Food Fight II: Fat

here: http://www.correntewire.com/rocky_mounta...

The direct link is Early exposure to common chemicals may be programming kids to be fat

The info made a huge amount of sense to me- and added another dimension to my thinking about nature vs. "nurture"

It's hard to get a sense of the article with just a few quotes (so many quotables) but:

"The evidence now emerging says that being overweight is not just the result of personal choices about what you eat, combined with inactivity," says Retha Newbold of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in North Carolina, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "Exposure to environmental chemicals during development may be contributing to the obesity epidemic." They are not the cause of extra pounds in every person who is overweight—for older adults, who were less likely to be exposed to so many of the compounds before birth, the standard explanations of genetics and lifestyle probably suffice—but environmental chemicals may well account for a good part of the current epidemic, especially in those under 50.

When many of the chemicals Baillie-Hamilton discussed had been tested for toxicity, researchers focused on whether they caused weight loss, which is considered a toxic effect. They overlooked instances when the chemicals caused weight gain. But if you go back to those old studies, Heindel pointed out, you see that a number of chemicals caused weight gain—and at low doses, akin to those that fetuses and newborns are exposed to

Hope you don't mind me throwing this complication into the discussion- my view has always been that it's both nature and nurture, 'course. Until I hit a certain age, I was skinny- I couldn't do anything to put on weight. And then, voila! I was eating exactly as before, and the pounds amounted. Very much a family pattern (genetics). Dropped some pounds when I read info in the "South Beach Diet" about insulin, sugar spikes, fat storage, and started eating differently. So, that's the "nurture" part. But, the info in the article was new to me- fascinating I thought.

That is all ye know...

UPDATE Or, to be less cryptic and allusive, I'm not sure that the dualism CD proposes holds up.

The actual definition of obesity is based on BMI, and that's how it's statistically tied in with numerous diseases. I think that's fine for policy.

However, BMI can't be applied in any meaningful way to an individual. I worry that confusion on this point could continue causing a lot of headaches for people with high BMI and low body fat.

________

Black bean and winter squash soup. I used delicata.

1 cup precooked black beans/turtle beans
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
1-2 kale leaves, torn
1/2 cup of baked winter squash, any variety
a tomato if you have one
grated carrot maybe
black pepper

I bake the squash in halves, facing up, with a little olive oil and seasoned with the usual cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg. After scooping it out I just puree it with a fork.

Throw everything but the squash into a pot, add about a cup of water, bring it to a boil, and then simmer for about 20 minutes. After stirring in the squash, wait until it heats back up, then serve.

This cost me about $1.75 to make with the whole tomato.

has changed several times. The big reason there are so many more people who are classified as obese now is that we've lowered the rate to classify them as such.

http://easydiagnosis.com/blog/?cat=80

And this link just mentions one change. We went back and forth several times in the 80s and the 90s.

This is one of the best articles I know of on the subject. It's written by Gina Kolata, who is the head science writer at the New York Times, and it really sums up the state of research:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health...

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

As for nature versus nurture:

The assumption was that environment determined weight, but Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania wondered if that was true and, if so, to what extent. It was the early 1980s, long before obesity became what one social scientist called a moral panic, but a time when those questions of nature versus nurture were very much on Dr. Stunkard’s mind.

He found the perfect tool for investigating the nature-nurture question — a Danish registry of adoptees developed to understand whether schizophrenia was inherited. It included meticulous medical records of every Danish adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees’ biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their biological parents and their adoptive parents.

Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young — 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.

The scientists summarized it in their paper: “The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect.”

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications: “Current efforts to prevent obesity are directed toward all children (and their parents) almost indiscriminately. Yet if family environment alone has no role in obesity, efforts now directed toward persons with little genetic risk of the disorder could be refocused on the smaller number who are more vulnerable. Such persons can already be identified with some assurance: 80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight.”

A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

But anybody who comes to the United States from another country instantly notices that there are a great many more really heavy (several hundred pounds over) people (let's say) here than elsewhere. BMI, whatever. Use your eyes, and you know there's something different about this country, no matter what's being done to the stats. It's the same thing abroad. If you notice somebody really heavy the odds are great that they are from the US. Meaning, to me, that there's a something substantial in this country that is not genetically based.

And what happens to people who adopt our diet? They start getting obese. Not to say that there's no genetic component, of course there is. But the genes are going to express themselves in different ways according to their environment. And yes, I saw the study could be read to say differently ("being fat was an inherited condition", which doesn't quite equal the 70% figure also given), but if it were correct, there'd be no way for evolution to affect how the body processes and stores. And that makes no sense.

I'm all for wearing the foil about official statistics, but deprecating the stats and their makers doesn't change... reality. In the same way that we have taste buds to taste, we also have eyes to see.

What I think about is my strength, not my weight. Weight is important insofar as it impacts my strength -- my ability to put mass into motion in a given direction through the application of force. And as I get older -- and more computer-bound -- I notice my strength decrease. I don't like that.

Not that I'm a "six pack" (telling phrase) maven or ever was; but I used to do a lot of physical labor, when I was young, and I still think that I am like that. But I'm not.

I'm definitely not an expert on all this but some of my thoughts are:

The Wikipedia definition of obesity—a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it may have an adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy—strikes me as about right. Our society loads a lot of baggage on to every aspect of appearance, weight, etc., but the core concept is a useful medical one. (Yes, the BMI is a lousy indicator of obesity in some respects and it can be assumed to mean way more than it does but, overall, I would be very surprised if it were misrepresenting the overall trend to higher proportions of body fat in Americans.)

The nature/nurture issue is also gets people carried away. It's very difficult to tease out the various "nature" issues. As a species we're inclined to eat sugar, fat, and salt and store fat and not lose it (hence the metabolic slowdown when calories are severely restricted), and, not surprisingly, there's individual variability in how we do that. The environment exerts an inexorable demand for those foods due to our evolutionary heritage and we've created an environment, not surprisingly, that presents those foods we are inclined to eat (and overeat), with fewer natural constraints than in the past. So, saying that people can keep their weight at a normal level doesn't mean it's easy or equally easy (or even possible) for everyone or that people are "irresponsible" or should be blamed or shamed for not doing so. They can but the environment, especially here in the US, is deliberately designed in part to reinforce precisely the wrong choices and makes it exceedingly difficult to keep weight off or lose it. (So I agree with Valley Girl about misusing the entire "nurture" part of the equation. In a very different vein, it's somewhat similar to the whole idiotic "choice" question in gay issues—even if being gay were a choice, which is clearly is not, that "fact" would determine nothing about how gays should be treated, what rights should be accorded, etc.)

Enfolded into all that confusion is the tangle of confusion at the nutritional/exercise/weight loss level. That video I mentioned from Dr Lustig makes some of these confusions evident:

• A calorie is a calorie—except it isn't. Your body does different things with different calories.
• Calories in, calories out — you can't burn enough calories through exercise to effectively lose weight (eat a chocolate cookie and poof—there goes all that jogging—but the effectiveness of exercise doesn't have to do with the calories it burns. it has to do with getting rid of metabolic precursors to lipogenesis, the dreaded fat creation.
• Fructose is like any other sugar, so high fructose corn syrup found everywhere and hidden most places can't be the problem—but fructose is metabolized different and very much appears to be a huge part of the problem.

(There's plenty more—the link with fat and heart disease, notably—but you get the point.) The issue here isn't these specific bits of confusion—although they're major in themselves. The issue is they're overlaid onto the whole dysfunctional social construction of weight and appearance in this country, causing even more shame, blame, confusion, despair and resignation. That's part of why Gina Kolata (and Gary Taubes) can run a cottage industry discussing how confusing the last 30 years of nutrition studies are wrong—they are wrong (and, maybe, even the logic of why they're wrong might be wrong—e.g., maybe one type of calories is worse for you than another but we've been telling people the wrong ones, rather than "nothing works") but people don't see it that way. If you're following the conventional wisdom and you're not losing weight, then either it's your genes or you're doing it wrong—but, in fact, the conventional wisdom is wrong and is reinforcing the already stacked deck of the environment and heredity against you.

I'm certainly no diet/weight loss maven. That's just how I see it.

I'll bring it up again.

Putting an FDA ban on HFCS is the most logical place to start. It is after all toxic.

"Sugar Coated / We're drowning in high fructose corn syrup. Do the risks go beyond our waistline?" http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...

Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

And the ongoing discussion about it contaminating HFCS:

Paging Erin Brockovich

The Environmental Health and IATP studies speculated that the mercury is seeping into HFCS through an industrial substance called caustic soda, used by HFCS producers to break down corn. Until a decade or so ago, most caustic soda was manufactured in chlorine plants that relied on mercury. This “mercury-grade” caustic soda is being phased out in favor of a new kind made without the toxic heavy metal. For this reason, the FDA press officer I corresponded with called it an “outdated process.” But it remains in use—and there are no regulations preventing it from being used to make food products like HFCS.

Today, just 10 percent of U.S. caustic soda comes from four remaining mercury-using plants, according to the IATP study. But in Europe, 60 percent of caustic soda production relies on mercury—and there are no restrictions on importing it into the United States. “The HFCS companies use what’s cheapest,” Dufault told me in a phone interview. “They have no obligation to report whether they’re using it [mercury-grade caustic soda] or not.” Dufault emailed data compiled from the U.S. International Trade Commission suggesting a trend of rising imports of mercury-grade caustic soda, particularly from Great Britain.

The corn industry reacted swiftly to the research linking HFCS and mercury. On Jan. 26—the same day the Dufault and IATP studies were released—the Corn Refiners Association issued a curt press release casting doubt on the “relevance and accuracy” of the test results. The CRA called the mercury-based caustic soda process “outdated,” but never mentioned that it’s still being used to make ingredients used in a wide range of consumer food products. A few days later, the CRA released a harsh assessment of the test results prepared by Dennis J. Paustenbach of ChemRisk, a self-described “leading scientific consulting firm.”

“To imply that there is a safety concern to consumers based on the findings presented, both incorrect and irresponsible,” concluded Paustenbach.

Yet in Paustenbach, critics say the corn industry has settled on a particularly dubious defender. The researcher has a storied history as a hired gun for industries seeking to avoid responsibility for the messes they create. The Environmental Working Group has described him like this: “Dr. Paustenbach has spent virtually his entire career as a paid expert for polluting corporations arguing for weaker health protections for workers and the public from some of the most notorious toxic substances ever known.”

Paustenbach’s most notorious foray into public debates around toxins involves chromium-6, a once-widely used industrial chemical now known to be carcinogenic. In an excellent 2005 exposé, The Wall Street Journal detailed Paustenbach’s dodgy dealings on behalf of PG&E, the California utility accused of leaking toxic levels of chromium-6 into one town’s groundwater (a case made famous by the 2000 Julia Roberts film Erin Brockovich).

The problem isn't pure fructose; it's the barely regulated industries that create it and our other food products.

One way to get a handle on the relative effect of each is to compare similar populations. Caucasian Europeans and Americans, Japanese and Japanese Americans, and so on. By that measure, Americans are a lot fatter. Another way is to look at it over time. In the last decade or so, coffin companies have had to start making supersize coffins, car companies have had to make seat belt extenders a regular item, and, again, so on. Result: the genetics haven't changed over the past 50 years, so something has changed about the US environment. (The same trends are evident in Britain, interestingly enough, but not so much continental Europe.)

I think folks have summarized a lot of those factors: high fructose corn syrup (major!), estrogen-analog environmental pollutants. (I'm not so sure about the mercury argument. Chronic mercury poisoning causes retardation, among other things -- maybe an explanation for why the benefits of single payer are so hard to grasp for people here! -- but not necessarily weight gain.)

My comment on the earlier post seems to have vanished, so maybe this one will too :( , but another environmental factor is city planning. Honest. I can't remember who wrote this study, but they looked at activity levels over recent decades. The move to suburbia, and the need to drive even to the grocery store, means that people walk way less than they did even in the 1950s. According to their math, that amounted to some 200 calories per day that's not used up now. As deniseb commented upthread, even 50 calories a day makes a difference over the years. So our lack of mass transit, which cases people to walk to and from bus stops, is another environmental factor behind national rotundity!

who travels to the US has any doubt that Americans are, as a group, fat. I notice it the second I get on an airplane traveling to the US, and I notice it for the trip, and I really notice it when I get home and go on the subway, and the average person is so much thinner. It's brutal.

Too much food of the wrong type of food, not enough exercise. I first noticed it when I traveled to Boston in 05. I was on a corporate account and we ate out every night, and the plate sizes were huge. At first I ate it all (raised in one of those "clean your plate" households) eventually I just stopped eating it all.

And so much of the country is walking unfriendly.

(International airlines put aside more weight for Americans than other nationalities, btw.)

I think a large reason Americans let themselves be abused by their elites is that they are fat and heavily medicated. The number of Americans on anti-depressants (a drug class which is more addictive than opiates, btw) is staggering. You're drugged to the gills so that you will put up with the way you're absued rather than taking to the streets.

Being unhappy when your life is shit is natural folks. Drugging yourself to make yourself tolerate is a palliative, not a cure.

And a lot of these drugs also lead to weight gain. Bonus.

If they're white, they get called teabaggers; fatness, stupidity and ill spelling, were the main insults used by the Village. Or, if their politics don't offend, they get insulted by the left elite, like Michael Moore always gets. Protesters must be camera-ready, ne?

If they're black, they'll be called racist, or anti-Semitic, because the only people listening to black rage after Obama are the old reliables: Farrakhan, Sharpton, hell, even ACORN.

And its funny how the Village, and folks generally on the Internet, will give an approving eye to someone who enjoys her wine or his whiskey, who appreciates a finely-rolled spliff or an expert hash brownie, and they'll even nod knowingly when tales of excess are shared, but when they discuss fat people they turn 12 again, and they can either cringe at the fool who's about to get beaten up again by the bully, or they turn bullies themselves. We don't lecture alcoholics and narcotics users over their insufficient activism; but we must do it, for depressive losers and the distastefully sweatpanted, because they somehow bring us down in way glamorous drug users do not. If we did not hold those self-medicating prejudices to be self-evident, MAD MEN would have no hold on anyone. Alcohol, nicotine, pills, can still leave a beautiful corpse behind. Food doesn't.

But, now? Why stay clean, sober, abstinent? Remember that the credit crisis has a constant drumbeat of "the evil gluttons brought down this economy -- why couldn't they do with less"? Just like fat pigs, right? But over the past 30 years wherein our economy has been dismantled, what future do we have? The unions capitulated ever since they allowed two-tier contracts, Congress considers constituents a conduit to speak to lobbyists for fundraising, and corporations have been able to classify righteous anger as "going postal". It's one thing to say we're so drugged we'll put up with anything, but those of us who've lived through assassinations and riots know who wins. Those who didn't are dead or in jail, defeated.

We've learned our lesson: Either the fast death through drugs, a more moderate one, through nicotine, or a slow one, through food. Antidepressants are covered by insurance, more than talk therapy or other solutions that work. I'm still getting the impression, Mr. Walsh, that you think a cure is possible, if only the fatties and depressives stop their evil ways -- they're the reason we don't have single payer! But generations of Americans now have proof that a cure is not forthcoming, and that if they try, the consequences will land on their heads. We didn't need terrorists to do that; the economy did that all by itself. The only reason more people aren't using drugs instead of food to get high is all those prison rape jokes. Some people choose to get high and not go to jail, through the one legal means the government subsidizes without restraint. And still, they get less respect than drug addicts, for not doing it glamorously.

We have always been drugged. Ale was handed out as water, in colonial days. Prohibition was a way for the elites to force the poor into morality, when all it did was solidify organized crime. Panics about marijuana and heroin allowed various organized crime groups their day to shine, until the corporations were able to create drugs as innocent as food. Combinations to pump up glucose, make insulin drop, pacify with a nap, pump up with caffeine. We let them, and now the poisons will never leave us. If we did have a response to all this, a real one, not one in some activist's dreams, wouldn't it be mass suicide? Self-loathing does that to one -- and nothing about calling a population you want to successfully motivate "fat and drugged" will do nothing to change that -- unless you're one more seller of a diet plan on an infomercial.

who sums it up better than I could:

So what should we do? Peaceful protest won out for the abolition, women's suffrage, anti-colonialism and civil rights movements, yet they all required great masses of people to demonstrate over periods of years. Though unlike other countries with active national strike cultures, not only has a strike ethic diminished in stature as an option in the activist toolkit, the national media barely reports on such events unless they are violent, represent authoritarian ideologies, or can readily be mocked. People seeking peaceful change in the US are often effectively isolated from sympathetic peers around the world and at home and turn only rarely to collective action solutions to shared problems.

Maybe an idea like these Common Security Clubs, which try to gather small groups of neighbors to talk about economic issues face to face, could help. It's hard to say. But the injustices piling up in this world and this country have got to be addressed.

Just saying that when we mock protesters of any stripe for being fat (and therefore dismissably ugly), we tell fat partisans on our side to stay home because *they* are ugly. Yes, that's irrational, and yes, fat leftists should be tougher -- but when the other side has made its fortune on exploiting the weaknesses of a civilization, how do we compete when we use that side's classist, sexist, lookist framework? As a Mr. Lambert might put it, instrumentalism sux.