How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

Can you support this? I feel like most things I've read and most of what I've learned myself while training has been that diet in fact is a much bigger factor, to a level of say 75%/25%. It's very hard to exercise enough to undo a bad food decision, and even if you do exercise a ton, that's not going to reverse vitamin and nutrient deficiencies that may result from eating predominantly processed foods.

Moreover, the type of food you're eating has at least as much effect as its theoretical caloric content. 300 calories of raw carrots is not equal to 300 calories of potato chips, as far as your body is concerned. We're not calorimeters.

This might be true, and I suspect that it is, but it's not true of the trivial amounts of exercise prescribed by doctors to improve health. There was a Cochrane Review meta-analysis finding only a very small weight loss induced by exercise (something like 2kg) across a lot of studies, and this well-controlled experiment just published in the International Journal of Obesity found only a 1.8kg average weight loss in the exercise group:

http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v35/n3/full/ijo2010147a.ht... Adiposity changes after a 1-year aerobic exercise intervention among postmenopausal women: a randomized controlled trial

But the mean duration of exercise per week in the exercise group was 178.5 minutes, just under three hours. The Afghans and Inuit being discussed here as a point of comparison probably get a great deal more than three hours of exercise per week. I'm thinking it's more like 30-60 hours.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any obesity studies comparing groups that are matched, except that one of them gets about 40 hours a week of exercise. Maybe a study looking at people who changed between physically-strenuous and non-physically-strenuous jobs?

(Me, I got three hours of exercise on Sunday. I bicycled 20km to go to two events, and at one of the events, I danced pretty intensely for more than an hour. I'm doing something similar tonight.)

Exercise has a lot of other good effects, though. Even the trivial amount of exercise often prescribed can substantially increase muscle mass, lower blood pressure, increase strength, reduce stress, and improve insulin sensitivity.

But it's not adequate to cure obesity.

Also, the idea of calories vs. exercise being a simple balancing act is almost certainly wrong. The measure of calories is based on the amount of energy that can be gotten out of something by burning it, with fire. Your body is definitely not as even handed as fire when it comes to releasing energy from food.

For a simple example, look at the atkins diet.

Sounds nice, but do not try this. Ask people who do this sort of thing a lot, or even for a living. E.g. bodybuilders. They have a saying: "you can out-diet bad exercise, but you can't out-exercise bad diet."

You need both, diet and exercise, dialed in reasonably well.

When Gary Taubes surveyed the literature to find the evidence that exercise is useful for losing weight, what he found is that the scientific literature itself proves this statement is either not true or even slightly false. There aren't any studies where exercise has lead to persistent, significant (which I would define as taking someone from clinically obese to normal weight, not merely shaving 3% off of someone clinically obese) weight loss without a diet change. I have not seen any evidence to the contrary, I am not aware of any evidence that exercise on its own actually works for weight loss, let alone that exercise can wipe away making your diet even worse.

He also observes that it is pretty rare for people in practice to get serious about exercise, but leave their diet completely unchanged. If you start exercising consistently and cut out sugary soft drinks and lay off the potato chips, how you do know which thing did what?

I say paleolithic "style" diet because I'm not being super strict about it. The main thing I did was totally cut grains and refined sugar out of my diet. I eat fresh meats (mostly beef), eggs, fresh vegetables and low sugar fruits (berries, mostly) and some nuts. I cut dairy as well, except for heavy cream in my coffee and butter which I use for cooking (I also use ghee). I try to avoid seed oils though I do use a olive oil for salad dressing.

I admit I miss good fresh bread but I can't argue with the results.

No. A hundred times no. I say this from experience: you are what you eat. No amount of exercise will do you good if you don't eat clean, fresh, natural food. The only reason I'm not the fat fuck I was an year ago is that not only did I stop eating out, I started avoiding any kind of food that comes ready-to-eat out of a plastic bag[1].

Then again, people in my country still cook and Coke is viewed by some as the embodiment of absolute evil (which it is, by the way).

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[1] In some scenarios, eating out is unavoidable. I don't worry about eating out once a week or so.

You can't get a 6 pack by exercise, you have to eat correctly.

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimate...

Even when looking at Males 15-59. Though it should be noted these numbers are from 2004. Additionally, I really have no sense of how accurate these numbers are.

If you compare dogs bought from reputable breeders and puppy mills, you can't exclude all the puppies that die in the first year from a puppy mill and get a fair comparison. You can't exclude puppies died from both suppliers and get a fair comparison. The only fair way to compare is between total numbers.

Life expectancy is a product of health and health care. The unhealthy live longer in places like the UK and US than the healthy in many places of the world. When the west has people with AIDS outliving people in the middle-east and africa with no recognizable condition, then those places cannot and should not ever be used in reference to a healthy place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian#Verified_super...

Do you see an Afghan? No you see people from the allegedly 'unhealthy' western countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian#Numbers_of_centenar...

Again do you see any Afghans? Do you even see any middle-east or African countries with accountable estimates? No.

See, I can use useless anecdote too...

Your great-grandparents may have lived well into their 90s, but they are the outliers on the curve of lifespans for people born at the same time as them. Most of the variance at this extreme end of the spectrum is entirely due to genetics and not lifestyle (e.g. Donald O'Connor led an active lifestyle, ate well for someone who lived through most of the 20th century, and lived to be 78 which is almost 25 years beyond the average life expectancy for someone born in 1925 -- he also was notorious for smoking several packs (2-5) of cigarettes a day for most of his life; shall we suggest that smoking has no health consequences since I can find examples of people who lived a long time and were also smokers?)

What is more useful is to see what the impact of diet/lifestyle options are on the larger chunks of the population and not use outliers as exemplars for points we might wish to make.

His basic point is that "food science" doesn't know very much, is heavily politicized, and that we don't really know on a deep level how food, food-like substances, supplements, and so forth work. The war on "fat," as you note, doesn't make much sense because it counts the "fat" from a Big Mac and the "fat" from almonds the same way, which makes little sense. It counts the "sugar" from strawberries and Pepsi the same way. This is, to put it lightly, stupid, and it makes people stupid, since most people hear marketing slogans or public service announcements or whatever and follow those.

Bodybuilders know a lot about diet, especially in the context of controlling the body fat percentage - mostly because in their case, the diet must work, or else they lose the competition. They can't rely on the latest fad on Oprah's that may or may not actually work. So the stuff they do tends to have a solid reality-based backing.

Any bodybuilder will tell you that low-fat diets are bullshit. Carbs are probably more aggressive fat-builders than fat per se, mostly because carbs are absorbed quickly, while fats are absorbed more slowly.

It's interesting to see the convergence from various sources. E.g., some diets recommended by weightlifters for "maintenance" (only to preserve a certain physique), and the diet recommended by Ray Kurzweil on health and longevity grounds, are similar in that the recommended daily intake of macronutrients is 33% carbs, 33% fat, and 33% protein as percentage of calories, or roughly 2:1:2 in weight.

As a comparison, that's slightly more protein that most people normally eat, a heck of a lot less carbs than the average intake, and a fairly average level of fat intake. I actually did this; reducing carbs was hard at first, but I got used to it after a while. It's amazing just how high you can raise the total caloric intake, if you keep the macronutrients at 33/33/33 relative ratios, without starting to gain fat. I was eating over 3200 cal / day, with 3 hours of lifting weights / week as my only exercise, and I was neither gaining nor losing fat (but I was gaining muscle).

In my mind, there's no doubt: By far the easiest way (in terms of effort spent, hours in the gym spent, etc.) to lose fat is to reduce the total calories by reducing the carbs intake (don't bother with tweaking the fat intake), and lift weights either 2 or 3 times a week, between 30 and 60 minutes each. 2 x 30 is the minimum that produces results, 3 x 60 is the maximum that allows you to keep it up a long time without burning out.

Don't eat carbs below 25% of your daily caloric intake, or you'll start to feel pretty weak. In other words, reduce carbs, but don't be a carbs nazi.

EDIT: This message was edited several times.

In fact eating fat will probably lead to less calories overall since fat gives an earlier feeling of fullness.

1. Your body is expecting a certain amount of calories at any point during the day which is either being pumped into your bloodstream from your fat or food in your gut.

2. Your fat doesn't work right, (probably because you eat too many carbs), and doesn't release enough calories, so you get hungry.

3. You keep over eating until you have enough volume of fat so that even though your fat doesn't work as well at releasing calories into your bloodstream, you make up for it by just having more.

4. Voila, you have reached homeostasis. Your body conspires to keep you at this weight. You are either hungry and thin or full and fat.

As for exercise, well, I can only offer up a personal anecdote. I lost 50 pounds. At first by starving myself with a calorie deficit and now I've figured out how to keep the weight off with the food I eat. (I no longer calorie count -- hooray).

During this period of weight loss I attempted to increase the amount I exercised to speed the process along. It didn't work. The only thing that moved the scale was either counting calories or eating a low carb diet, (paleo to be exact). If I had it to do over I'd just start with changing the things I eat, although because of years of calorie counting I'm now very aware of what I put in my mouth -- a good habit to have.

Edit: I do actually believe exercise can help you lose weight. I am currently training to race bikes. I go for very long rides (3-4 hours twice a week) to train my body to burn fat. This is critical for endurance sports. But I don't think it's realistic to ask everyone to become an endurance athlete.

Ultimately it's up to the individual to control how much they eat and exercise, but we've been misinformed for decades (and still, to this day!) on how to live healthily. The reason obesity has become an epidemic is surely due, at least in part, to this.

(Weight gain/loss is ultimately a simple equation: calories in ‒ calories out. Eat more but exercise more and they'll cancel out.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/02/japan.justinmccu...

Junk food is also popular in Japan, though probably not as much as in the US. However, in general portions are smaller here in Japan and people don't drink soft drinks all day. Apparently the average American geek needs as much food as a Japanese construction worker.

They're not sedentary, and the portions are usually small.

You still see obesity in those cultures, particularly among the rich - and bingo! those groups are more sedentary and can afford to eat more.

For example: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4528.html

I can tell you, the portions were significantly smaller in all cases.

Eat like an Inuit and live in Florida and you'll probably resemble something more like a manatee than a man.

Check out http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ , http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ and http://www.westonaprice.org/ for more viewpoints.

The general consensus though is to avoid processed foods and stick to whole foods. A big one is to eat animal fat instead of industrially produced vegetable and seed oils.

Also, limit carbohydrate intake (ideally eating only fruit and vegetables).

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/p-nu/201103/dietary-mani...

I was the same. I hated peas, carrots, sweet potato, that sort of thing. A few years ago I was at a friends place and she grew all her own produce. It was the first time I had ever tasted fresh vegetables. Oh wow.

If (in Australia) the major super markets that advertise "We're the fresh food people" I'm sure more people would be enjoying something other than lollies (candy). As it stands at the moment any vegetable you buy from our two major players (coles and woolworths) are terrible.

Eating better? http://robbwolf.com/ try him.

The very easy way to do that is cut processed sugars and carbs out of your diet for a few months, healthy foods will start tasting better, and you'll never be able to go back without getting sick.

I did that and the result is that Egg McMuffins - my old favorite - make me feel bloated, Girl Scout Cookies make me sick, and Wendy's burgers smell like cow manure.