MALE PATTERN FITNESS: obesity Archives

March 13, 2007

Fat Chance

Here's news I didn't expect:

In a 16-year study that followed more than 45,000 male health professionals, researchers found a steady decrease in suicides as B.M.I. increased, even after controlling for variables including smoking, dietary factors, physical activity, marital status and alcohol use. There were 131 suicides during the time of the study.

Compared with those in the lowest 20 percent in B.M.I., men in the highest one-fifth were almost 60 percent less likely to kill themselves.

“It’s a surprisingly strong relationship,” said Kenneth J. Mukamal, the lead author and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University. “But even though we see that heavier men are less likely to commit suicide, there are plenty of other studies that link obesity to poor health. Gaining weight is not the best way to improve anyone’s mental health. I hope these findings will provide insight into new strategies to prevent suicide.”

So what is it about being heavier that makes you less likely to pull the plug? The researchers suggest it may have something to do with higher circulating levels of insulin. But you have to figure that some of the heavier people have insulin resistance, which is linked to mood disorders. The best answer might be that the men in the study -- highly educated (and overwhelmingly white) male health professionals -- aren't really representative of the overall population.

Pop a pill before you bust a gut

Vitamins are getting a bad rap these days, but here's a group that can use them:

Weight loss surgery could lead to a condition which can result in memory loss, according to U.S. research. The syndrome -- Wernicke encephalopathy -- affects the nervous system and brain, and can lead to confusion and the inability to co-ordinate movement.

The study, published in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology, says the syndrome is caused by a lack of vitamin B1, or thiamine. Frequent vomiting after surgery can lead to the syndrome, the study found.

What's interesting here is that the syndrome shows up months after the surgery -- in one case 18 months later. The treatment involves administering B vitamins intravenously, so taking vitamins should help prevent it.

Take that, all you ... well, whoever advises people not to take vitamins.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2007

Quick Question

We now know that obesity in childhood can trigger early puberty in girls:

Lee noted that girls in the United States are entering puberty at younger ages than they were 30 years ago. Over that same time, there's been a significant increase in obesity rates among American children.

"Previous studies had found that girls who have earlier puberty tend to have higher body mass index (BMI), but it was unclear whether puberty led to the weight gain or weight gain led to the earlier onset of puberty. Our study offers evidence that it is the latter," said Lee, who is also assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the U-M Medical School.

We also know that Shaquille O'Neal is trying to help kids with health and weight-control issues:

Shaquille O'Neal will be taking a shot at a TV reality show focused on childhood obesity and health. The ABC summer series will feature the Miami Heat star and his effort to help Florida schoolchildren lose weight, ABC said Monday. ...

The series, being filmed in Broward County, Fla., will track the lives of the children involved. O'Neal will be on hand as booster and, in episodes yet to be shot, will lobby politicians on causes including school nutrition, Daily Variety reported Monday.

The show is an adaptation of the British series Ian Wright's Unfit Kids, which featured the former soccer star.

O'Neal, a father of six, has been outspoken about the issue of children and weight problems.

So this mean we'll someday realize that Shaquille O'Neal prevents early puberty?

That would be a hell of a line to have on your resume:

"... and from 2007 to 2012 I prevented 46.7 million children from reaching early puberty."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2007

Monday Linkage

Just because I'm too busy to organize these stories with a unifying theme ...

Why extreme stress makes you stupid

This story shows that when you lose sleep, your brain stops making new brain cells.

This test was pretty extreme, since it kept subjects awake for 72 hours. In real life, that would only happen in times of war, personal tragedy, or natural disaster. And it doesn't really say anything about what happens to brain cells when people just lose a few hours of sleep here and there.

But the news is still kind of scary: If you're involved in something so traumatic that you don't sleep for 72 hours, it takes two full weeks for your brain to catch up.

Sleep it off

It's not news that sleep is important to weight control. So this short item about kids and sleep isn't surprising, but it reinforces what we already know:

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used detailed diaries kept by families to examine children's sleep behavior and its relationship with weight. They determined that an extra hour of sleep cut the likelihood of being overweight from 36 percent to 30 percent in children ages 3 to 8, and from 34 percent to 30 percent in those ages 8 to 13.

Not a huge difference, but it's still something. Parents, turn off the TV or computer or PlayStation, and enforce a consistent bedtime. And if you have any of those things in your kids' bedrooms, where you can't monitor whether they're on or off, get them out.

And make sure they get a good breakfast when they wake up.

There. I just solved the childhood obesity problem in two easy steps.

Cut it out

I meant to blog last week about the rise in obesity surgeries for teenagers. But like so many things, I never got around to it. So this morning's L.A. Times has a handy roundup story about how weight-loss surgery is getting safer across the board:

What really improved safety, experts say, was the introduction, in 1994, of laparoscopic procedures into weight-loss surgery. Using lasers and cameras, surgeons make a few small incisions and perform procedures without cutting a person's belly.

Between 1998 and 2004, the death rate of patients undergoing obesity surgery dropped 80 percent, according to a 2006 report by William Encinosa of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Md. -- probably due to simpler surgery.

Maybe someday surgery will be as common for people tired of being overweight as Lasik is for people who're tired of wearing glasses. If it's truly as safe as it now seems, it's hard to argue against it.

Use it ... and lose it anyway

I spent the weekend watching my older daughter skate. She probably skated four hours on a friend's frozen pond on Saturday, and then another three hours Sunday at an indoor rink -- she had her regular lesson, then tore around on the ice with friends for another hour and change.

At 50, I'm lucky if I get in three hours of exercise a week, but for her that's just a regular old Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I'm only doing what my body tells me to do -- I'm supposed to slow down with age. This is a process that occurs naturally in every species. It's not just activity levels that downshift. Performance declines as well after about the age of 30, even with elite-level talent and serious conditioning.

A new study sheds some light on why our bodies persist in getting older and slower:

The team from the Howard Hughes Medical School at Yale University School of Medicine compared the skeletal muscle of three-month-old rats and two-year-olds. They found that a process called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) slowed down in the older animals.

AMPK's role in skeletal muscle is to stimulate the body to burn off fat and to fuel cells, via the production of mitochondria -- cells' power sources. ...

The animals were exposed to a chemicals which stimulates AMPK and were also fed more food, which also stimulates the process. They found that the older rats had lower AMPK activity than the younger animals.

What's funny about this story is that it portrays this loss of muscle function as all-or-nothing:

Dr. Anne McArdle, an ageing specialist at the University of Liverpool, said: "Loss of skeletal muscle mass and function as we age is a major problem which has a significant effect on quality of life of older people." ...

But she added: "The data suggest that the ability to increase AMPK activity is completely abolished and so there is little evidence to suggest that 'working harder' would overcome these deficiencies."

There's still a pretty big gulf between "doing nothing" and "working harder." No one walking around with a 70-year-old body thinks he just needs to work a little harder to make his body perform like a 20-year-old's. But there's plenty you can do that falls in between the extremes. Some exercise is always better than none, and exercise in combination with a good diet will do wonders to delay the inevitable -- to slow the slowdown.

So what'll you bet the next time we see the acronym "AMPK" in a news story, it'll be about a drug company that's invented a product to increase AMPK activity in older people? "It's Viagra for your muscles!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

Monday Blog Meat

If it's Monday, that means there's a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it's Martin Luther King day. Next month it'll be Presidents' Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut.

I'm not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids' Christmas vacation.

I don't say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It's just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and all their great achievements.

Then, in November, we use that holiday for a National Day of Voting. Call it Democracy Day, perhaps. In even-numbered years, the adults vote for congressmen, governors, and the occasional president. In odd-numbered years, the children vote in non-binding polls on the things they'd like their country to do. The point is that everyone celebrates the great individuals of our country's history on a single day in February, and then in November everyone practices what those great Americans gave us: democracy.

Anyway, my point is that the kids are home from school today, I'm on deadline, and I have to travel later this week. So today's blog is a link dump, without a unifying theme.

Downward-facing devil

When Rannoch Donald sent along the link to this story, his only comment was, "I'm not sure what to make of it."

A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.'s Cariboo region. They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn't be taught in public schools.

Chelsea Brears, who has two children in the school system, said her son was asked to do different poses and "to put his hands together." Brears, a Christian, said she doesn't want her children exposed to another religion during class time.

"It's not fair to take prayer out, and yet they're allowing yoga, which is religion, in our schools."

Local rancher Audrey Cummings doesn't believe Christian children should be doing yoga at all. "There's God and there's the devil, and the devil's not a gentleman. If you give him any kind of an opening, he will take that."

This is a new one on me. I guess there's a line of thought in contemporary fundamentalist Christianity that insists every idea not mentioned in the Bible is a competing belief system. Evolution isn't discussed in the Bible, so it must be a competing religion. Jesus and the Apostles didn't practice yoga, so it must be a competing religion.

It reminds me of the Harry Potter flap, with Christians arguing the books are an endorsement of paganism and witchcraft ... which of course are competing belief systems.

Personally, I think the Potter books are profoundly moral. There's good and there's evil. Harry, at various points, is tempted with worldly riches and social position, but shows no interest in either. He spends most of his time either being a kid or saving the world.

Granted, there's no God in Harry's world, even though they celebrate Christmas. The magic is controlled by mortal beings. In that sense, it's like Star Wars. There's The Force, and some are better at using it than others. But there's no God or gods who can save the mortals from their own dilemmas.

What all that has to do with yoga, though, is beyond me.

Eat a steak, save your brain

According to this, low levels of LDL -- the "bad" cholesterol -- are linked to Parkinson's, a secondary symptom of which is dementia. That's right: Low levels of cholesterol are linked to a debilitating disease.

Another way to prevent dementia -- learn a foreign language:

Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn't, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Previous studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as physical activity, social involvement and education may improve overall brain health. Bilingualism may help the brain build what is called a cognitive reserve, which may provide protection against the onset of dementia, the Canadian researchers said.

"There are no pharmacological interventions that are this dramatic," Morris Freedman, director of the Memory Clinic at Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto, said in a statement today.

The difference in dementia onset remained even after the researchers factored in the possible influence of culture, immigration, formal education, employment and gender on the results, the study said.

Since I only speak one language, I sure hope those cholesterol-raising steaks are enough to protect me.

The height of fashion

I've been reading more and more about height the past few years -- and blogging about it from time to time -- so it's no surprise the L.A. Times would devote a major health feature to the topic, including this:

Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn't exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.

"There's still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature," says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. "But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring."

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

What I didn't know is that some parents are giving normal, healthy kids drugs to make them taller:

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller -- but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.

The added height comes at a cost of $52,634 per gained inch, according to a study in the March 2006 issue of the same journal. About 410,000 U.S. children qualify under the FDA guidelines. If they were all treated with growth hormone, the total healthcare cost would be more than $8 billion a year, wrote Dr. Leona Cuttler, pediatric endocrinologist at Rainbow Babies and Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, in a February 2004 editorial in the journal.

I look at that as a parent who gives one of his children powerful stimulant medication to help him function normally. Nobody who saw our son in school before he started taking the meds doubted that he needed them. We waited as long as we could before starting the treatment. It's helped him in profound ways, but we still struggle with issues the drugs can't treat. That's fine; it's the deal you accept when you decide to become parents.

But to take those kind of risks with children just because they're short? And to spend that kind of money to make it happen? Holy cow.

That said, I do understand that it's kind of disappointing to realize your kids aren't going to be tall. My wife and I are dead-solid-average for American adults -- I'm 5-10, she's 5-4. I'm two inches shorter than my dad, and she's about the same height as her mother.* Both of us have taller siblings, which gave us hope that our kids would be taller than us. Our son may end up being taller than me -- he's about average for his age right now, but started out above average and may end up there again -- but both of our daughters remain stubbornly short for their ages.

Our siblings' children are mostly taller than them, so in that sense we wonder what the hell we did wrong. Two of our kids figure to be smarter than us, and the third is stronger and faster and more athletic than either of us even dreamed of being when we were that age. So why did they get the short end of the stick?

I have no idea how to answer my own question, but it would never in a million years occur to us to try to change that genetic roll of the dice with powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. I hate to judge other parents' decisions, but this is a tough one to understand.

* Actually, she's the same height as her 65-year-old mother now. Her mother was actually 5-6 for most of her adult life, two inches taller than my wife. So each of us is two inches shorter than our same-sex parent, which is bad enough. But now our daughters may end up even shorter than my wife. Where's regression to the mean when you really need it?

UPDATE: Water, water everywhere, but don't let any of it out unless you want to lose the contest

Craig Ballantyne wondered how I could possibly miss this story about a 28-year-old woman who died after a water-drinking contest she'd entered for the chance to win a video-game system for her three kids.

I didn't actually miss the story; I just found it too damned depressing to write about on a Monday morning.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2006

Gut Check

According to new research, a type of bacteria may cause obesity:

According to two studies being published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, both obese mice and people had more of one type of bacteria and less of another kind.

A "microbial component" appears to contribute to obesity, said study lead author Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University's Center for Genome Sciences.

Obese humans and mice had a lower percentage of a family of bacteria called Bacteroidetes and more of a type of bacteria called Firmicutes, Gordon and his colleagues found.

The researchers aren't sure if more Firmicutes makes you fat or if people who are obese grow more of that type of bacteria.

But growing evidence of this link gives scientists a potentially new and still distant way of fighting obesity: Change the bacteria in the intestines and stomach. It also may lead to a way of fighting malnutrition in the developing world.

Who would've thought something called "Firmicute" might make people fat? Doesn't it sound like a new workout system for teenage girls? "I lost 20 pounds on Firmicute, I got a new boyfriend who isn't on meth, and my SAT scores went up 100 points!"

(Thanks to Sal Becker and Mike Navin for the link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2006

Saltpeter for Your Nose

According to this, the power of the human sense of smell is highly underrated:

New olfactory research suggests that when it comes to tracking scent at ground-level on open terrain, the average human's sense of smell is stronger than most people believe.

"There's this general assumption that people have a bad sense of smell," said study lead author Jess Porter, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley. "But we found that people can certainly sniff their way accurately around a spatial context -- although less successfully and slower if they have only one nostril to work with."

The new American-Israeli study, published online Dec. 17 in Nature Neuroscience, reports that people can, in fact, be trained to rely exclusively on ground-level smelling to successfully navigate unknown territory. In fact, they instinctively mimic certain animal behaviors, including enlisting each nostril to independently identify distinct smells and "triangulate" a path.

The research was conducted in open fields. The subjects were blindfolded and given thick gloves and ear plugs, leaving them to navigate a scented trail on their hands and knees, using only their sense of smell.

About two-thirds of the men and women were able to find their way, and the subjects who were brought back to repeat the task got better at it with practice.

To my surprise, the article doesn't report any gender differences. I expected women to have keener senses of smell than men. But maybe that only applies with poopy diapers that both parents are too tired to change. In my experience, the female usually "notices" it first, which is to say the male is better at ignoring it until the female finally acts.

Coincidentally, this story came out the next day:

Compellis Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts said it will begin human trials next year of a nasal spray designed to fight obesity by blocking the senses of smell and taste. It won a patent for the product this month.

"The pleasurable effect of eating is all stimulated by smell and taste," Christopher Adams, the company's founder and chief executive, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"The premise is that olfactory activity that controls both smell and taste is a trigger and a feedback mechanism to eat. If you have some kind of reduced sense of smell or taste, you tend to eat less," he said.

It makes sense in theory, but I wonder about the practice? I mean, do people with chronic sinus problems eat less? It's pretty well-established that asthma and obesity are linked, and this study shows that people with asthma are more likely to complain of chronic problems with their nasal passages.

I'm just thinking about all this for the first time as I type it out, so I can't even guess if chemically castrating your nose is a good idea or not for the treatment of obesity.

But I will offer this prediction: For new fathers, this spray will be a godsend. You'll never have to change a dirty diaper again.

"Honey, I swear, I can't smell a thing!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2006

A Dispatch from the Trans-Cupcake Wars

Some days I question my competence as a blogger. I call MPF "the official weblog of the American obesity epidemic," but when a story comes along that's right in my wheelhouse -- like the trans-fat ban in New York City -- I can't work up the energy to care about it.

I'm not in favor of trans fats, but I do cringe when governments get involved in nutrition debates. Historically, they tend to jump in on the wrong side. Look at the original Food Guide Pyramid, for example. It was a virtual prescription for diabetes, and yet the U.S. Department of Agriculture continued to promote it long after we knew about the dangers of large quantities of refined carbohydrates.

The only good thing you can say about the pyramid is that the government never forced anyone to follow it.

Don't get me wrong; I don't think any harm will come from banning trans fats. But it's worth noting how we ended up with so many trans fats in our foods in the first place.

Here's one example: Companies like McDonald's used to cook French fries in beef tallow. But, because of the fear of animal fats in general and saturated fats in particular, they were pressured to switch to vegetable oil. The type they chose was partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which includes a trans fat called elaidic acid, and what looked like a win for nutritional virtue turned into a major loss. (And that was before McDonald's started supersizing.)

As Mike Roussell points out in this T-nation column, some trans fats occur naturally in beef, and are actually good for us. Our bodies convert these fats to CLA, which is currently thought to reduce body fat. So the debate isn't as simple as it looks.

My other concern about banning trans fats in our nation's media capital is that it gives ammunition to all the people who don't want anything to be regulated. (Trust me, they'll use this mostly symbolic trans-fat ban to drum up fear of universal health care, which will be a major issue in the 2008 elections and beyond.)

I don't mind setting those people off if we're talking about a legitimate public-health issue, like smoking in public buildings. But it's hard for me to imagine how my health is improved by the fact the guy next to me in a New York City restaurant can no longer order foods fried in partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

But there is a current nutrition debate that hits closer to home:

Once a cupcake wasn't something to think about. It was just what your mom brought to school for your birthday. But this year, as schools across the country begin enforcing new federally mandated "wellness policies," many are banning the little treats. And parents are fighting back.

When the principal at George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria explained to the PTA earlier this year that cupcakes were out, a furor erupted.

"A lot of people are really angry," said Karen Epperson, a George Mason parent. "They think this is really stupid."

What the Washington Post story doesn't say is that cupcakes are only a small part of the problem in today's schools. If your kid is in a classroom with 25 other kids, she's not only getting birthday cupcakes a couple dozen times each school year, she's also getting treats to celebrate every freakin' holiday imaginable. Even on Halloween, when the kids are just hours away from storming the streets and coming back with pumpkin-loads of candy, they get bags of it at school. Valentine's Day is an orgy of hardened, blood-red globs of pure sugar. I'm waiting for them to come home with candy pitchforks because someone wanted to celebrate Bastille Day.

(Okay, that wouldn't happen, since Bastille Day is July 14, when kids are home for the summer, whining about having nothing to do, which is how they prepare for the 9-month school year, when they whine about having too much to do. And, okay, there isn't much call for acknowledging French holidays in the U.S. these days. But if it were in March instead of July, I'll bet some kid would bring in something baked or sugar-coated to celebrate it.)

The upshot of all this is described by a commenter on Kevin Drum's blog:

You try to raise a non-obese, relatively healthy kid and you do okay until they hit kindergarten. Between the cupcake days, the party days, and the "specials" (teacher's day, Arbor Day, whatever), there's hardly a day that isn't loaded with extra artificial food coloring, high fructose corn syrup and fat. And then we wonder why the kids all misbehave. Blue, tattooed "froot" leather does not occur anywhere in nature! But try to tell that to most parents.

Seriously, parents will get near violent with you when you suggest at an average suburban school that maybe we should just have one cupcake/candy/sweet-treats day a month, or otherwise limit sweets. So, you can tell your kid that she can sit in the corner and eat her grapes and carrots while her friend passes out the Sponge Bob froot snacks. You can harp on the teacher. Or you can take it to the [PTA] where they will roll their eyes at you.

That's pretty accurate. But there's yet another level of absurdity here: At the same time the parents are fighting to keep cupcakes in the schools, the schools are wringing their hands over childhood obesity.

It's like complaining that children are illiterate, but then refusing to put books into classrooms.

Seriously, it's that absurd.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:56 AM | Comments (4)

December 04, 2006

Chew the Day

Back in the late 1890s, a guy named Horace Fletcher hit on the ultimate weight-loss protocol: He would chew each mouthful of food 32 times, then spit out whatever hadn't dissolved and slid down his throat. According to this (scroll down toward the bottom), he lost more than 40 pounds by turning every bite of food into a chew toy. One of the biggest fans of "Fletcherizing" was John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, the subject of The Road to Wellville, T.C. Boyle's very entertaining novel about the healthy-living craze of the early 20th century.

(I'm finally reading Road to Wellville now; I have no idea why I waited so long, considering I've read most of Boyle's books and I'm actually interested in the subject.)

Reading about century-old health and nutrition fads is humbling, in a way, especially for someone who attempts to offer advice in those areas. I cringe at some of the ridiculous ideas people had back then -- particularly the militant vegetarianism of guys like Kellogg, who was obsessed with bowel movements and "intestinal flora" -- but recognize the messianic confidence with which they offered their "physiologic" solutions to problems ranging from obesity to depression.

Still, they were right about some things, especially tobacco. And given the unsanitary conditions of the slaughterhouses 100 years ago, they may have even had a point about avoiding meat.

I bring all this up because a new study shows they were also right about Fletcherizing:

A new study provides the first-ever scientific proof that if you eat slowly, you will eat less -- and you will enjoy the meal more.

Women consumed about 70 fewer calories when they were told to take their time eating a meal of pasta and sauce, compared to when they were instructed to eat it as quickly as possible. They also rated the meal as more pleasant when they ate slowly.

"They got more pleasure for (fewer) calories, and more satiety for (fewer) calories," Dr. Kathleen Melanson of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston told Reuters Health.

Melanson decided to conduct the study when she learned there was no research to support the familiar claim that eating slowly reduces appetite.

What's most remarkable about the study is the extremes: First the group was told to eat as fast as possible, and wolfed down 646 calories in nine minutes. Then, on another day, they were told to eat as slowly as possible, and put away 579 calories in 29 minutes, on average. Since nobody actually eats like that, I have to wonder about the study's practicality.

It also reminds me of those fidgeting studies, which show that thin people tend to fidget more. Since a non-fidgeter can't choose to become a fidgeter, what good is it to know that fidgeting burns off calories?

I know eating patterns can be consciously altered, but my guess is that some people just naturally eat faster than others. I confess I'm a speed-eater, and my kids tend to eat like me. But we're also fidgeters. So part of our genetic code predisposes us to be lean, while another part leads to overeating.

Looking at it the other way, wouldn't non-fidgeters be the most likely to eat food slowly anyway? And, since they're less active in general, does chewing food slowly really do them any good?

If only Fletcher and Kellogg were still around to sort it out for us.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:59 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2006

... Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

Here's something that's always fascinated me: I don't make any secret of my politics. I'm a liberal, and I'm proud of it. And, as an old-school liberal, I cringe at stereotypes. I try hard not to be a stereotype myself. I may be bald, middle-aged, and suburban, but I try not to act like the bald, middle-aged, suburban dads I saw growing up.

What confounds me is when people embrace their stereotypes. It's their choice, and I'd be the last guy to say people shouldn't make their own choices. But when you go through life trying not to think of, say, all young black males as irresponsible baby daddies, or all Asians as bad drivers, or all lesbians as pushy and plump, it creates some serious cognitive dissonance to read about people who want to match their most negative images.

Today's New York Times has a feature on one such group:

Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat to the nation’s health and treasury, fat studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.

For most scholars of fat, though, it is not an objective pursuit. Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject -- and it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian activists -- to women’s studies, queer studies, disability studies and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes and oppression by mainstream society.

“It’s about a dominant culture’s ideals of what a real person should be,” said Stefanie Snider, 29, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, whose dissertation will be on the intersection of queer and fat identities in the United States in the 20th century. “And whether that has to do with skin color or heritage or sexual orientation or ability, it ends up being similar in a lot of ways.”

Fat studies is still a fringe area of scholarship, but it is gaining traction. Three years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, which promotes scholarly research of popular culture, added a fat studies component to regional and national conferences.

Professors in sociology, exercise physiology, history, English and law are shoehorning discussions of fat into their teachings and research.

I understand that everything in life is a worthy subject of research. And certainly being overweight in a society that celebrates emaciation is a challenge worth examining in the social sciences. But is it really all that different from any other challenge? Is anyone creating an academic track for bald studies, or short studies, or mediocrity science?

Interestingly, fat studies exists, in part, to refute obesity studies:

[P]roponents of fat studies ... firmly believe that obesity research is shaped by society’s bias against fat people and that the consequences of excessive weight are not as bad as scientists portray.

“When you look at the data you realize that the claims are completely exaggerated and in some places misleading based on the actual science,” said Dr. Abigail C. Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles. “That raises really interesting sociological questions: Why has this become such the concern that it is and why are we so worried about weight?”

Oh! Oh! I can answer that!

Actually, the article does a good job of shooting down the idea that obesity is a healthy condition, while avoiding the issue of whether fat people are actually victims of systematic discrimination. Which is fine. The subject that's covered in depth -- whether fat studies is a legitimate category of academic pursuit -- lets both sides present their case. I'd guess most readers will agree with this sentiment:

[A]s Big Arm Woman, a blogger, wrote: “I don’t care if people are fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money on scholarship about the 'politics of fatness' when half of the freshman class can’t read or write at the college level.”

Others, like me, will wonder about this line of descent: An academic movement that started with gender studies (women studying themselves) and moved on to queer studies (homosexual women studying themselves) now embraces fat studies (overweight homosexual women studying themselves).

What's next? Where do they go from here?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2006

The Whole Package

A chain of grocery stores in New England has decided to start calling out allegedly "healthy" foods on their true health-promoting qualities. I don't think the results are much of a surprise:

The chain, Hannaford Brothers, developed a system called Guiding Stars that rated the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you.

These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar). Whole milk? Too much fat -- no stars. Predictably, most fruits and vegetables did earn three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal.

My eyes kind of glazed over as I was reading the story in the New York Times this morning. Sure, warning consumers about added salt and sugar is perfectly fine, but something tells me that parents who feed their kids yogurt or Healthy Choice soups aren't the ones responsible for this:

American children and teens are growing ever-fatter tummies, a bad sign that means they are at even more risk of heart disease and diabetes, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

They found that the belly fat of children and teenagers had increased by more than 65 percent since the 1990s -- directly in line with rising obesity rates.

The study measured waist circumference, and the researchers determined that the growth in American waistlines is a sign of increased visceral fat, the type that accumulates around internal organs, beneath the abdominal muscles, as opposed to the squishy subcutaneous fat that grows between the muscles and skin.

This is a small quibble -- and it's really more of a question -- but how do we know that a waist-size measurement is an indicator of increased visceral fat? Lots of kids these days look to me as if they're carrying extra fat all over. If their bellies are bigger, is it because they have more visceral fat, or because they're just accumulating more subcutaneous fat from too many calories and not enough exercise?

But, realistically, it's probably a combination, and the researchers are right to raise the alarm.

Still, I've been giving these nutrition questions a lot of thought lately -- call it the Halloween effect. There's so much candy these days, so many treats, and at the same time so little chance for the kids to go out and run around and burn off the excess energy they're ingesting that it's no surprise they're getting fatter.

And that brings me back to the grocery chain trying to help its customers decide what's healthy and not. Given the inevitability of excess calories, is there any way to minimize the damage those calories cause?

Last week we were talking about resveratrol, but Greg Critser brought up something else this weekend in the L.A. Times, a nutrient that might have an even bigger impact on our health and quality of life. His subject is Alzheimer's, but there are farther-reaching implications:

On the other end of the new research wave are academic entrepreneurs who are asking: Can we find a public health intervention that can slow the growing dementia rates in large populations? To that end, the National Institutes of Health has begun trials on omega-3 oils. But it is California -- and particularly Los Angeles -- that is at the leading edge of such work.

A number of promising experiments are underway, including the work of Greg Cole, a professor of medicine and neurology at UCLA, on the use of curcumin, a spice in curry powder, and its ability to retard dementia-linked changes in Alzheimer's-prone rats. USC has a number of experiments underway as well, many inspired by the pacesetting work of Caleb Finch, arguably the world's leading gerontological thinker.

Caleb Finch has been one of my academic heroes ever since I read a profile of him in a USC alumni magazine a few years ago. He said that, based on everything he knew about aging in general and dementia and Alzheimer's in particular, he thought the ideal dinner included a good steak and red wine. Yes, he thinks red meat is a key to lifelong cognitive health.

My kind of guy!

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2006

News Flash: Fat People Don't Need to Be Reminded that They're Fat

When my son was born, almost 11 years ago, he was large. Not only did he have a huge head, but he had round little deltoids and visible muscle separations in his thighs, trapezius, and abdomen. His feet already looked like little skateboards. He was good at one thing -- extracting milk from breasts -- right from the get-go, and quickly grew off the charts. Because of that skill, he was chubby from his toes to his cheeks in his first months of life, and, as you could imagine, felt pretty good about things. He was the jolliest of our three children, quick to laugh and always ready for any kind of game.

He was the picture of robust health in his first year, but that didn't stop my mother from worrying obsessively about his weight. Of course, the extra fat came off as soon as he developed a second passion -- walking -- to go with his great love of drinking milk straight from the jug(s). Now, in fifth grade, he's about as skinny a kid as you'll find, and starting to grow like a weed, which means it'll be a long time before he begins to fill out.

Given our genetics, it's unlikely he would've kept the weight. But what if he'd stayed heavy? How would we have dealt with that? The worst thing would be to remind him constantly about his weight. That's a point I tried to make in this post, and one made more authoritatively by Yale researchers Kelly Brownell and Rebecca Puhl here:

[W]e recently completed a study of more than 2,000 people enrolled in a weight loss program. (It's in the October issue of the journal Obesity.) Participants told us that when they are stigmatized because of their weight they respond with such strategies as eating more food and just giving up on dieting. Eating more in response to discriminatory treatment was reported by 79 percent of the participants, and 75 percent refused to diet. A smaller number, 63 percent, said that they had at one time or another used dieting to cope with such discrimination, but dieting doesn't work very often.

Other studies have shown that overweight girls and boys who are teased because of their weight are more likely to engage in unhealthy weight control and binge eating than are overweight youth who are not teased. It has also been shown that overweight young people avoid physical activities in which peer victimization frequently occurs.

The data are quite clear: Stigmatizing overweight people contributes to unhealthy behavior that only adds to the problem of obesity. With two-thirds of American adults now overweight or obese, obesity is recognized as a pressing public health issue. Schools, health professionals and communities across the country are beginning to talk about what must be done to improve eating habits and encourage more physical activity. But these efforts, which are urgently needed, must expand to include the topic of weight stigma.

They make another interesting point, which is what inspired me to recall my mother's obsession with my infant son's weight:

The sources of weight stigmatization reported in the study were surprising, with family members being the most frequent perpetrators at 72 percent and physicians following closely at 69 percent. But doctors were not the only health-care professionals to make the list: 46 percent of respondents reported being stigmatized by nurses, 37 percent by dietitians or nutritionists, and 21 percent by mental health professionals.

It seems to me that doctors need to talk to patients about their weight, especially if it's linked to high blood pressure or bad blood chemistry. I have no idea when a doctor crosses the line from talking straight with his patients about health risks to "stigmatizing" them because of their girth. I was once told by a doctor that I needed to lose weight, and she was right -- I was too fat at that point. But "too fat" for me was 190 pounds. Now I'm 185, which is technically "overweight" if you go by BMI, but feels like the right weight for me. (It doesn't look bad, either. If you scroll down a little through this article, you'll see a recent picture, taken by Chris Shugart at Charles Staley's annual fitness summit a few weeks ago.) But if that doctor was willing to tell me I needed to lose weight when I had perhaps 10 pounds of fat to lose, how does she approach someone who's 50 or 100 pounds over the edge?

I won't pretend I know the answer, but I think Drs. Brownell and Puhl are right about one thing: Whatever doctors are saying now sure isn't working.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:06 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2006

The Unbearable Fatness of Being

Now that baseball's over, we return to our regularly scheduled blogging. This story, by the New York Times' Gina Kolata, talks about something I meant to blog about last week but never got around to:

This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990’s, is 350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide.

“People are out scouring the landscape for things that make obese people look bad,” said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.

And is that a bad thing? Dr. Jacobson doesn’t think so. “We felt that beyond public health, being overweight has many other socioeconomic implications,” he said, which was why he was drawn to calculating the gasoline costs of added weight.

What's interesting to me isn't that obesity contributes to global warming -- I'm sure fat people exhale more carbon dioxide than thin people, too, so it's kind of an obvious conclusion -- but that every single study making the point that fat people are causing pain and suffering to the rest of us gets this kind of publicity.

I mean, when's the last time a study from The Engineering Economist was hashed over by the New York Times?

To put it on context, what if that same journal had concluded that low-carbohydrate diets will save humanity, or that the orthopedic injuries caused by running are crippling commerce? Would any major media outlet have written about it?

Kolata focuses on an important point -- stigmatizing fat people doesn't help them lose weight -- but there's still a bigger point to be made: We have re-engineered our lives to minimize physical activity, and re-engineered our food chain to make our food as cheap, calorically dense, and easy to consume as possible. These changes are based on a series of changes that all of us, in some way, saw happen and did nothing to prevent. (Greg Critser's Fat Land is the best book I've read on how we got to this point.)

Now we have schools burdening kids with so much homework that getting outside to play during daylight hours is nearly impossible. Meanwhile, parents turn every minor celebration -- birthday, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Easter -- into yet another reason to send kids home with their backpacks bulging with candy of every description. And if you work with an office with more than a couple dozen colleagues, you're going to have birthday cakes and platters of sweets available on a weekly basis, if not daily.

So why are we so hell-bent on blaming fat people for getting fat, when nearly every aspect of our lives is designed, however unintentionally, to make them fat?

I can be as negative and cynical as anybody, but I really think we're at a point that calls for positive, optimistic solutions. Yelling at people to lose weight sure isn't helping.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:44 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2006

Our Daily Bread

Three stories that are probably connected:

First, restaurants are serving ever-bigger portions:

Most restaurant chefs are dishing out portions that are two to four times bigger than the government's recommended serving sizes.

They know these large amounts are supersizing their diners, but they believe customers expect big platefuls of food when eating out, according to a survey of 300 chefs presented [in Boston] Saturday at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society.

A typical restaurant meal has at least 60 percent more calories than the average meal made at home, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. And Americans purchased 209 meals a person from restaurants last year, both eating at restaurants and buying takeout, NPD says.

Portions served at restaurants have steadily increased since the 1970s in tandem with the rise in obesity rates, says Barbara Rolls, a nutrition professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Second, a diet loaded with bread has been linked to kidney cancer in one study:

Researchers say those consuming the highest amounts of bread doubled the risk for kidney malignancy, compared to those eating the smallest amounts. ...

In the study, Bravi's team compared 767 men and women, aged 24 to 79, with kidney cancer to 1,534 men and women in the same age range who did not have the disease.

They asked about diet, lifestyle, personal and family medical history and obtained the participants' height and weight so they could compute their body-mass index (BMI). The participants also answered questions on average weekly intakes of 78 food items over the past two years.

Those who ate the highest amounts of bread -- 28 portions a week -- had nearly two times the risk of kidney cancer as those who ate the lowest number of portions per week, 9, she found. A "portion" was defined as 50 grams or 1.7 ounces, the equivalent of a slice or a slice and a half of bread.

A modest but not statistically significant increased risk was found for the highest intakes of pasta and rice. Those with the highest intakes of milk and yogurt had a 1.3 times greater risk for kidney cancer, she found. But high intakes of poultry, processed meat and vegetables decreased the risk.

No surprise that poultry and vegetables would lower the risk for any type of nutrition-related disease, but processed meat? The idea of bacon preventing anything is kind of mind-blowing. And how do milk products rank up there with bread, rice, and pasta?

The researcher quoted in the story says that she suspects the blood-sugar rise from highly processed carbohydrates starts a hormonal cascade that could eventually lead to cancer-cell growth. But if that's the case, why are milk and yogurt on the list? They're known to spike insulin levels, but not blood sugar.

The researcher is Italian, and had this to say about whether or not the findings of her study apply to Americans:

She doesn't think the findings would apply to the U.S. diet. "The U.S. diet is richer in proteins and poorer in cereals," she said.

Obviously, this is a woman who's never visited Olive Garden.

Now, the third nutrition story in the news this morning:

The "Freshman 15" is more like 5 to 7, but it is followed by the "Sophomore 2 or 3," say researchers who led two of the largest and longest studies ever done of weight gain among college students. The research also showed that males piled on significantly more pounds than females.

Doctors say it is good news that the number of pounds gained is less than the widely believed 15, but bad news that "Generation XL" kids seem to be learning patterns of gradual weight gain that could spell trouble way beyond graduation.

"It may be 10 or 8, but it continues. That, to me, is a bigger problem," said Rena Wing, a psychologist and director of the weight control center at Brown University Medical School in Providence, R.I.

How are they connected? Two of the stories are about eating out -- the college kids, away from home and presumably living in dormitories, are essentially eating out at every meal, choosing their own portion sizes. Adults eating out at restaurants aren't choosing their portion sizes, but we know the portions are bigger than they need to be, and that people will tend to eat what's in front of them, regardless of how hungry they are.

The kidney-cancer story fits in because it looks at one possible consequence of meals heavy in breads and, presumably, other cheap, starchy foods. If you're a restaurant owner or food-service manager of campus housing, and you need to fill a plate or serving line, you aren't going to accomplish that goal with grass-fed beef and wild salmon. You're going to load up on the cheapest foods and minimize the higher-quality proteins.

Curiously, though, the story about restaurants includes this:

Overall, 60 percent of chefs serve steaks that are 12 ounces or larger. A serving of cooked meat is three ounces, according to the government's dietary guidelines. Most dish up one to two cups of pasta with a meal; a serving is half cup. When it comes to vegetables such as steamed broccoli, chefs are closer to a serving with 1/2 cup.

"Not everybody is a plate cleaner, but as the size of the steak increases, you are probably going to eat more," says Julie Flood, a Penn State doctoral student.

Let's get real: How many people are becoming obese and risking their health because they're eating too much steak in restaurants? I understand the point about serving sizes, but can anyone explain to me the proven health benefits of restricting meat to three ounces per serving?

Yet again, I'm amazed with how nutritionists, even when making a good point about the size of restaurant meals, still manage to look away from the 800-pound potato in the room.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2006

Your Belly Or Your Brain

Scotland Bureau Chief Rannoch Donald sent this one along:

Middle-aged adults with a high body mass index (BMI) received lower scores on cognitive tests than middle-aged adults with low BMI, according to a study published in the October 10, 2006, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study investigated the relationships between BMI and cognitive function in 2,223 healthy men and women in France through the use of four cognitive tests. The participants, who were between the ages of 32 and 62, were initially tested in 1996 and again five years later.

The study found a higher BMI was associated with lower cognitive test scores. Results from a test involving word memory recall show people with a BMI of 20 remembered an average of nine out of 16 words, while people with a BMI of 30 remembered an average of seven out of 16 words.

“A higher BMI in 1996 was also associated with a higher cognitive decline at follow-up in 2001,” said study author Maxime Cournot, MD, with Toulouse University Hospital and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Toulouse, France. “The study’s findings may be due to a host of factors including the thickening and hardening of cerebral vessels because of obesity or possibly the development of insulin resistance.”

My first question was whether the people who got fatter in the five years between tests had corresponding declines in brain power. They didn't; the study "found no association between changes in BMI between 1996 and 2001 and cognitive performance." (I assume that means people who lost weight didn't get smarter, either.)

Art De Vany has this intriguing theory on his blog:

I think these researchers are following the path of correlation rather than causation. ... They are looking for some mechanism through which abdominal obesity might affect cognition.

I would argue that metabolic disease produces both abdominal obesity and poor brain nutrition. The brain becomes insulin resistant, just as other organs in the body do, so metabolic disease produces abdominal obesity and poor cognition. This is what I mean by mental obesity, not a fat brain, but an insulin-resistant brain produced by an obese, insulin-resistant body.

My friend Robert, a prominent neural pyschiatrist, tells me that the areas of the brain that have the most insulin receptors, the hippocampus and the frontal cortex, are the same areas that show prominant degeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Insulin resistance in the brain means that these key areas are denied nutrition and are suffering a kind of sugar overload.

As Rannoch says, it just keeps coming back to the corn syrup. No matter what health problem we're discussing, the solution probably involves an adjustment to the diet.

No pill makes you small ... yet

Speaking of obesity and metabolic disease, Wired magazine has weighed in with a look at the pharmaceutical industry's rush to turn obesity into a disease. If it's a disease, rather than a self-imposed lifestyle issue, then it can be solved with a pill:

[D]rug companies have long eyed obesity as the ultimate growth market -- and they just happen to have an arsenal of pills poised to target it. Such cynicism isn't misplaced. The drug industry is among the most profitable in the world; pharma's knack for generating money makes oil companies look like lemonade stands. Drug firms owe their prodigious success to doing one thing exceptionally well.

R&D? No -- marketing.

And as perfect an opportunity as obesity might be, it's also a legitimate health crisis that's only getting bigger. The one snag is that most people don't consider being fat a disease, they see it as a lifestyle problem. Which explains the appeal of metabolic syndrome. It's a simple, compelling concept that reframes the issue in scientific terms. ...

But some wonder if metabolic syndrome really identifies anything new. Skeptics, which include the American Diabetes Association, suggest that researchers, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies have been so hasty to embrace the disease (each for their own reasons), they've overlooked evidence that the science behind the diagnosis is flimsy and conjectural. These critics say that so-called metabolic syndrome lumps together risks we already recognize and monitor -- or worse, that it's just a fancy way to describe obesity. By accepting it, we medicalize a lifestyle condition that we already know how to treat: with diet and exercise.

The opening paragraphs of the story describe a woman who weighs 228 pounds and has been losing the battle against fat for some 15 years. Then it says this:

The breakthrough came last December when her new endocrinologist diagnosed her with something called metabolic syndrome. She'd never heard of it. As she Googled to learn more, her chronic ailments -- the weight, the high blood pressure, the lack of energy -- started to make sense. They even seemed treatable. She's now on Glucophage and Avandia (which both regulate blood sugar) and has lost 20 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates. "Getting a diagnosis was a relief," Cunningham says. "I have hope now, whereas I didn't have any before."

Would her outcome have been any different if she'd simply cut out the carbohydrates? Are the drugs doing anything that diet-induced weight loss couldn't have done on its own?

(Thanks to Chris Bathke for the Wired link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2006

French Women Do Get Fat

Look who's bulking up:

The image of the super-svelte Frenchwoman has taken a battering after a new survey showed more than a third are overweight.

In all, the study found that 19.8 million people out of the country's population of 63 million were too fat, and that 5.9 million of them were obese -- 2.3 million more than nine years ago.

"Women appear to be more affected than men," said Professor Arnaud Basdevant, a Paris hospital nutritionist who jointly co-ordinated the study.

The finger of blame seems to be pointing at the same problem we have here in the you-ess-aye:

Last year the bestseller French Women Don't Get Fat "explained" how a bit of common sense combined with a moderate intake of calorie-filled delicacies could ensure a perfect figure.

Its author, Mireille Guiliano, 60, claimed that traditional French ways of choosing and preparing food ensured good health and figure. The reality, however, is that McDonald's and Burger King are now regular features of towns and cities across France.

Family meals are being replaced by supermarket ready dinners. Even Miss Guiliano has admitted that her book's title may have to be revised.

"Of course some French women get fat," she said. "I find it obscene, frightening, that France has one of the largest number of McDonald's outside America."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2006

Kids on the Fat Track

My wife and I are way, way, way behind the pop-culture curve in many areas, especially TV. Since we signed up with Netflix, we don't bother following any series in real time; we wait for the full-season DVDs to come out, and then watch all the episodes in order.

To give you an idea how far behind we are, we just completed the first season of 24. For the life of me, I can't figure out how that show got so much attention and critical acclaim, aside from the gimmick of pretending the events are happening in "real time." I'll acknowledge that the cliffhangers are exciting, but I couldn't stop thinking that everything that led to each crisis was transparently phony -- cops don't act like cops, terrorists don't act like terrorists, politicians don't act like politicians, and no one ever gets hungry, thirsty, dirty, or sweaty. The characters were better-groomed at the end of the "day" than they were in the beginning.

Our new series is Weeds, which isn't as slick or ambitious as 24 but still has its moments. My favorite parts, for pure shock and horror, are when the evil Celia bullies her overweight daughter.

In real life, the brightest and best-intentioned parents of even slightly pudgy kids often obsess over what to do. Make a big deal out of the weight, and risk scarring the kid for life? Ignore it, and let the kid be fat but potentially happy? Split the difference, and do everything you can to monitor the diet and encourage exercise without specifying the reasons why?

The third option looks right to me, and it's important to realize that baby fat isn't always something kids grow out of:

Pudgy toddlers face a good chance of becoming overweight 12-year-olds, according to government research that shoots down the notion that children naturally outgrow early chubbiness.

Children who were overweight at age 2 or later during their preschool years were five times more likely to be overweight at age 12 than youngsters who were not overweight early on, the study found. Sixty percent of the children who were overweight at any time during the preschool period were overweight at age 12.

Children were considered overweight if their body mass index was in the 85th percentile or higher for their gender and age. That means they were heavier than at least 85 percent of children their same age and sex.

"These results suggest that any time a child reaches the 85th percentile for BMI may be an appropriate time for intervention," the researchers wrote.

That said, it also seems important to note that 12-year-olds still might grow beyond their residual baby fat once the hormones kick in and the bones start growing like bamboo shoots.

But that's a pretty big "might," especially when you consider this:

The researchers also found that 40 percent of children whose BMIs were between the 50th and 84th percentiles by age 3 -- or in the normal to high-normal range -- were overweight at age 12. By contrast, no children with a body-mass index below the 50th percentile throughout elementary school had become overweight by age 12.

Curiously, our very skinny son was off the growth charts as an infant. He was very, very good at breast-feeding, and who can blame him? Somewhere deep down inside he must've realized that this boob-in-the-face thing would only last so long. He was relatively big at birth (8 pounds, 12 ounces; 20.5 inches long) but by six months was a chunky monkey, a Buddha baby. Today, he's around the 80th percentile for height and 75th for weight, with an upper body that looks like a skeleton with abs.

Conversely, at her recent doctor's appointment, our older daughter registered in the 25th percentile for height but the 50th for weight. I have no idea how to explain the numbers, since she has no visible fat and is actually muscular for an eight-year-old. Seems impossible that this short, wiry kid is exactly average in weight for her age, but there's no point arguing with the numbers. As long as she's lean and healthy, I don't know what we should do differently.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2006

We're Going to Hell in a Handbasket, A Really, Really, Really Big Handbasket

It may be a holiday weekend in the U.S., but Scotland Bureau Chief Rannoch Donald is working hard this morning, sending me more obesity-related news than I normally get in a month.

Most of the news comes from the International Conference on Obesity, in Sydney, Australia, where experts kicked things off by warning of a worldwide obesity pandemic:

"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Paul Zimmet, chairman of the meeting of more than 2,500 experts and health officials, said in a speech opening the weeklong International Congress on Obesity. "It's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu."

So you'd think that people issuing such dire warnings would have solid, practical ideas about how to stop this pandemic. And you'd be wrong:

Experts at the conference said governments should impose bans on junk food advertising aimed directly at children, although they acknowledged such restrictions were unlikely to come about soon because the food industry would lobby hard against them.

That's it? That's all they've got?

That leads me to the most depressing story coming out of the conference so far:

The spiralling consumption of high-sugar, high-energy soft drinks has been a hot topic in the world of obesity research, and particularly regarding the spread of weight gain among teenagers.

But now the soft drink industry is hitting back with its own science.

Among the 3,000 experts meeting in Sydney for a world congress on the international obesity epidemic is the American Dr. John Foreyt.

Chaperoned by Coca Cola company representatives as the conference opened today, Dr. Foreyt will address the congress about what he's learnt in his time at the Behavioural Medicines Research Centre in Houston, Texas.

In short, Dr. Foreyt says soft drinks have copped too much criticism in the war on fat.

Back when I first started writing about weight loss and related issues, Foreyt was on the A-list of obesity experts. And now he's waddling around in the employ of a soft-drink company, the nutrition-science equivalent of a Bush administration goon telling us things are fine in Iraq when everyone knows the situation there is FUBAR.

Look at this quote from Foreyt:

"I think the answer to really looking at a healthy lifestyle is balance and variety and moderation, and any time you pick out a single culprit you're going to really be in trouble, because, you know, obesity and health risks are all associated with multiple factors."

And this one:

"Well, calories are calories are calories, so you want to look at balance, and if people are getting their calories from one source, too many calories, people can get in trouble, but that caloric source can be anything. So you really have to look at your overall diet. I think that's still the bottom line."

Okay, so show me all the people who weigh 400 pounds because they ate too many chicken breasts or went overboard with fresh fruit and steamed vegetables. How fucked-up a world is this when an obesity researcher goes to work for the industry most closely associated with the problem he's allegedly trying to solve?

Oh, on a related note, I should note that I'm now a consultant for Pillsbury. My job is to make appearances with the Dancing Doughboy, and make sure people understand it's okay to eat pastries in moderation. Calories are calories are calories. An ounce of cookie dough is no different from an ounce of fish. And the fish may be worse because, you know, fish have mercury.

Gene, gene, the overeating machine

Stepping away from the material destined for the "this dog won't hunt" file, here's something to chew on:

Dietary supplements and alternative treatments promising weight loss have minimal or no effect because they cannot match evolutionary influences that cause the body to conserve energy in times of famine, Dr. Anne-Thea McGill told the conference.

McGill, senior lecturer in Population Health at the University of Auckland, said humans were designed to maximize their energy intake because their large brains used about one-quarter of their total energy expenditure.

"Early humans sought energy-dense food with high levels of fats, starches and sugars. We are genetically programmed to find foods with these qualities appealing," said McGill.

"However, highly energy-dense Western diets have had many of the flavor and micronutrients processed out of them. The artificial replacements in starchy, fatty and sugary foods make them over-palatable and easy to eat quickly."

I think the "eat quickly" part is crucial. Humans have complex mechanisms designed to tell us when we're full. Back when food was difficult to eat -- when you had to gnaw meat off a bone, pull seafood out of a shell, or extract nuts and seeds from husks -- there was plenty of time for the enzymes and hormones to do their job and let us know when we'd had enough. But when we choose foods that can be eaten quickly -- and it takes no time at all to put away 1,000 calories of fast food -- then we don't give the satiety-signaling mechanisms a chance to work. And foods with high-fructose corn syrup can pass through your system without triggering insulin, a hormone that helps with appetite control. That's why you can put away a six-pack of soda -- 900 calories, give or take -- without your body sensing that it has a shitload of food to process.

At the same time, those calories aren't giving your body the nutrients it needs, so your body responds by storing fat and then kicking up the hunger signals in hopes of getting more food.

That's why taking pills specifically designed to speed up your metabolism or slow down your appetite don't work particularly well:

"Many over-the-counter remedies such as concentrated herbal preparations, food extracts, minerals and vitamins are promoted as helping to decrease body weight," she said.

"However, they do not redress the nutrient imbalance from poor diets that produce obesity."

Interesting that she didn't mention prescription anti-obesity drugs. Maybe it was an oversight, and maybe the reporter left out the part of her speech in which she mentioned it. Still, I've developed a radar for this kind of thing. Researchers like to come down on supplements, but they rarely have similarly disparaging words for prescription drugs. Since they're all inadequate solutions to the same problem, why single out the products that consumers choose, and give a free pass to the ones that doctors push on patients?

The girl can't help it

This BBC story about a morbidly obese teenager is as depressing as anything coming out of the obesity conference:

Being a 19-year-old girl is tough at the best of times. You’re awkward; you’re insecure and trying to find your place in the world. Imagine having to contend with all that and being super-morbidly obese.

Meet Bethany Walton. At 5'6" and 34 stone [476 pounds], Bethany weighs three times the size of an average 19-year-old and is the largest teen in the UK. While most teens her age are clubbing, dating and moving away from home, Bethany’s size dictates her life. She can’t wear the latest fashions or go to the cinema as she can’t fit in the seats and she’s never had a boyfriend. She never feels pretty and thinks her body is "disgusting."

Which brings me to yet another bit of news from the conference:

Girls as young as five are sensitive about their bodies in a "weight-hostile" environment that equates popularity and attractiveness with thinness, an international conference of experts has heard.

"Children are sensitive at an increasingly early age to their physical appearance," said Leeds University professor Andrew Hill.

"The impact of being overweight on girls' self-confidence has been detected in children as young as five years.

"Psychological factors such as perceptions of one's attractiveness, physical ability and self-esteem can be improved with even a modest weight loss," he told more than 2,000 delegates to the congress, which is held every four years.

So why would five-year-old girls be overweight? And, for that matter, how could a teenager balloon to 476 pounds?

Maybe it's too easy to point the finger at the parents, especially since I have three skinny kids. But, you know, I think there's a reason why they're skinny, beyond genetics. We emphasize protein at every meal, give them lots of vegetables, limit sweets to once a day (although they get lots more outside the house), and put very strict limits on electronic entertainment, leaving them little to do besides going out and running around.

Yes, some parents can do all that and still end up with heavier-than-average kids, and I'd be the last person to say it's a parent's duty to starve their kids just because they're born with an unfashionable genetic predisposition.

But still, I see what parents allow their children to eat. I hear my kids describe the crapfest of snacks they get in other people's homes. It's not all genetics.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:13 AM | Comments (2)

September 01, 2006

Memo to America: It Ain't Working

The research company Mintel sent me a press release yesterday, detailing its latest study of American dieting.

The big finding:

According to a recent Mintel report, more that 80 percent of respondents utilize eating plans they have devised themselves based upon their needs. In contrast, only 6 percent say that they use a commercial diet plan such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

"Although there are numerous plans and options, consumers are looking for a diet they feel will work for them, and are developing their own strategies for coping with dieting," said Marcia Mogelonsky, senior analyst for Mintel. "According to our research, only 1 percent of the 13 percent who tried Atkins are still on the diet. Consumers cycle through diet plans with great speed because they are looking for results. If they feel a diet is not working for them, they tend to
look for another alternative. For many dieters, the most successful plan is one that combines dieting methods."

The same report notes that more than two-thirds of Americans consider themselves overweight, which must be great news for the media, which has done a bang-up job of telling people they're fat. (Yeah, I know. I'm part of the problem.) Turns out, the fat people are listening.

But get this: According to Mintel, just 6 percent of people "agreed that they like to try new diet plans." About 30 percent of the people surveyed are "very satisfied" with the plan they're on, and 70 percent told Mintel they have no interest in celebrity diet plans.

I really like that last bit. When I was at Men's Health, all our survey data from readers indicated they couldn't care less about the workouts of the rich and famous, whether we're talking about athletes or entertainers or anybody else who's better known than you and me. The only celebrities whose workouts garnered any reader-driven interest at all were Brad Pitt and Tiger Woods, and those two aren't talking. (Although, when I was at Men's Fitness, I did get the strength coach at Stanford to give us the workout plan Tiger used when he was in college. I only bring it up because I like to celebrate my victories, no matter how small and insignificant.) It's nice to see that the public is no more interested in celebrities' diet advice than in their workouts.

My second-favorite data point: 13 percent of the people surveyed have tried Atkins. Damn! I have no idea how big a slice of America was surveyed -- a representative sample of all adults? middle-class adults? people who previously expressed some kind of interest in a diet-related subject? -- but it's still a huge number. It doesn't matter so much that only 1 percent of those people are still on it. (I think that means that just 0.08 percent of the surveyed population is still on the diet.) Considering it's the most vilified diet of our time, I'm amazed that so many people have given it a shot.

In other news ...

Were you aware that liberalism causes obesity? Anyone relying on logic and data would find it hard to make that argument. Even if you, like so many Americans today, think that logic and data are for pussies, it's hard to drum up many anecdotal examples of fat liberals who aren't Michael Moore. Even Al Sharpton is relatively svelte these days. And if you wanted to pick two poster boys for humorless, ideologically rigid liberalism, you'd be hard-pressed to find any better examples than Ralph Nader and Michael Jacobsen, the latter being the anti-fat crusader who founded and leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest. If anyone on earth deserves to be called a Food Nazi, it's Jacobson.

What do the two have in common, aside from their fanatical desire to impose their fun-free world view on anyone they can reach?

If you said "so skinny you could count their ribs from outer space," then you see what I see.

But none of that stopped Rush Limbaugh, that lifelong conjurer of a fact-free world, from saying this:

This is what happens when you let the left run things. We've been beat about the head. There are hungry people everywhere. UNICEF got it all started. We've seen the babies with the extended tummies, the walking skeletons, told that kids can't learn unless they're fed. We've been guilted into pouring resources on the problem. And now, now, the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished. Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn't teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn't teach them how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. The real bloat here, as we know, is in -- is in government.

And to think I was nice enough to avoid mentioning a fairly obvious fact when I wrote about the latest data: The highest rates of obesity are found in states that voted overwhelmingly for the current president and his minions.

That's what I get for being polite -- an overweight drug addict who knows full well what it's like to be poor and living on unemployment insurance accuses me and my fellow travelers of causing the problem that I've been trying to prevent.

Good thing it's a holiday weekend, so I have some time to get over it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:52 AM | Comments (1)

August 30, 2006

Southern Comfort

The stats are in for 2005:

Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia are the three states with the highest rates of obesity, according to a new report by the nonprofit advocacy group Trust for America's Health. In all three states, nearly three of every 10 adults tip the scales with a body mass index of 30 or higher, a measure that accounts for both height and weight. ...

The problem is especially acute in the South, home to nine of the 10 states with the highest obesity rates, Levi said.

In all, 31 states saw obesity rates rise, and just one -- Nevada -- saw its rates fall. Colorado, to no one's surprise, is the least obese of all states. (Colorado Springs usually ranks among the "fittest cities" when magazines set out to measure these things.) Hawaii and Massachusetts are close behind. Kansas is right at the median.

But here's something interesting:

The group's estimate of obesity rates is based on a three-year average, 2003 to 2005.

The data comes from an annual random sampling of adults via the telephone.

If someone called me on the phone and asked me my height and weight, I think I might round down by a couple of pounds. Wouldn't you? So the numbers may actually be worse than what's portrayed here.

Here's the alphabetical state list.

By region, things break down pretty cleanly. Nine of the top 10 are in the South, with Indiana tied for eighth. (Having recently driven through Indiana, I can provide visual confirmation: People there don't just look really fat, they look really unhealthy. I mean, no matter where we stopped on our trip, it seemed like everyone was smoking.)

The least fat states are all in the Northeast (Rhode Island, Vermont, and Connecticut, along with Massachusetts), West (Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii), or Mountain region (Colorado, Montana, Utah).

And most of the Midwestern states fall in the middle -- Iowa is 21st, Illinois 23rd, Kansas 26th.

My home states are near the top, and sort of outliers for their regions -- Missouri is 14th, Pennsylvania 19th.

Conclusion? Probably that people in the South eat too much crap and don't exercise enough. People in colder states probably get more exercise, and since those states tend to have higher educational levels and less poverty, they probably eat better, too.

Is there anything to say that hasn't already been said, here and elsewhere? I sure can't think of anything.

(Thanks to Mike Navin for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:39 AM | Comments (3)

August 18, 2006

Mass Hysteria

It's probably not much of a surprise to those of us in the hypertrophied-American community, but I guess it's worth noting that a major study has slapped down the notion that body-mass index is a reliable predictor of heart disease:

BMI is determined by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by height in meters squared. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered healthy, while anything over 25 is said to indicate obesity. [Actually, a BMI between 25 and 29.9 means you're considered "overweight." BMIs of 30 and above qualify someone as "obese."] For example, a 5-foot-9-inch person weighing 170 pounds has a BMI of just over 25.

Doctors have typically gauged a person's weight-linked risk for heart trouble by using their BMI.

However, a new analysis of 40 studies involving over 250,000 patients showed that those with a BMI under 20 were at higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease than those with "obese" BMIs of 30 to 35.

"An explanation for the lack of a positive association with BMI and mortality in older ages is that, in older persons, BMI is a poor measure of body fat," concluded a team of researchers from the Mayo Clinic, who published their findings in the Aug. 19 issue of The Lancet. "The measurement of weight does not differentiate between fat and fat-free mass, and fat-free mass (especially muscle) is progressively lost with increasing age."

So being skinny with little muscle mass is more dangerous than being big, since someone who's obese probably has a lot of muscle beneath the fat, and that extra heft seems to have a cardioprotective effect. (I linked to an interesting discussion of the relative merits of over- vs. under-nutrition in this post last week.)

And if we change the subject from heart disease to all-cause mortality, BMI remains a poor predictor:

A British study published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition gave further evidence for that view. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine studied nearly 15,000 patients over age 75 and concluded that it is not appropriate to use BMI to calculate death risk in this age group. They noted that the health risks associated with a high BMI are known to decline with age.

What is dangerous is a high waist-hip ratio, which is easy to calculate: Just measure your waist at its narrowest point and your hips at their widest point. Divide waist size by hip size. If the number is greater than one, you're setting yourself up for some serious health problems, since fat around the waist is more dangerous than fat elsewhere. (In fact, among women, fat around the hips seems to have a health-promoting effect.)

The first caveat to this is that those with BMIs above 35 really do have health problems associated with their weight. But you have to be pretty big to get into that range -- a man who's six feet tall and 260 pounds has a BMI of 35.3, and that's right on the borderline. If he's exercising and maintaining a lot of muscle mass, and not smoking or doing anything crazy with his diet, he may not have any more problems than someone smaller who's not exercising or watching what he eats.

But at least we have some official confirmation that the standard admonition to have a BMI below 25 is silly. I don't know about you, but I'd have to take off a few pounds of hard-earned muscle to get down to that standard. No thanks.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2006

Two Flora, Fat and Thin

Today's New York Times Magazine has a massive story on an emerging question in the study of obesity: Do the microbes in our guts help determine if we become fat or thin?

A quick explanation of the theory:

Of the trillions and trillions of cells in a typical human body -- at least 10 times as many cells in a single individual as there are stars in the Milky Way -- only about 1 in 10 is human. The other 90 percent are microbial. These microbes -- a term that encompasses all forms of microscopic organisms, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and a form of life called archaea -- exist everywhere. They are found in the ears, nose, mouth, vagina, anus, as well as every inch of skin, especially the armpits, the groin and between the toes. The vast majority are in the gut, which harbors 10 trillion to 100 trillion of them. “Microbes colonize our body surfaces from the moment of our birth,” Gordon said. “They are with us throughout our lives, and at the moment of our death they consume us.” ...

[Jeffrey Gordon, who directs the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University] first began studying the connection between the microflora and obesity when he saw what happened to mice without any microbes at all. These germ-free mice, reared in sterile isolators in Gordon’s lab, had 60 percent less fat than ordinary mice. Although they ate voraciously, usually about 30 percent more food than the others, they stayed lean. Without gut microbes, they were unable to extract calories from some of the types of food they ate, which passed through their bodies without being either used or converted to fat.

When Gordon’s postdoctoral researcher Fredrik Bäckhed transplanted gut microbes from normal mice into the germ-free mice, the germ-free mice started metabolizing their food better, extracting calories efficiently and laying down fat to store for later use. Within two weeks, they were just as fat as ordinary mice. Bäckhed and Gordon found at least one mechanism that helps explain this observation. As they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, some common gut bacteria, including B. theta, suppress the protein FIAF, which ordinarily prevents the body from storing fat. By suppressing FIAF, B. theta allows fat deposition to increase. A different gut microbe, M. smithii, was later found to interact with B. theta in a way that extracts additional calories from polysaccharides in the diet, further increasing the amount of fat available to be deposited after the mouse eats a meal. Mice whose guts were colonized with both B. theta and M. smithii -- as usually happens in humans in the real world -- were found to have about 13 percent more body fat than mice colonized by just one or the other.

Gordon says that there's no immediate application for this research:

He says it will be a while before anyone figures out what the gut microbes do, how they interact with one another and how, or even whether, they play a role in obesity. And it will be even longer before anyone learns how to change the microflora in a deliberate way.

If you have a chunk of time for some serious reading, and want to know more about the frontiers of obesity research, this article is as good as it gets.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2006

Post-Vacation Blog Meat

More good blog material piled up during my vacation than I could ever use, so I'm going to solve the dilemma the lazy man's way: by providing random links.

And the check's in the mail ...

My Scotland Bureau Chief, Rannoch Donald, sent this one, showing that most overweight people believe they have healthy eating habits. Even more intriguing is that 40 percent of them report that they do "vigorous" exercise at least three times a week.

Hmmm ... healthy diets, vigorous exercise, and they're still obese? I know it's possible, and I'm sure that in a small minority of cases it's true. But what are the odds it's true in that many individuals?

(Also check out this blog post by Regina Wilshire, sent by Steve Adam.)

Juice box

Good old Floyd Landis -- busted, but still in full denial mode. Still, one mystery remains: Why did he only test positive after the 17th stage?

I haven't had a chance to follow up on my pet theory, which is that he used it to get a one-day surge in aggressiveness and competitive drive after falling far behind during the 16th stage. No one else that I've seen has mentioned this, but I don't know of any evidence that testosterone couldn't provide that kind of acute, short-term effect.

If you have some time, you might also want to check out this five-year-old New Yorker article on doping by Malcolm Gladwell. (Thanks to Rannoch for this one, also.)

The other steroid scandal

Give sprinter Justin Gatlin credit -- he at least came up with a unique excuse for flunking a drug test: His massage therapist rubbed testosterone into his skin without his knowledge. The masseur, Christopher Whetstine, flat-out denies the allegation.

Turns out, though, that Whetstine was the recent victim of a vicious beating by another athlete, a former high jumper named Llewellyn Starks.

What a weird, weird story. (Thanks to Rob Duffield for these links.)

Re-enact this, fat boy

A few weeks back, I read a book of Civil War history called Bloody Roads South, about U.S. Grant's drive toward Richmond in the spring and early summer of 1864.

One of the oddest details of the book: One morning, in the middle of one of the epic battles of the campaign, Grant ate a sliced cucumber with vinegar for breakfast. That was his entire meal! I know it was strange even at the time -- that's why someone bothered to note it in a diary -- but it seems even stranger a century and a half later, knowing what we know about the importance of nutrition. It made me wonder how many battlefield decisions were made by people who were too dehydrated or undernourished to be thinking clearly.

Anyway, I bring that up because of a remarkable New York Times story published shortly before I left on vacation. The story, by Gina Kolata, showed how modern nutrition has created humans that are almost unfathomably healthy by historical standards. Even though the subjects of the story (one of whom is a Civil War re-enactor) are clearly obese, their steady access to food has made them nearly invulnerable to the debilitating diseases that hit their ancestors.

That prompted this blog post by Dr. Michael Eades, comparing mid-19th-century diets with today's:

It turns out that bread was the principal food for all groups, with the average being somewhere between 12 to 16 ounces per day and contributing approximately 40 percent of calories. Most of the bread consumed was purchased, not home baked.

Apart from the wheat in bread, no other cereal grains were eaten in any significant quantities.

Potatoes were considered 'dear food,' were difficult to come by, and were consumed in extremely small quantities and not very often. Cabbage, another major vegetable in the diet of the time, were eaten even less frequently than potatoes. Onions were 'used very extensively and give a savoury relish when bread is the chief article of which the meal is composed.'

The average consumption of milk was just under a quarter pint per day, with the indoor workers getting only about half that amount.

Most people ate meat only a couple of times per week giving an average daily consumption of 2 to 3 ounces.

On average, under a half ounce of cheese was eaten per day and one egg was eaten every two or three days.

About an ounce of sugar per day, or about 6 teaspoons, was the average consumption.

And total fat, excluding that found on meat or in cheese, was about three quarters of an ounce per day and was typically fat saved from cooking meat and only very occasionally butter.

The consequence of a diet so low in fat, protein, and total calories:

It's pretty easy to see that with this kind of diet most people would be be small. The pregnant mothers aren't going to be able to provide the necessary nutrients for optimally healthy babies. The babies born were fetally programed to develop heart disease and obesity, but couldn't become obese because they never got enough to eat. And it's easy to see that adults who were malnourished as fetuses and continued to be malnourished through childhood and adulthood would be more sickly and be prey for every bacteria and virus that came down the path.

Paleolithic man, who ate plenty of meat, was large and robust with a greater bone cortical thickness than we have today. It's only been in the last generation that we have caught up size-wise to our ancestors of a hundred thousand years ago. Why? Because for the first time since the advent of agriculture meat has become relatively cheap and plentiful. During the time of Dr. Smith's study the average family spent somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 percent of income on food, and you've seen what they got for their money. According to government statistics we today spend on average about 14 percent of our household income on food. And look at what we get for our 14 percent compared to their 50 percent. It's no wonder we're fat and comparatively healthy while they were thin and sickly.

We've got two extremes. They were suffering from undernutrition; we are suffering from overnutrition. If you've got the choice, take overnutrition, especially coupled with antibiotics and all the other marvels of modern medicine.

Thanks, again, to Steve Adam for these links.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try to catch up on some work this morning.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

"It's Like Documenting the Force of Gravity"

Some days I feel as if I'm living in a parallel universe, when the prevailing wisdom deviates so far from my knowledge and experience that I fear for my sanity.

I'm happy to report that this isn't one of those days. A new research review out of the Harvard School of Public Health says that sugary soft drinks do, indeed, lead to weight gain:

An extra can of soda a day can pile on 15 pounds in a single year, and the "weight of evidence" strongly suggests that this sort of increased consumption is a key reason that more people have gained weight, the researchers say.

"We tried to look at the big picture rather than individual studies," and it clearly justifies public health efforts to limit sugar-sweetened beverages, said Dr. Frank Hu, who led the report published Tuesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

He and others at the Harvard School of Public Health reviewed 40 years of nutrition studies that met strict standards for relevance and scientific muster. The work was funded by ongoing grants to his lab from the federal government and the American Heart Association.

Of course, the beverage industry isn't happy about the results:

Soft drink trends have marched lock-step with the growing obesity epidemic, but industry groups have long fought efforts to say one directly caused the other. Not all studies conclude that beverages are at fault, and the new analysis ignored some that would have discounted such a link, the American Beverage Association said in a statement issued in response to the study.

"Blaming one specific product or ingredient as the root cause of obesity defies common sense. Instea