Hot_Pink_Urinal_Mint wrote:If governments were serious about obesity they would stop promoting the "Food Pyramid," which promotes a diet heavy in grains and cereals.
Well, though I've come to despise such foods, let's face it, that stuff alone won't make anyone morbidly obese by itself. (Especially cereals and grains are "filling" due to the challenge they represent to the human digestive system.) However that stuff alone is also quite tasteless unless garnished with some heavy contribution of fat and/or sugars. Both have been demonized (but fat has been demonized longer and stronger for most of the past ~45 years), but what are people to do, eat cardboard? The food pyramid is a disgrace in many ways, but not as regards morbid obesity. And by regrettable social necessity ("we need to feed all offspring and must not limit our numbers", a natural species reflex) it has been with us in some fashion or another ever since the rise of agriculture (born out of food animal scarcity in each and every instance) and concomitantly, "civilization".
....cereals and dairy foods are not natural human foods, but rather are preferred because they contain exorphins. This chemical reward was the incentive for the adoption of cereal agriculture in the Neolithic.
The first sentence may be true but the second is highly contestable. Wherever agriculture developed, there preceded a severe unprecedented prey animal scarcity due to some combination of climatic changes and human over-hunting/over-reproducing (for the resources at hand locally). Not buying that "exorphins" were such a decisive motivation in the beginning..
prahocalypse now wrote:I just think that obese people eat too much and don't do enough exercise.
Very obese people usually have some degree of undiagnosed/untested insulin resistance and related severe hormonal (leptin, ghrelin and such) imbalances. Insulin is meant to shuttle nutrients and energy to the cells that need them, as they resist the insulin (from chronic high insulin levels) nutrients and energy "go nowhere" (or just straight to fat cells into storage for the famine that never arrives) and the person continues to feel "hungry" (aka, not-nourished) and after eating, tired instead of energized. Yes: "they eat too much and move too little" but that's because every hormonal signaling pathway in their so-disrupted bodies screams at them to oblige these very commands. A long water fast is the best cure for the morbidly obese not primarily for the weight loss (that does kick into high gear quickly of course) but for these specific hormones and all resistant cell receptors to slowly but surely reset back to healthier/normal operating levels.
vladimir wrote:Serious question: have you ever tired buying healthy foods?
Low-fat/low-sodium etc. Have you noticed they are almost always more expensive than regular shit?
That's all marketing b.s. anyway. They'll repackage and rebrand whatever is the health mantra of the day. Low-fat, all your ancestors would have laughed at you and your grandchildren perhaps will, too. What constitutes healthy food continues to be debated ever since we first established multiple choices between multiple kinds of foods, and even with our "modern level of science" it's impossible to find plausible consensus. Epidemiology alone (the bulk of "studies") is flawed to the core for the goal of conclusive answers, but the media love them. Consider what happened when they first discovered "vitamins" and analyzed all foods for content of known vitamins, but for way too many decades with NO regards to actual human (not rodent, not ape, not pig) absorption and bioavailability of said substances! Only way too late did it slowly dawn on the scientists that vitamins are for the most part "bodily activities" requiring "vitamers", rather than simple substances/molecules/compounds that seem to work predictably only in a petri-dish. "Low-fat/low-sodium" has just as much and just as good evidence *against* it as *for* it, so which camp makes it to the media and public policy, the better-funded and/or the one more suited to cheap processing and production (voters hate high food costs).
scobienz wrote:Fresh vegetables and fruit are very cheap compared to processed, sugary and high fat food.
Perhaps, in terms of nutrition per kg, but surely mostly not in terms of kcals/$. And even the nutrition thing is usually overestimated since soil quality varies around the world with a tendency to become ever poorer, and actual digestability and full bio-availability of "fruits and vegetables" (especially raw) are individually varying but never anywhere near the levels of say egg yolks or organs.
Khmerhamster wrote:Unhealthy diets are often a result of a lack of awareness of the importance of diet.
So yes there is a correlation between poor diet and poverty but the real correlation is to education
Yeah it's a 'funny' side-effect of our feeding history, for millions of years we evolved marvellous mechanisms to choose the most palatable and nourishing foods from "all that nature or the garden offers us" --- never needed to think consciously as our noses, tongues and stomachs learned to react appropriately for so long. Now our gathering grounds are the supermarket, our well-honed instincts to forage "the most palatable offerings" leads us straight to concoctions engineered for hyper-palatibility while suffering in nourishment. Now everyone needs to either: follow their simplistic taste/smell senses and suffer most, follow official advice and suffer less, or do their own research and build the best body of knowledge they can cognitively muster. We can't even ever "adapt" to these food stuffs evolutionarily even if we tried, since problems such as they do occur either don't hinder reproduction or manifest themselves really only post reproductive prime age (so no gene mutations "fittest for junk food" will ever be advantageous enough to really proliferate --- perhaps a good thing).
prahocalypse now wrote:Everything Scobienz says is correct. A quick check of Tesco's website will show you that fresh vegetables can be bought for less than 50p a kilo in the UK.
Here's the deal, a kilo of vegetation is probably the most the human stomach can handle per day without making a fuss, and will likely not provide the day's calories. If these come from microwaved junk foods, the supplemental veg won't help much (not hurt much either though). If they come from meat and butter, your doctor and the media will curse you. If they come from sugar cereals breads or grains, then I will scold you. So pick your poison
Everyone going for low-fat: remember
some is needed for utilization of the fat-soluble vitamins (D,A,K,E) and the essential fatty acids (brraaiinnss), and it's not the fat you eat but the fat that you don't burn that is the issue. What turns off fat burning and fat breakdown, insulin. What raises insulin, we all know. Low-fat
can work to lose body fat, of course, same as low-carb. But with the latter you're always burning fat, no matter how long ago your last meal, are satiated more fully for longer, and you don't get blood sugar swings easily mistaken for "hunger" by most. But it's also more challenging socially/habitually etc.