BBC News - What caused the obesity crisis in the West?

Contrary to popular belief, we as a race have not become greedier or less active in recent years. But one thing that has changed is the food we eat, and, more specifically, the sheer amount of sugar we ingest.
"Genetically, human beings haven't changed, but our environment, our access to cheap food has," says Professor Jimmy Bell, obesity specialist at Imperial College, London.
"We're being bombarded every day by the food industry to consume more and more food.
"It's a war between our bodies and the demands our body makes, and the accessibility that modern society gives us with food. And as a scientist I feel really depressed, because we are losing the war against obesity."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18393391

First off, did you laugh as I did at his goofy lament about being a "scientist" that's depressed?  I think I know what he was trying to say, but do you have to be a scientist to notice the negative reinforcing cycle of human suffering that results from the obesity epidemic?  And if you knew that someone caused that spiral, or accelerated it, by using strongly held belief dressed up like science and backed by the power of the government, would you feel (scientist or not) angry about it?

I have, but I don't now.  I think eventually the government will get it right about the science - it's getting to the point that even the government hasn't any more wiggle room - but right now, all that matters is improving my ability to help others sort this mis-information mess out. 

The reference to genetics is noteworthy, as it shows the paleolithic model, as a framework for the problem of human nutrition, is gaining a wider influence.

As to the reference about the food companies bombarding us to make us eat more food - OK, if that's how you want to see it, but I also see folks who desperately want the food companies to make low fat food, low cal foods, very tasty and cheap foods, foods that are "whole grain", and foods that have vitamins/minerals and other supposedly healhy characteristics - in other words, the food industry is doing what it should, which is providing the consumer with what the consumer will pay for.  If consumers hadn't been lied to about the role of fat and sugar in their diets, much of the food industry leverage to see cheap, processed low fat nastiness would not exist.

The same, big, nasty, souless food industry (spare me the drama please) is also going to be the one that figures out how to provide the market with inexpensive (relatively) grass fed animals on a large scale.  They will give us what we want, for the sake of their profits, which will pay their employees, who will pay their taxes and FICA, and the big souless machine will have done far more to benefit us than the equally soulless but unaccountable to anyone USDA.  The difference in these two large, soulless bureacracies (USDA and the food industry giants) is that one will cease to exist when it no longer supplies what the customer wants at a price the customer will pay, whereas the USDA will continue to do whatever the heck it does no matter how badly it does it.

Fructose is easily converted to fat in the body, and scientists have found that it also suppresses the action of a vital hormone called leptin.
"Leptin goes from your fat cells to your brain and tells your brain you've had enough, you don't need to eat that second piece of cheesecake," says Dr Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist.
He says when the liver is overloaded with sugars, leptin simply stops working, and as a result the body doesn't know when it's full.
Fructose isn't just "easily converted into fat" in the body, that is what happens to fructose in the body, period.  The problem with that is that above a certain dosage level, fructose so "buggers up" (sorry, BBC article, just had to us their colloquialism) the liver's capacity to do its myriad metabolic chores that it can't keep the rest of the machine running "unbuggered."  So, you get fatty liver, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome along with you HFCS laden gatorade, coke and dr. pepper.

HFCS, or sucrose (nearly the same thing) is, by the way, a silly thing to put in a sports drink - the body that's depleted of glycogen and glucose from high intensity exercise does NOT need fructose to get back up to speed quickly - it needs glucose.  Glucose was what made the original gatorade such a game changer - but it didn't taste good.  So, the gatorade folks did what all of us ignorant consumers demanded - made gatorade more tasty by making their drink less effective.  If I needed a gatorade like sports drink for rapid replenishment of glucose/glycogen, I'd get the zero cal sports drink and add a calculated amount (determined via experimentation) of pure glucose from cane syrup.  But if you or your kid just needs to rehydrate and maintain electrolytes post-workout, give them salty foods, a potassium supplement and regular food - the body will replenish the glycogen within 24 hours.  And if you are working out to assist in recovery of metabolic health and body composition - please skip the high carb post workout drinks/shakes. 

Another cut from the article:

Overnight, low-fat products arrived on the shelves. Low-fat yoghurts, spreads, desserts and biscuits. All with the fat taken out, and largely replaced with sugar.

The public embraced the new products, believing them to be healthier. But the more sugar we ate, the more we wanted.
By the time anyone began to ask if it was a good thing to replace fat with sugar, it was too late - but it was a decision with huge implications for the obesity crisis.
"If fat's the cause, that's a good thing to do," says Dr Lustig. "If sugar's the cause, that's a disastrous thing to do, and I think over the last 30 years we've answered that question."
Well, yes we have.

Having included a bit from the "calorie is a calorie" crowd, the fructose gang, and the sugar haters more generally, the author also includes a bit from the "palatability" crowd, who think that foods laden with sugar, fat and salt have a unique power to make us want to eat more and more.  My problem with this crowd is pretty simple - their statement of the problem does not help very much (eliminate sugar salt and fat from the diet?  Good luck living like that for 50 years), but to the extent that it works, I still don't know how they think they can say it is the three foods together that causes the problem, vice just the sugar.  In other words, getting a client off of sugars/starches works for most of them.  What then is the point of making a big speculative fuss about the supposed evils of fat-sugar-salt together?  Further, I eat all the salt and fat that I want, and I've never had better appetite control - and it's a good thing I do, too, since I lose a bunch of salt daily in the heat of the South - 99 degrees today here in Memphis.  In short, the "food pallatability" crowd doesn't impress me.

Here's where my best efforts to understand the problem of the millions year old human genome in the age of annual mono crop dominated agriculture - eat meat, vegetables, eggs, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat. 

Taubes on Food Reward/Palatability, IIc

One point I’ve been making in my posts and in my books is that it’s possible to find evidence in favor of virtually any idea – including the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the ruling force in the universe. More important to the validation of an idea or a hypothesis is the strength of the evidence that seems to refute it. Can the hypothesis survive more or less intact our best attempts to refute it?

This is one of the points I was trying to get across at the Ancestral Health Symposium: that the foods we eat today during our current obesity epidemic might have a high reward value, and that diets consumed by lean populations in faraway locales might not, isn’t particularly interesting. Yes, it supports the hypothesis, but how do we explain epidemics of obesity in populations that  eat diets that don’t appear to have a high reward value? Do we need an entirely different hypothesis for them? That would be unfortunate.

Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(c)

I think this is Taubes' most compelling post yet, but taken together, the series is enough to convince me that "food reward" is a compelling but incomplete explanation for population obesity.

Another element of the carb hypothesis that is compelling is the studies which show that low fat, low calorie diets (~1200 kcal/day) lead rather rapidly to the symptoms of starvation (folks feel cold, lethargic, irritable, think about food all the time, and are inactive), whereas folks on a high protein/fat diet at the same number of kcal/day will continue to lose weight and feel relatively good.  Presumably, those on a low protein/fat, low cal diet would naturally eat more food so that they can stop feeling bad - they would also not lose weight, and if they did, they would not feel better and so might wonder "what's the point of losing weight if I still feel like dirt?"  In short, based on physiological reality, one could predict that low fat/protein and low calorie would be a losing proposition - which it usually is.  Even worse, it does not improve the measurable markers of health very speedily, or as dramatically, as does carb restriction.

I await the next series when Taubes discusses the evidence in opposition to the "carbohydrate hypothesis" of obesity.

Part IIb In Taubes' Rebuttal of the Palatability Conjecture

What can we take away from these studies? Well, these three papers certainly support the contention that the sugars consumed in western diets have very specific deleterious metabolic effects, and that maybe these sugars are the, or at least a proximate cause of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, and so, we can assume, obesity and type 2 diabetes and perhaps all the other chronic diseases that associate with these two conditions (cancer anyone?). This was the thesis of my April New York Times Magazine cover article “Is Sugar Toxic.”
http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%e2%80%93-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates%e2%80%a6-part-iib/

Look, I know we're all going to have some sugar in our lives, I'm not deluded that a purist diet of no sugar is either easy or necessary.  I would suggest, though that increasing your intake of fructose from 5% to 20% of your total caloric intake is problematic for your health.  Further, if you are the average American knocking back close to 150 pounds of sugar per year, you shouldn't be surprised if you are as weak, fat and sick as the average American is - and just as subject to the diseases of the West (gout, cancer, heart disease and stroke, obesity, diabetes, etc). 

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch and no sugar/wheat. 

Lustig: Insulin and Satiety

A shorter explanation from a gent with some nifty insights in the relationships between obesity, insulin, leptin and what causes what.

There's a key point here with relevance to the Taubes/Guyanet highlighted debate between the palatability theory of weight loss and the carb theory of weight loss.  Guyanet and others in that camp point to the fact that insulin injected directly into the brain results in satiety, therefore, the carb theory, which hinges on the action of insulin in causing overeating and under activity, must be false.

Whenever I've read a report on that study - that insulin injected exogenously reduces hunger - I wonder why anyone would take that to mean anything significant.  The idea that we can deduce the effect of insulting in the system, in the organism, from the effect of it being exogenously injected, is fraught with peril - as is any rational analysis of diet without massive long term well controlled intervention studies.

Lustig does a nice job of pointing out the difference between short term impacts of hormones, and the longer term impacts or chronic impacts.

It does make sense, of course, that if the body is secreting insulin to control a carb bolus, that it should also reduce hunger - at that moment.  After all, there's a glucose crisis to deal with, which eating would exacerbate.  Two hours later, when insulin is overdoing the job of saving the body from too much glucose, and blood sugar levels of dropping, it would also make sense that appetite would increase, which is what many people experience in their pattern of high carb eating.  To say that the short term effect of exogenously injected insulin disproves the carb theory shows, to my mind, some defect of thinking - due to either a desire for the carb hypothesis to be wrong, or due to the tendency of many to mistake a measurable, discreet fact for the whole picture, which it is only a factor (and perhaps a minuscule one) in the whole picture.  It appears that this kind of defective thinking often results from the specialist's confidence that they know more, perhaps their desperate need to believe that they know more, than those who don't share their credentials.