" are extremely accurate depictions of fat women and prove that some -- quite a lot actually: it had to be common enough for being fat to be meaningful -- people became obese, which speaks volumes about those hunter-gatherer societies.

First, let us consider the diet of pre-Neolithic Revolution Man. This was fish, meat, eggs, nuts, fruit, mushrooms. It was therefore made up of a) proteins b) fats but c) no carbohydrates
.
So why did the obesity set in only with the advent of industrial food? Considering
i) all the talk of fast-/slow-release carbohydrates and raw/refined sugars,
ii) it's fats and sugars that we like (low-fat stuff often has loads of sugar to make up for it) and
iii) everyone everywhere has a starchy staple (not necessarily grain),
it seems clear that the problem is the amount and 'purity' of the carbohydrates in processed food (plus bone-idleness).
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Quite right, Dan. The answer can be found in the chemistry of modern food. Virtually all processed food is loaded up with chemicals to whiten, brighten and prolong its shelf life. Before the advent of processed foods people butchered their own meat, grew and/or ground their own grain, cultivated their own vegetables. The food people ate up until the 1950s was as close to its origins as you could get (pull it out of the ground and eat it/chop its head off, pluck it and cook it).

The average dietary intake was protein > fat > unprocessed carbs in descending order of amounts consumed. Processing food changed all this by removing most of the nutritional value of food to the point now when in most cases less than half of the base food is retained and the balance is made up with fillers, emulsifiers, preservatives, colouring, flavouring and binders. The only vitamins and minerals are those added which are again manufactured chemicals.

It is no surprise that the slide into obesity has paralleled the increasing degree of process foods. Nor should it be a surprise that clinical and psychological disorders, which never existed before the 60s or were so obscure they were considered extremely rare, are not only becoming more common but are treated as the norm; disorders which are being treated by ingesting even more chemicals in the form of drugs.

Robert Atkins was right. It's not just about restricting carb intake. It's about eating more food that is as close to nature as possible and only eating high quality carbs and as little processed food as possible. I'm not only a believer but a practitioner of this philosophy.
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Ray



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You're quite right, the Atkins diet is the only one that actually works. Other diets not only make people fatter, they actually make future weight loss more difficult to achieve. The reason is simple. Starving the body puts the system on famine alert. Once that happens the body is forever trying to store as much fat as possible against the next food shortage - and further dieting only increases the imperative.
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Mick Harper
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First, let us dispose of the vapourings of the paid apologists of the Atkins Empire like Komorikid plus all the usual Greenie hair-shirts that always seep out of the wetter parts of the political spectrum on these occasions (Dan and Ray). We have no reason to suppose that a tin of Jolly Green Giant sweet corn is either more or less fattening than the same amount of sweet corn plucked straight from the field and cooked on the spot in your Sierra Club Jotl Wood-Burning Stove.

They're not, I agree, exactly the same thing: there may be half-a-spoon of sugar in the Jolly Green juice, there may be more vitamins in the farm-fresh version, the latter probably tastes better and has no doubt been less genetically modified. Nevertheless, what is true is that cultures that consume corn-on-the-cob tend to be thinner than cultures that consume corn-in-the-tin.

To begin conjuring with this paradox, we need to know why the Atkins Diet works. It is certainly not for the reasons that the Atkins people (by now, a standard orthodoxy in its own right) put forward. All this stuff about ketosis and cellular burn rates and the rest has been shown (by reasonable experimental science) to be a bunch of horse-hooey. The fact is that the Atkins Diet works for one simple reason: it satisfies people's hunger better, so they tend to eat less.

And since the Atkins Diet only differs from ordinary modern industrialised diets by the excision of carbohydrates it can't be anything to do with Green Giant versus Hippy Dippy. It has been demonstrated experimentally that not eating tinned sweet-corn has, broadly speaking, the same dietary effect as not eating corn-on-the-cob.

But, on the other hand, we have already seen that carbohydrates per se do not produce obesity-epidemics because for ten thousand years we've been eating carbohydrates and not getting obese. So let's have a look at the Mediterranean Diet. Why? Well, because it is both 'modern' and 'traditional'. The Italians and the French are not so different (genetically, economically, culturally) from the Brits and the Yanks and yet they are thin, we are fat. Why? It is because food is much more central to their culture than it is to ours. For them, it's a way of life, for us it's an enjoyable energy source. Now why should that make such a difference?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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it must be because food is much more central to their culture than it is to ours.

Yes, that sums it up. And being a way of life, they're concerned about the quality of what they eat. We're concerned about the convenience: we don't want it to get in the way of our way of life.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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No, that cannot possibly be right. The Brits and the Yanks have never been in the least interested in food and for hundreds of years they were thin. And by the way, Komori, we have been eating industrialised food (and a lot more disgustingly industrialised) since the advent of the Industrial Revolution...not 1950.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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I don't see the mystery.

Obesity has always been with us. All that has changed is who is obese. Being fat has gotten cheaper and "work" has become a lot less physicially demanding.

Not long ago, only the very rich could afford to be fat. Now everyone can. As for work, even "manual labor" jobs are today, as likely as not, to be performed from the seat of a chair. From forklift driver to assembly-line worker, there's just no much call for physical exertion.

Not too long ago, even an office clerk would find it necessary to walk several blocks a day from home to work. Now we drive several hundred blocks. No wonder we are fat.
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Mick Harper
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You are talking piffle, Ishmael, and orthodox piffle at that. Obesity has not always been with us -- some people have always been obese which is not the same thing at all. Who cares if somebody is fat? Nobody, except possibly that person. Who cares if fifty per cent of the age group (or whatever) is fat? Everybody.

Not long ago, only the very rich could afford to be fat. Now everyone can.

This is one of the classic "Oh wasn't it awful in the old days?" assumptions. The truth is that, apart perhaps from very marginal people, everybody has been able to afford to be fat since the world began. Just as everybody has always been able to afford to be an alcoholic, or indulge in any other kind of cheap excess, should they choose. Humankind has had a surplus to use or misuse ever since it became humankind. That's what being human means.

And mostly we use this surplus to sit around being sedentary in various ways so please don't repeat this tired nonsense about our modern society being especially sedentary. No doubt it is (another great triumph of the human race) but since there is no correlation between sedentariness and obesity (except as you get more obese you'll probably get more sedentary) this is clearly irrelevant.
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Forty years ago Ancel Keys, Ph.D., a prominent American nutritionist, argued that heart disease was common in countries that had high-fat diets. He drew a graph of seven nations to show that more fat meant more heart attacks. This was an influential finding until a few years ago when it was discovered that Keys had not only carefully selected the nations to make his case but also suppressed the data in his preliminary report that showed exercise had a far more significant correlation with coronary heart-disease risk than any other factor.

A famous British nutritionist of the same period, Dr. John Yudkin, took a different view. He thought heart disease correlated with sugar consumption. It's difficult to isolate information on food habits in different nations. Nearly all developed nations have high fat consumption and high sugar consumption. And nearly all underdeveloped nations have neither. Heart disease is high in the developed nations, but why?

One explanation proposed by T. L. Cleave, M.D, was that increases in the incidence of coronary artery disease could be traced to increases in refined carbohydrate intake. He noted that diabetes, hypertension, ulcers, colitis and heart disease, to name a few, were all virtually nonexistent in primitive cultures until refined carbohydrates were introduced. Cleave proposed his "Rule of 20 Years," noting that it took that long after the introduction of refined carbohydrates before diabetes and heart disease began to appear in a culture. Cleave's hypothesis does give one explanation of what brought about the heart-disease epidemic in the industrialized world.
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Oakey Dokey



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For the effects of a calorie-controlled diet, you only have to look at the nomads of the Russian steppes. They never even see a vegetable or tuber in their entire lives, which are considerably longer than most. They live off milk, blood and meat and are extremely healthy.

Carbs and sugars are your enemy, Ketosis is your friend, even if it does give you 'smelly' breath. The free radicals produced by excessive carb intake alone probably accounts for a large amount of tumours and cancers.

The Atkins diet actually reduces bad cholesterol, not increases it as many have claimed. The other benefits are also down-played by those with the 'balanced diet' theosophy. High carb intake from refined foods also can cause stomach fauna problems, tiredness and make you more prone to allergies (food allergies and even to a certain extent asthma is suspected even tho it's mainly attributed to hydrocarbons from misburnt fuel).
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Mick Harper
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Yes, there's little doubt that, from an Applied Epistemological perspective, it is "the balanced diet" that is the root of the current malaise. It is just the kind of simple shiboleth with a touch of science that, once it is launched, enthralls both heirarchy and laity for evermore. The Holy Trinity of Carbs-Fats-Proteins rules all our lives except of course anywhere that doesn't suffer from the modern disease of Believing Popular Science. Not that there is anything remotely scientific about it -- no experiments have been done isolating the effect of "a balanced diet", in fact there is no agreement about what balanced means in this context. It is no doubt one of those infinitely variable sliding scales so beloved of bogus theories.

Oakey is right, anybody with a really firmly entrenched food culture is immune to the siren calls of the "nutritionists". Now there's a priesthood if ever I saw one.
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Ray



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It is recognised that a diet rich in carbohydrates can over-stimulate the production of insulin. This in turn creates a desire for a quick fix, which in the affluent West usually leads to the sweetie pack or the biscuit tin. This only exacerbates the problem as the pancreas has to go into overdrive to break all the sugars down so that they can be passed out of the bloodstream. What happens next depends on how active the chocolate bar-eater is, but steadily rising obesity suggests that most of it is not burnt off but converted into fat.
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Mick Harper
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We can now, I think, draw all the pieces together. The first thing to appreciate is that carbohydrates are an addiction but a peculiarly hidden one. As Ray has pointed out, the consumption of carbohydrates leads to a demand for carbohydrates over and above that which we need for ordinary purposes. But, unlike normal drugs, this is entirely hidden from us. After a carbohydrate-binge, all we actually experience is a generalised hunger and since we experience this quite naturally three times a day, we do not associate the general sense of edginess with carb-desire. It's just time for another 'meal'.

But why has this problem not been evident since the Neolithic Revolution when our diet shifted over to carbs? That's easy: carbs are crap food. Who wants to sit down to a bowl of porridge or brown rice or mashed plantain? Hence, enter the "balanced diet". It was quickly realised that adding a bit of protein and fat (and fruit and veg) made the whole thing go down quite easily.

So why not carb-bingeing at this point in history? Enter the foodie culture. Every place turns food (and especially the main meal of the day) into a ritual event.and, if observed properly, it is designed to cure the carb-problem. Consider the Italian Way. They sit down to a bowl of pure carbohydrate (pasta) right at the start of the meal. Then they go on to courses which are predominantly (classically, entirely) protein, fat, fruit and veg. But here's the clever bit: they make sure that the meal lasts a long time. In other words by the time the original carb-itch kicks in from the pasta, the body is still eating! And of course, because all this later stuff is non-carb, their bodies are perfectly satisfied hunger-wise until it's time to start the cycle over again.

Now you can see the same (sort of) thing in non-foodie cultures like pre-Industrial Britain. The Brits think hanging around eating is highly decadent but they were famous for being wholesale meat-eaters (les rosbifs) and they made sure that the carb part of the diet was ring-fenced. So, for instance, a pie -- which has stacks of carbs in it -- is associated with high days and holidays, not for everyday. In fact the daily carb input was more or less wholly in the form of beer, which has its own special culture-of-rationing. In fact it will almost certainly be found that beer-cultures are non-foodie ones, while wine cultures (wine not being carb-packed) are obsessed with the damn stuff.

The coming of the Industrialised Revolution, and the breaking of the link between food preparation and eating, had no effect on any of this. What did change everything was fast food (of which I think I am right in saying, the Jewish fish-and-chips of London's East End was the first in terms of complete meals. Forget the Protocols of Zion, this was the Great Conspiracy!

But why does fast food have such a monstrous effect? Because fast food is always disguised carb-food. And once Industry is on the trail of an addicted market, nothing can stop it. We now all eat "fast food" whether we buy it from fast food outlets or not. You don't believe me? Well consider the two favourite meals in Britain today. They are Hamburger'n'chips and Chicken Tikka Massala. This is the way the first stacks up:
One large carbodhydrate bun
One large portion of carbohydrate potato

A sliver of protein (minced beef) and a smidgeon of fat
Indian food is even more diabolical in carb terms
One all-carb popodum
One all-carb nan
One all-carb portion of pillau rice
One all-carb portion of Bombay potato
One nearly-all carb portion of massala sauce

A few pieces of protein (chicken) and a bit of fat.

But what is fascinating about this process is that none of us are in the least conscious about the carb bits, the bits that are really pulling us in. We don't have conversations like, "What did you have at Macdonalds?" "Oh, the usual carbohydrates...delicious." We say, "Double cheeseburger". "What Indian shall we order?" We answer, "Don't mind, lamb or chicken." While what we should be doing is training ourselves to say "The usual carbs please. Better add a stuffed paratha for later when the carb-craving kicks in."
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Well....I've got another idea. Related as it is.

I was doing some thinking this morning about how every meal in every culture involves some mix of protein and carbs. Everyone eats carbs, everywhere, which is why I find it hard to believe there was ever a time we lived without them. Every culture in the world has always been organized around the cultivation and consumption of one carbohydrate or another.

Right.

One carbohydrate.

It suddenly occured to me that ours may be the first culture in history to enjoy regular access to multiple carbohydrate sources! For everyone else, through all time, it has either been corn, barley, wheat, potatos or rice -- exclusively. Never all five. We have access to all five and we regularly switch back and forth from one to the other from one meal to the next. This is unheard of.

Could this be the key?
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