Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

...the implication seems to be that Americans walking less somehow has a causative effect in skyrocketing obesity rates. This seems entirely wimpy and facile.

The fact that exercise causes weight loss has been borne out by numerous controlled experiments. Something I found via a quick search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car...

Also, Taubes' insulin nonsense has been debunked. Lets move on.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...

As for your hypothetical environmental cause, it must be extremely selective. For example, consider mixed income American neighborhoods (e.g., Harlem, Jersey City). This alleged environmental cause seems to primarily affect the lower income people. How does that happen? Are the yuppies with gym memberships and hipsters with their organic vegan raw paleo diets somehow immune?

View on HN

> Are the yuppies with gym memberships and hipsters with their organic vegan raw paleo diets somehow immune?

Well, yes. As a paleo dieter, I can tell you I can't be eating more sugar than someone from the 1850s. My guess is that anyone conscious enough to be on a raw-vegan diet, doesn't either.

> This alleged environmental cause seems to primarily affect the lower income people.

My understanding is that refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils are cheap. Who was it that said that if you have $1.5 to spend on food, you're better off (calorically) buying potato chips than broccoli.

> Also, Taubes' insulin nonsense has been debunked. Lets move on.

I do suspect that it's simplistic. It's much better than the popular notion of calories-in/calories-out, though. That's why I said that it's controversial, but that it's the kind of thing, that's more on-the-mark than simply blaming sedentarity as a primary cause in obesity.

> The fact that exercise causes weight loss has been borne out by numerous controlled experiments. Something I found via a quick search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car....

OTOH, exercise makes you hungry. What's more interesting is whether exercise is effective long-term to cure obesity. I'd suspect not alone, but that it certainly helps.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914974,00....

Who was it that said that if you have $1.5 to spend on food, you're better off (calorically) buying potato chips than broccoli.

High fat/high sugar foods offer the most calories/dollar. So what? If you are fat you have no reason to maximize the number of calories you consume.

Similarly, if you wanted to maximize your salt intake, you can get the most salt per dollar by buying a canister of salt.

It's much better than the popular notion of calories-in/calories-out, though.

Cals in/cals out has been validated in many controlled experiments to be a good first approximation. Taubes' insulin theories have been debunked by experiments.

Incidentally, the standard picture doesn't blame sedentarity as the sole cause of obesity. It blames the combination of sedentarity and increased caloric consumption as the cause.

But the cause, whatever it is, is highly unlikely to be some sort of metabolic disorder. Fat people have a higher metabolic rate than thin people, not a lower one. Their bodies release fat more easily into the bloodstream, contra Taubes and others. They just eat a lot more.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC303803/

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0954-6820.1969....

http://www.ajcn.org/content/8/5/740.full.pdf

> High fat/high sugar foods offer the most calories/dollar. So what?

Well, the theory is that cheap vegetable oil and sugar causes these metabolic disorders which then causes obesity.

>Taubes' insulin theories have been debunked by experiments.

They're not his theories. He makes the point repeatedly in GCBC that they form part of modern, standard biochemistry. The only controversial points that he makes is that they should be applied to obesity research.

> Taubes' insulin theories have been debunked by experiments.

what are those experiments? My understanding is that carbohydrate-restricted diets generally fare better in terms of weight-loss, muscle-maintenance, and improvements in risk factors of chronic diseases:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/297/9/969.full http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo

Apparently they results are best for people who are insulin resistant, as you might expect.

"PLASMA FREE FATTY ACID TURNOVER RATE IN OBESITY"

I'm not sure exactly what that means, is this referring just to the rate at which FFAs cross fat-cell membranes, or the rate of esterification and lipolysis? Because it's the latter that Taubes argues is primarily important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com