"Pro-fat"/"Pro-obesity"--anyone else heard of this?

TheGFG · July 19, 2007, 12:30pm

Re: post 130 by mythmom

Please go back and re-read my posts. I supported you by asserting that the weight issue can be more complicated than simply overeating, and I cited several anecdotes (even a personal one about my own struggle with healthy eating) to demonstrate that. I was basically agreeing with you, so why are you naming me as someone who feels superior, etc.?

However, I also think that the fact that there are people who have reasons they are overweight other than eating too much (hormonal imbalances, etc.) does not mean that there aren’t plenty of people who are obese because they do indeed eat too much. If that offended you, then you offend too easily.

jack · July 19, 2007, 12:37pm

mini: Was that last paragraph meant for me? If so, you’re preaching to the choir. Read my other posts. Yep, I do look at what goes into my food-- that’s precisely why I know how difficult it is to eat healthy in this country-- doable, but most definitely takes effort, time, and money. By the way, I don’t use table salt.

I think an excellent start would be to know where your food is grown and where it comes from, including your fruits and vegetables. Growing your own is a possibility; if not, know the farms where you buy your food and buy locally. I don’t eat meat, so that’s not an issue for me, but for those who do-- I’d buy from local farms, too, and get to know your local farmer-- know what they’re feeding and injecting into those lambs, cattle, pigs, and chickens. That’s a start.

Hanna · July 19, 2007, 12:38pm

“You obviously have never met anyone with severe corn-based allergies, or wheat allergies.”

Yes, I have. Also terrible seafood allergies, cow’s-milk allergies, tree-nut allergies, and soy allergies. Are those foodstuffs addictive too? Are they responsible for the obesity epidemic?

Or are you arguing that HFCS is bad simply because its prevalence is a problem for corn-allergy sufferers? Becuse if so, I don’t see the parallel to crystal meth in the water.

“just vegetable proteins”

Right, and each type of protein molecule in the biochemical world has unique characteristics and is chemically identifiable, both by our bodies and in the lab. Which makes them utterly different from the fungible sugar molecules, which are exactly the same whether they come from pears, potatoes, corn, etc.

“But if you don’t want to get into an argument about metabolites”

Actually, I did, but then you changed the subject from sugars to proteins, which is kind of like changing the subject from gerontology to pediatrics.

“when the obesity “epidemic” began, and when it spread to other countries. Simply use a public health approach.”

Oh, you mean the period when refined sugars of all kinds, hydrogenated fats, high-sodium canned meats, malls with huge parking lots, television watching, and the subdivision lifestyle began taking over the country? Hard to pin the results of that era on any one villain using a “public health approach,” unless you know of a society where people eat a lot of HFCS but have no Crisco, cane sugar, or TV.

momof2inca · July 19, 2007, 12:53pm

Sax, I think this is an unfair generalization. Perhaps this thread appeals to people who want to be in control of themselves (I count myself in this category, having struggled off and on in my life with self-discipline, and not just in terms of eating or exercising). But to be in “total control of others?” Come on. There is an epidemic of obesity in our country and, increasingly, in the world. Medical experts agree this is not good. Some of us have chosen to try to explain the reasons (using personal experiences, research, information from other websites, etc…). We can debate all day about the why and how of increasing obesity, we can argue about what it takes to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. This is fine, when it is done with respect and compassion, which I think most people here have shown. (And as for those posters who have been less sensitive, it seems there are examples of this from both sides of the argument.) I don’t think anyone is arguing for “total control” over people’s lives.

Alumother · July 19, 2007, 12:58pm

So part is genetic. Got it.

It is hard for me to believe that the rest of the issue is solely HFCS or that HFCS is unavoidable. Here’s why. I live in Northern California. Comparatively quite low rate of obesity out here - at least so it appears to me. Whenever I travel East or Midwest I am always struck by the numbers of people who are visibly overweight compared to the crowd at SFO.

So why aren’t people so fat here? #1. Wealth. We can afford to shop at Whole Foods where it’s easy although expensive to eat well. #2. Education. We as a microculture are hyper-aware of nutrition, and political nutrition as well, sustainable, organic, free-range, even the little kids know these terms. #3. Exercise. I frequently get up at 6am and take a 20 minute walk. The other day I was out, the streets were swarming with others doing the same thing. A flock of 30 bicyclists. Runners. Joggers. Walkers. Swimmers.

So I do not think it’s unescapable unless you are genetically handicapped. But it takes knowing what to avoid, enough money to eat correctly, enough resources (along with good weather) to be able to take that 20 minute walk in the morning without worrying about your job delivering newspapers or how your kids get to school, and then, and then, it does take effort and focus and concentration. I hate restraining myself from eating. But if I didn’t have the resources to take care of the nutrition and exercise probably even if I restrained myself I would see much less impact than I do now.

emeraldkity4 · July 19, 2007, 12:58pm

I read somewhere ( from a reputable source) that we add numbers of fat cells until we are two years old AND when we are pregnant.
So say you have been pregnant 3x, you may have 3x more fat cells than someone who hasn’t. ( Like your husband, who still wears his 501 size from high school)
Also I m not a nutritionist, but eating less, makes your body think it is enduring famine- and slows the metabolism
I think allergies also trigger immune system response and high allergic foods like corn-wheat and soy, may cause more weight retention in suseptible individuals.
I also think that what we sense as palatable, could be blamed on foods we ahve when young.
For instance, I wasn’t allowed sugar- and even as a kid- I could go weeks milking a carmel sucker.
Im also in much better shape than either of my siblings ( both of whom are younger) and still don’t crave sugar- I like sweet things- just like most people, but I don’t leave a bag of chocolate out on the kitchen counter and eat from it every time I walk by like my sister, or simply just put enough food on my plate to feed developing nations like my brother.

What I think is really a crisis, even beyond high weight, is the increase of diabetes in young kids and the other health problems it causes.
Ive gotten my mother a glycemic index of foods, but she still gorges on fruit because she thinks fruit is “healthy”
( well its better than candy- but the grape juice and apple juice she lives on it would be too sweet for a baby)

Its probably multicausal-
I was very thin as a child- but I have the German build- and my upper arms are never going to be svelte- no matter how much weight I lift
However, I have adjusted my goal- & I now just want to look/be really strong-but I am in awe of how much weight some of the men can lift.
( Im also happy to see that they aren’t just doing bench presses and free weights but are working on their legs too- looks much better when they have their socks with sandals )

momof2inca · July 19, 2007, 1:10pm

<a href=“Incidentally,%20I%20am%20basically%20quite%20healthy:%20numbers%20look%20good%20and%20all%20that.%20Just%20don’t%20look%20at%20the%20weight.”>quote</a>

[/quote]

dmd77, if all of your other numbers look good and you are feeling well and happy then there seems to me to be no reason to worry. I don’t think carrying an “extra” 30 pounds is necessarily going to impact your health or lifespan in a negative way. In fact, recent studies suggest that being overweight is not bad, unless you are also unfit:

“Groundbreaking work on fitness and weight has been done by [epidemiologist Steven] Blair and colleagues at the Cooper Institute. They have shown that the advantages of being fit are striking and that people can be fit even if they are fat and thus have lowered risk of disease. A remarkable finding is that heavy people who are fit have lower risk than thin people who are unfit.”
-Dr. Kelly Brownell, Director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, 2003

Clearly, from the way you describe your exercise regime you qualify as fit.

I hope you don’t think that this is my presumption or that I have stated this somehow in any of my posts. I would never boil down an individual’s unique diet/fitness situation to a four-word aphorism. As a general statement for a general phenomenon such as obesity, however, you could do worse than prescribe “eat less, exercise more.” For a lot of people, that would work. Just not, apparently, for you.

It’s kind of like saying “play less, study more” to the general idea of high school kids not doing well in school. Obviously, there will be individuals for whom this statement is ludicrous. But in general, many unsuccessful students could become very successful if they did just that.

momof2inca · July 19, 2007, 1:18pm

mythmom, if I hurt your feelings, I apologize. I’m not sure which comments you are referring to at this point in the discussion. I honestly didn’t see any comments from others that sounded like they were out to purposefully make you upset or to hurt you. I’m sure that this was inadvertent. Parents’ Cafe is generally a kind and compassionate board populated by people who are honestly trying to help others work out problems.

emeraldkity4 · July 19, 2007, 1:26pm

Another concern is fat/skinny people
they don’t have the scorn heaped on them as people do who are overweight- but I notice when I look at some of Ds magazines and catalogs- the young women, just look thin, not healthy.

While title9 and a few other athletic catalogs like Patagonia, take care to have models who actually look athletic, it isn’t believable to have girls selling surfwear, who don’t have any discernible deltoids.
<a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18594089/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18594089/</a>

sax · July 19, 2007, 2:58pm

Momof2inca: Yes, to be fair I should have said “some” people instead of many.

The corn syrup came along at the same time as refined white flour. This led to the creation of all the fake food we see daily in the middle of the supermarket. White bread, pasta, cereal, chips, cookies and all the rest. This indeed is a huge part of the problem. People are addicted to sugar and carbs and they battle their metabolism daily. No one really gorged on eggs and meats back in the day with all the fat and protein you were just too full. Carbs and sugar have put your metabolism in a rollercoaster cycle and are really deadly.

20 yrs. ago the nations attention focused on the smokers. It became politically correct to ostracize them until they stopped or at least went to where we couldn’t smell them. We attacked those who smoked along with the tobacco companies.

Now the gov’t has turned our attention to the obese and how they are hurting the economy with their medical problems. It is now politically correct to ostracize the overweight. This being the same gov’t that pleaded with us all to stop using butter and use 100% trans fat instead.Oops. I wonder if a class action suit is warrented?

I am all for fighting the problem (deadly food) but I am against fighting and ostracizing fat people. Pretty soon it will be okay to not hire heavy people and/ or charge them a large premium for their health insurance.They will have cards that only allow them to buy healthy food.They will pay emotionally and financially. It will not stop until we have gotten rid of all the fat people.

And then what? Well, genetic testing is slowly gaining favor. How about we only let certain people have babies.

It goes on and on.

Why are we not attacking General Mills, instead?

nyc · July 19, 2007, 3:11pm

“dmd77, if all of your other numbers look good and you are feeling well and happy then there seems to me to be no reason to worry. I don’t think carrying an “extra” 30 pounds is necessarily going to impact your health or lifespan in a negative way. In fact, recent studies suggest that being overweight is not bad, unless you are also unfit.”

But still, walking down the street, people assume that the guy carrying 30 “extra” lbs is unfit (or overeats, or is lazy) and that the slim guy is healthy. Likewise the posts insisting that if one were truly monitoring intake and exercising it would be impossible not to shed those unwanted lbs.

momof2inca · July 19, 2007, 3:36pm

Sax, I agree. I assume everyone who has posted on this thread would agree. Perhaps the miscommunication is that some people seem to be suggesting it is okay to be “pro-obesity” or “pro-fat.” I and others disagree. It is always at least incrementally better from a longterm health perspective to have your BMI in the normal range. If the “pro-obese” movement (is there really one?) is centered on eradicating ostracism or discrimination, that’s one thing, but if it’s trying to make believe that being obese is just another normal lifestyle choice without dire consequences, I think that is misguided and irresponsible.

I don’t think it has become or will become politically correct to ostracize the overweight. It’s a huge cultural issue that every adult deals with (only a few have the genetic luck to go with the flow and not pay the price; most slender people have to fight the Western culture to not gain weight). And with 65% of American adults in the overweight category, there are few people to really point fingers anyhow. (For cigarettes, I believe the percentage of smokers maxed out at 42% in the mid-sixties, so they were always in the minority.)

Hanna · July 19, 2007, 3:43pm

“The corn syrup came along at the same time as refined white flour.”

?? Refined white flour has been around for centuries. Wonder Bread became a national brand in 1925, decades prior to the wide introduction of corn syrup. Twinkies came out in 1933; hydrogenated Crisco, in 1911; Jell-O, in 1897. We’ve been eating different kinds of junk food for a long time, but we used to eat real portions, and we used to walk around a lot more.

momof2inca · July 19, 2007, 3:55pm

A guy by the name of Michael Pollan had a very interesting and long essay in the NY Times magazine a while back:
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ex=1327640400&en=7c85a1c254546157&ei=5088[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ex=1327640400&en=7c85a1c254546157&ei=5088</a>

It starts out like this:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.
…

He says to eat only foods your great-grandmother would recognize as food. And read the ingrediants to especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

garland · July 19, 2007, 3:56pm

Momof2–Besides the article originally sourced, I don’t think anyone on this thread espoused a “pro-fat” position. And i do think, especially early on, there were quite a few posts equating overweight with slovenliness, unkemptness, laziness, etc. I don’t wish to go back and re-read them, but I do know that they are there.

garland · July 19, 2007, 3:59pm

As well, Michael Pollan has written extensively about the disfunctional food system in the US, Hanna, and the particular insidiousness of high fructose corn sugar, which not only seems to metabolize differently than natural sugars, but is an ingredient in many more foods than most people know, not just desserts and other easily identifiable sweet foods. There is a lot of evidence that it affects blood sugar levels differently, causing a constant state of hunger.

cheers · July 19, 2007, 4:09pm

Michael Pollan is Tracy Pollan’s brother (married to MJ Fox).

sax · July 19, 2007, 4:10pm

Hanna :Yes,refined flour has been around a long time but it wasn’t until the industrial revolution that we were able to totally destroy all the nutrients that grain has to give. And to top it off we don’t even need eggs or milk to make bread anymore. Imagine that!

I was wrong on the gov’t pushing margarine. The margarine industry was tremendously successful in convincing people that it was healthy. The gov’t taxed margarine to help the butter manufacturers but people still wanted their margarine. It became very popular when there was a butter shortage and butter became very expensive.

In addition, I do not believe any one wants to be fat; not even the pro-fat group (and I did not read the article)

I think we will all be surprised at the intensity of the upcoming backlash at fat people by the gov’t, industry and each other.

sax · July 19, 2007, 4:34pm

Mom of2: 82% of American men smoked in 1948, 65% of women. This was the peak.

Hanna · July 19, 2007, 4:48pm

<ol>
<li>Michael Pollan is a professor of journalism, not a nutritionist or public health researcher. I think he’s good at what he does, and I enjoy his works. But I’m not going to rely on him as a source to prove that HFCS is somehow uniquely to blame for obesity (nor the equivalent of putting crystal meth in the water table, as mini claims). That’s what peer-reviewed scientific journals are for. </li>
<li>Furthermore, according to the cited article, he seems to think HFCS is just one item on a long list of problems in the American food system, not the root of all evil. He seems to think that portion size has a great deal to do with our bad eating patterns, too.</li>
<li>The article doesn’t even address the issue of exercise and inactivity, which is a colossal omission.</li>
</ol>

Differently from sucrose, but the same way that apple juice and honey do. But there’s no outcry about the expensive organic products sweetened with apple juice and honey. I assume that you’re referring to the glycemic index – beets have a higher glycemic index than chocolate, for example – but we’re a long way from any kind of scientific consensus that the glycemic index is the missing link in the obesity question.

True enough, but in what quantities? A ton in a Big Gulp Coca-cola, which if you’re even trying to eat right, you should only drink as a special treat anyway. But a two-slice serving of even the most nutritionally deficient white bread made with HFCS only has about 3g total sugars (about 3/4 tsp), accounting for about 10% of the calories in the serving. The molecular composition of that 3g of sugar is not the reason the nation is snacking after lunch. Choose a bread that’s high in fiber and protein, and you’ll feel full whether there’s a touch of HFCS in it or not. To propose that HFCS is some kind of poison that needs to be eradicated completely or it will overwhelm the other nutritional attributes of a food is just as misguided as the silly 1980’s fad of making everything fat-free.

So if refined flour (as you define it) has been around since the 1790’s, how is that the “same time” as HFCS?

Where in the world are you getting the idea that bread always used to have milk and eggs in it? They’ve been making baguettes in France, pumpernickel in Germany, cornbread in the Southwest, etc. etc. without eggs or milk for centuries. The oldest breads in the world – pita, matzo, and lavosh, from the lands where both wheat and baking were first developed – are not traditionally made with dairy ingredients, either.

"Pro-fat"/"Pro-obesity"--anyone else heard of this?

CONNECT WITH US