Healthiest diet: Science settles it!

[XXX-er]

I asked a gastro enterologist i was skiing with if there are any people who are fat for a real medical reason and he said no, the problem is not what we eat its how much

Its ok to be a little hungry at times

[Angle Parking]

I asked a gastro enterologist i was skiing with if there are any people who are fat for a real medical reason and he said no, the problem is not what we eat its how much

Hypothyroidism, Cushing's disease, depression and a whole host of other medical conditions can cause people to get fat. Must be one of our riff raff northern docs who told you that.

[Mazderati]

^ I get there are conditions which make people more susceptible to weight gain. What I don't buy is the possibility of weight gain without intake of calories in excess of what is used. It's a physical impossibility. Calories in, calories out assuming work is constant.

[Skistack]

Last night's dinner was skirt steak, avocado, chips, salsa and several Pacificos.

Am I Paleoing?

[hutash]

Calories taken in vs calories burnt off.

It is not rocket science, but there are many things that effect either side of that.

[hutash]

Last night's dinner was skirt steak, avocado, chips, salsa and several Pacificos.

Am I Paleoing?

Oh my god, you ate and drank grains...you are going to die (probably in about 50ish years if you are now 30.)

[KQ]

I asked a gastro enterologist i was skiing with if there are any people who are fat for a real medical reason and he said no, the problem is not what we eat its how much

Its ok to be a little hungry at times

Wow - he must be some doctor. While I do believe many ppl need to simply step away from their plates there are many medical reasons that cause excessive weight gain. Here is one:

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)

^ I get there are conditions which make people more susceptible to weight gain. What I don't buy is the possibility of weight gain without intake of calories in excess of what is used. It's a physical impossibility. Calories in, calories out assuming work is constant.

No, no it is not. My father had a heart condition that would cause him to gain 10lbs of water in a day. It had nothing to do with calories and as noted above there are diseases that cause weight gain regardless of how healthy you eat. Things go wrong and ppl have issues that may not make sense to a healthy young man but they do happen.

On the flip side I have several friends who can't keep weight on - if most of us ate what they do in a day just to stay static we'd be balloons. We are not the all the same and there are always excepts. As we all know, life is seldom simple.

[Angle Parking]

Not a doctor or anything, but i'm pretty sure there's a whole laundry lost of conditions which cause weight gain regardless of calorie intake.

[Mazderati]

My father had a heart condition that would cause him to gain 10lbs of water in a day.

Where is the extra weight derived? (Not being a smart ass when I ask this.)

[MagnificentUnicorn]

Last night's dinner was skirt steak, avocado, chips, salsa and several Pacificos.

Am I Paleoing?

No, you're Mexicaning.

[KQ]

Where is the extra weight derived? (Not being a smart ass when I ask this.)

It is a failure of the body to rid itself of excess fluids - that is the simplest explanation. There are many different reasons why it happens:

Fluid retention (oedema) occurs when fluid isn't removed from the body tissues, including the skin. Causes include the body's reaction to hot weather, a high salt intake, and the hormones associated with the menstrual cycle. Symptoms include swelling of body parts such as feet, hands and ankles, a feeling of stiffness or aching and weight fluctuations. Drinking plenty of water will actually help your kidneys to flush out excess fluid. Fluid retention may be a sign of disease.

Fluid regularly leaks into body tissues from the blood. The lymphatic system is a network of tubes throughout the body that drains this fluid (called lymph) from tissues and empties it back into the bloodstream. Fluid retention (oedema) occurs when the fluid isn’t removed from the tissues.

The two broad categories of fluid retention include generalised oedema, when swelling occurs throughout the body, and localised oedema when particular parts of the body are affected.

The wide range of causes includes the body’s reaction to hot weather, a high salt intake, and the hormones associated with the menstrual cycle. However, it’s recommended that you see your doctor rather than self-treat, because oedema can be symptomatic of serious medical conditions such as heart, kidney or liver disease.

I do understand that using my father's issue as an example is an imperfect one - he was ill and the weight was water not adipose tissue however the weight was real and it didn't just flush out of his system. Shit happens - shit that doesn't seem to make sense to us when we are young, healthy and fit. Also, too many ppl have horrible diets and exercise too little but in-between there are ppl with health issues that cause them to be fat. I guess I'm saying "never say never" and "there are no absolutes" re: the simple equation of eat less=weigh less.



The info on fluid retention (and more if you are interested) came from here:


Fluid retention

[hutash]

Fluid accumulation is not fat, so X's GI guy's statement is still somewhat correct. Fat is stored calories, and unless you are part plant and can convert sunlight to carbs, you get fat from eating too much, or not burning enough calories. Fluid accumulation can cause you to gain weight, but not fat.

Other then the few ounces of fluid in a polycystic ovary, it doesn't cause you to be fat. It can change your metabolism such that you burn fewer calories just as hypothyroidism does, but it still comes down to calories in vs calories out.

Eat less does equal weight loss, but it is not always such an easy thing to do with metabolic diseases.

[hutash]

Not a doctor or anything, but i'm pretty sure there's a whole laundry lost of conditions which cause weight gain regardless of calorie intake.

You are wrong, so stick to dentistry.

There lots of diseases that cause weight gain, but they all still have to do with calories in/out. (photosynthesizers excepted)

[Spats]

Saying "weight gain is calories in - calories out" is true -- but completely unhelpful.

It's like telling someone who's constipated "It's a simple matter of poop in vs. poop out. All you need to do is EAT LESS and SHIT MORE."

First, susceptibility to obesity is over 50% genetic: see, e.g., Maes 1997. "Genetic factors explained 67% of the variance in males and females."

Another entertaining example: Jenkins 2013. "We recently reported significantly greater weight gain in non-diabetic healthy subjects with a 1st degree family history (FH+) of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) than in a matched control group without such history (FH−) during voluntary overfeeding, implying co-inheritance of susceptibilities to T2DM and obesity."

In other words, they ate the same number of excess calories, but gained more weight.

This does not mean that people bear no responsibility for their decisions! What it does mean is that the same decisions will lead to wildly varying results...

...and that while a small amount of willpower may be all YOU require to keep yourself healthy, others may have to do much more in order to achieve far less. They might even have to do things you've never had to consider, like dramatically restricting the type and composition of the foods they eat.

Meanwhile, I've written an entire 8-part series (and counting) on the scientifically-proven ways in which equal calorie intake produces unequal weight gain or loss, e.g. a calorie is not a calorie. Here are a few entertaining installments: Part II, Part III, Part V, Part VIII.

This does not mean the laws of thermodynamics have suddenly broken! What it means is that both weight gain and weight loss are interdependent on a host of variables -- unlike the naive version of CICO which says "Weight gain or loss is a function of calories consumed, voluntary exercise, and nothing else."

Again, read my 2012 AHS presentation, which begins with an entertaining discussion of the ways in which traditional explanations for obesity fail trivially in the face of the data.

[Mazderati]

It is a failure of the body to rid itself of excess fluids - that is the simplest explanation.

I do understand that using my father's issue as an example is an imperfect one - he was ill and the weight was water not adipose tissue however the weight was real and it didn't just flush out of his system. ... I guess I'm saying "never say never" and "there are no absolutes" re: the simple equation of eat less=weigh less.

Fluid accumulation is not fat, so X's GI guy's statement is still somewhat correct. Fat is stored calories, and unless you are part plant and can convert sunlight to carbs, you get fat from eating too much, or not burning enough calories. Fluid accumulation can cause you to gain weight, but not fat.

Other then the few ounces of fluid in a polycystic ovary, it doesn't cause you to be fat. It can change your metabolism such that you burn fewer calories just as hypothyroidism does, but it still comes down to calories in vs calories out.

Eat less does equal weight loss, but it is not always such an easy thing to do with metabolic diseases.

Right. I'm referencing tissue weight gain; not fluid retention after a pile of salty snacks or a pronounced medical issue atypical of the population as a whole. In a scenario similar to your father's, he wouldn't be classed as "fat" simply because he was holding water due to a heart condition. While clearance of the heart condition should resolve the water weight gain, the same is not true of someone who's consumed more calories than they've burned.

The first law of thermodynamics says the change in energy in a closed system is equal to the heat supplied to the system by its surroundings minus the work done by the system on its surroundings. If the closed system is a body that neither consumes nor excretes (static body composition), increased work done by the body will result in weight loss. It has to according to physics as we know it*.

*I'm no physicist and welcome the correction if I've misinterpreted or misapplied the law above. And I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn last night.

Edit to add a picture. People love pictures.

[XXX-er]

well buddy didn't really say no period it was more like not really its overeating that is the culprit AND this thread is about diet not unusual medical aliments, are you going to tell me that the vast majority of the time north americans are fat because of a whole laundry list of medical conditions or ... an overactive fork?

I'm sure if I asked buddy more questions I could have got an extremely pedantic in depth medical opinion ... 3 doctors, a medical health info guy and a retired vet on that trip

[iceman]

I think it's pretty clear that the main cause of obesity is consuming more calories than you expend.

[theshredder]

It's not the bacon. It's big bones.

[PNWbrit]

Bullshit right back at you. I'm not going to out the person involved, because it's not my place to do so -- but the specific things that Paleo did for them (and the advice I gave) are specific to the pathologies they were dealing with, and were continuing to deteriorate under traditional dietary therapies.

(Note that I don't claim Paleo "cured" them...

Actually what you claimed was that they believed that Paleo had....

When someone I know tells me "I'd be dead today if it weren't for Paleo"

and that apparently

I know it's true, that far outweighs any bullshit anyone can throw at me..

Which is....

BULSHIT

[Spats]

PNWBrit: There is an important difference between "not being dead" and "being cured". Apparently your irrational hatred for me overshadows your reading comprehension.

iceman: "I think it's pretty clear that the main cause of obesity is consuming more calories than you expend."

Yes. And the reason a sports team loses is because the other team scored more points.

For full credit, list all the possible significant ways in which "calories" can be expended. Hint: if you want it to look sciency, you can write it as an equation:

Energy In (corrected for digestion and absorption) = (BMR/RMR + TEF + TEA + SPA/NEAT) + Change in Body Stores

I won't link my articles again, because it's clear that people just want to argue, but you can google "No Such Thing As A Calorie" and start reading the 8-part (and counting) series if you like.

Meanwhile, those who actually read my 2012 AHS presentation, linked multiple times above, would understand the problem with blaming everything on sloth and gluttony.

Here's the graph of obesity in America over the last 50 years. What happened on or around 1979?


Did everyone suddenly become gluttonous and lazy?


Perhaps it's more likely that Americans dramatically changed what they ate, starting in 1979, in direct response to the US Government's first Dietary Guidelines for Americans -- which told us in no uncertain terms to stop eating red meat and eggs and animal fat, and start eating more whole grains and seed oils.

If anyone can come up with a better explanation, I'd love to hear it...but years of research has pointed me towards plausible biochemical pathways by which the known statistical trends in American food consumption are most likely causing us to become fatter and sicker. And I find this far more likely than a massive, nationwide moral failure contemporaneous with the Reagan inauguration -- or any of the other popular explanations.

[systemoverblow'd]

I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.

Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:

I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.

After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:

Those crackers – gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut
Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that’s a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage pools. I didn’t know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn’t!

The broccoli, though..that’s ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn’t make me a terrible person, unless….oh, shit! That broccoli isn’t organic. That means it’s covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn’t awkward enough.

And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I’m basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it’s in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.

I hate myself.

Well, shit.

All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.

That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60 year old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.

You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.

You’re hardcore now, so you go way past way cave-person. You go all the way to The Inuit Diet™.

Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.

Even though The Inuit Diet™ is high in Vitamin D, you learn that every disease anywhere can be traced to a lack of Vitamin D (you read that on a blog post) so you start to supplement. 5000 IU of Vitamin D before sitting in the tanning booth for an hour does wonders for your hair luster.

Maxing out your credit line on seal liver forces you to continue your internet education in healthy eating. As you read more you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lacto-fermented tears of a virgin.

You discover that if the women in your family haven’t been eating a lot of mussels for at least the last four generations, you are pretty much guaranteed a $6000 orthodontia bill for your snaggle-tooth kid. That’s if you are able to conceive at all, which you probably won’t, because you ate margarine at least twice when you were 17.

Healthy eating is getting pretty complicated and conflicted at this point but at least everyone agrees you should eat a lot of raw vegetables.

Soon you learn that even vegetables are trying to kill you. Many are completely out unless they are pre-fermented with live cultures in a specialized $79 imported pickling crock. Legumes and nightshades absolutely cause problems. Even fermentation can’t make those healthy.

Goodbye, tomatoes. Goodbye green beans. Goodbye all that makes summer food good. Hey, it’s hard but you have to eliminate these toxins and anti-nutrients. You probably have a sensitivity. Actually, you almost positively have a sensitivity. Restaurants and friends who want to grab lunch with you will just have to deal.

The only thing you are sure of is kale, until you learn that even when you buy organic, local kale from the store (organic, local kale is the only food you can eat now) it is probably GMO cross-contaminated. Besides, it usually comes rolled in corn starch and fried to make it crunchier. Market research, dahling…sorry, people like crunchy cornstarch breaded Kale-Crispers™ more than actual bunny food.

And by now you’ve learned that the only thing worse than wheat is corn. Everyone can agree on that, too. Corn is making all of America fat. The whole harvest is turned into ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, chicken feed and corn starch and the only people who benefit from all those corn subsidies are evil companies like Cargill.

Also, people around the world are starving because the U.S. grows too much corn. It doesn’t actually make that much sense when you say it like that, but you read it on a blog. And anyway, everyone does agree that corn is Satan’s grain. Unless wheat is.

The only thing to do, really, when you think about it, is to grow all your own food. That’s the only way to get kale that isn’t cornstarch dipped. You’ve read a lot and it is obvious that you can’t trust anything, and you can’t trust anyone and everything is going to kill you and the only possible solution is to have complete and total control over your foodchain from seed to sandwich.

Not that you actually eat sandwiches.

You have a little panic attack at the idea of a sandwich on commercial bread: GMO wheat, HFCS and chemical additive dough conditioners. Some people see Jesus in their toast but you know the only faces in that mix of frankenfood grains and commercial preservatives are Insulin Sensitivity Man and his sidekick, Hormonal Disruption Boy.

It’s okay, though. You don’t need a deli sandwich or a po’boy. You have a saute of Russian Kale and Tuscan Kale and Scotch Kale (because you love international foods). It’s delicious. No, really. You cooked the kale in a half-pound of butter that had more raw culture than a black-tie soiree at Le Bernardin.

You round out your meal with a little piece of rabbit that you raised up and butchered out in the backyard. It’s dusted with all-natural pink Hawaiian high-mineral sea salt that you cashed-in your kid’s college fund to buy and topped with homemade lacto-fermented herb mayonnaise made with coconut oil and lemons from a tropical produce CSA share that helps disadvantaged youth earn money by gleaning urban citrus. The lemons were a bit over-ripe when they arrived to you, but since they were transported by mountain bike from LA to Seattle in order to keep them carbon neutral you can hardly complain.

The rabbit is ok. Maybe a bit bland. Right now you will eat meat, but only meat that you personally raise because you saw that PETA thing about industrial beef production and you can’t support that. Besides, those cows eat corn. Which is obscene because cows are supposed to eat grass. Ironically, everyone knows that a lawn is a complete waste in a neighborhood – that’s where urban gardens should go. In other words, the only good grass is grass that cows are eating. You wonder if your HOA will let you graze a cow in the common area.

In the meantime, you are looking for a farmer who raises beef in a way you can support and you have so far visited 14 ranches in the tri-state area. You have burned 476 gallons of gas driving your 17-mpg SUV around to interview farmers but, sadly, have yet to find a ranch where the cattle feed exclusively on organic homegrown kale.

Until you do, you allow yourself a small piece of rabbit once a month. You need to stretch your supply of ethical meat after that terrible incident with the mother rabbit who nursed her kibble and ate her kits. After that, deep down, you aren’t really sure you have the stomach for a lot more backyard meat-rabbit raising.

So you eat a lot of homegrown kale for awhile. Your seasoning is mostly self-satisfaction and your drink is mostly fear of all the other food lurking everywhere that is trying to kill you.

Eventually your doctor tells you that the incredible pain you’ve been experiencing is kidney stones caused by the high oxalic acid in the kale. You are instructed to cut out all dark leafy greens from your diet, including kale, beet greens, spinach, and swiss chard and eat a ton of low-fat dairy.

Your doctor recommends that new healthy yogurt with the probiotics. She thinks it’s called Activa.

http://www.nwedible.com/2012/08/trag...thy-eater.html

[irul&ublo]

Last night's dinner was skirt steak, avocado, chips, salsa and several Pacificos.

Am I Paleoing?

Only if the chips were pieces of tree bark

[frorider]

I think it's pretty clear that the main cause of obesity is consuming more calories than you expend.

Or being a fat fuck.

[iceman]

Spats I was really just responding to the idea that someone floated that there are diseases and conditions which make you fat, not attempting to argue your thesis. But yeah, scoreboard. Score more points, win. Eat too much, get fat.

[PNWbrit]

PNWBrit: There is an important difference between "not being dead" and "being cured".

Which makes it even stranger that you'd attempt to substitute one for the other (as I was saying).

irrational hatred for me

Paranoid Paleolithic.