Yeahhhh. What did people eat before the processed foods? FRESH FOOD. Is this a hard concept to grasp?
I believe it. I have not had a soft drink in years. It was pretty easy to cut it all out for me - although I miss some of the breads and pastas. My unhealthy vice is beer/wine.
Is that the government's fault or people's fault for not going out and reading the latest news? The fact is that the government has recognized new information when it comes out and has changed their guidelines. Your criticism would be like holding a local building inspector responsible for someone building a house now but basing it on previous codes. It's the builders fault they didn't follow the latest codes. You have to consider that these guidelines are meant to be as broad and general as possible. Dairy is probably the best source of calcium and vitamin D (in cold climates) that we have. Also in the form of active culture yogurts and certain cheeses provides many helpful pro-biotics. So while for an adult like me who is lactose intolerant it is a bad idea to eat a small amount of dairy it is very helpful for children. Fruit's provide many anti-oxidants, vitamins, carbohydrates and fiber. Grains, provided you eat whole grains, provide carbohydrates, fiber minerals and some proteins.
Or just eat whatever the hell you want IN MODERATION. The bolded part is what a lot of people have problems with.
Beer and wine in moderation are actually good for you. Alcohol has been shown to have vascular and heart benefits and red wine has other chemicals that help to lower cholesterol and some anti-cancer chemicals. Beer has some vitamins, anti-oxidants and some other anti-cancer chemicals.
It is hard to eat processed crap in moderation because it literally makes you hungrier. Almost addicting in a way.
both. The question is 'what caused the obesity epidemic in this country?'. The obesity epidemic started in the late 1970s, so what changed in the 70s that caused people to start eating unhealthy? Did Americans just get instantly lazier? I doubt it. What changed was Senator George McGovern pushed his Dietary Goals for the United States. Here is what he suggested: Before this government played a much smaller role in telling citizens what constitutes a healthy diet. Unless you are eating plastic, almost every food product has some value (ever seen those Lucky Charms commercials or any other sugar cereal where they say 'part of a balanced breakfast'?). Even if that diet is a good source of calcium or vitamin D, it wouldn't change the fact that the diet they push has tons of sugar and will probably make you fat.
And keep in mind that the government doesn't want you to eat very good/healthy. If we all ate good and healthy meals we would not be sick nearly as often leading to less doctor visits and much less prescribed medication. If you think the job industry is bad now imagine how many doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and pharmacists would be out of jobs. Not to mention all the fast food places, restaurants, etc, etc it goes on an on. The government needs you to be sick to a certain degree. Before eating healthy I was going to the doctor between 20-30 times a year. Since eating healthy I have not been once in the last 18 months. You are what you eat.
Or maybe it was because that fast food took off and the society got more sedentary. I am curious though do you think that most people slavishly follow all government guidelines? Anyway the current guidelines are different now. I didn't see Lucky Charms or any sugary cereal listed in the latest USDA guidelines.
Ignorance is the culprit, not Americans sitting more. This thread proves ignorance about healthy eating is very common. I didn't start educating myself until about 2-3 years ago. Was shocked about how little I knew. yes, I think most people have a tendency to think what they are told from the government to be correct and therefore don't check the source or question the motives. That wasn't the point. The point was you can't justify eating sugary crap by saying it has vitamin X. you could justify eating anything if it needed only to have one useful ingredient (like sugar cereal commercials try to do). If you need vitamins take a vitamin pill (much less sugar).
This reminds me of an article I read yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/science/a-mathematical-challenge-to-obesity.html A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are obese. We spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Dr. Chow, 49, gave a presentation on “Illuminating the Obesity Epidemic With Mathematics,” and then later by telephone; a condensed and edited version of the interviews follows. You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity? In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, I married. My wife is a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, and she would not move. So I began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, I heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity. I didn’t even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on. I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent. The interesting question posed to me when I was hired was, “Why is this happening?” Why would mathematics have the answer? Because to do this experimentally would take years. You could find out much more quickly if you did the math. Now, prior to my coming on staff, the institute had hired a mathematical physiologist, Kevin Hall. Kevin developed a model that could predict how your body composition changed in response to what you ate. He created a math model of a human being and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The model could predict what a person will weigh, given their body size and what they take in. However, the model was complicated: hundreds of equations. Kevin and I began working together to boil it down to one simple equation. That’s what applied mathematicians do. We make things simple. Once we had it, the slimmed-down equation proved to be a useful platform for answering a host of questions. What new information did your equation render? That the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. Also, there’s a time constant that’s an important factor in weight loss. That’s because if you reduce your caloric intake, after a while, your body reaches equilibrium. It actually takes about three years for a dieter to reach their new “steady state.” Our model predicts that if you eat 100 calories fewer a day, in three years you will, on average, lose 10 pounds — if you don’t cheat. Another finding: Huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. This is because a person’s body will respond slowly to the food intake. Did you ever solve the question posed to you when you were first hired — what caused the obesity epidemic? We think so. And it’s something very simple, very obvious, something that few want to hear: The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could. At the same time, technological changes and the “green revolution” made our farms much more productive. The price of food plummeted, while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day. Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight. In the 1950s, when I was growing up, people rarely ate out. Today, Americans dine out — with these large restaurant portions and oil-saturated foods — about five times a week. Right. Society has changed a lot. With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food. People think that the epidemic has to be caused by genetics or that physical activity has gone down. Yet levels of physical activity have not really changed in the past 30 years. As for the genetic argument, yes, there are people who are genetically disposed to obesity, but if they live in societies where there isn’t a lot of food, they don’t get obese. For them, and for us, it’s supply that’s the issue. Interestingly, we saw that Americans are wasting food at a progressively increasing rate. If Americans were to eat all the food that’s available, we’d be even more obese. Any practical advice from your number crunching? One of the things the numbers have shown us is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work. But the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year. People don’t wait long enough to see what they are going to stabilize at. So if you drop weight and return to your old eating habits, the time it takes to crawl back to your old weight is something like three years. To help people understand this better, we’ve posted an interactive version of our model at bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov. People can plug in their information and learn how much they’ll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose. It will also give them a rough sense of how much time it will take to reach the goal. Applied mathematics in action! What can Americans do to stem the obesity epidemic? One thing I have concluded, and this is just a personal view, is that we should stop marketing food to children. I think childhood obesity is a major problem. And when you’re obese, it’s not like we can suddenly cut your food off and you’ll go back to not being obese. You’ve been programmed to eat more. It’s a hardship to eat less. Michelle Obama’s initiative is helpful. And childhood obesity rates seem to be stabilizing in the developed world, at least. The obesity epidemic may have peaked because of the recession. It’s made food more expensive. You said earlier that nobody wants to hear your message. Why? I think the food industry doesn’t want to know it. And ordinary people don’t particularly want to hear this, either. It’s so easy for someone to go out and eat 6,000 calories a day. There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 16, 2012 The “Conversation With” article on Tuesday, about Carson Chow, a mathematician who studies obesity, misstated a statistic around which his work revolves. One in 3 Americans are obese — not merely overweight, a description that applies to 2 in 3 Americans.
Crap like this really annoys me. It ignores biochemistry and lacks any clinical trials to back up the claim. You cannot treat it like a math problem if you don't know the equations that regulate the human body. Teenage boys eat vociferously and sleep alot. In other words, gluttony and sloth. But we know why he eats and sleeps all day, it's because he is secreting growth hormone. Increased sleeping and eating are a symptom of growth, not a cause. Yet when it comes to growth of fat tissue, we ignore biochemistry and blame gluttony and sloth for our weight gain. It's a character flaw you see, you are weak willed. Eat less! Exercise more! If you open up a basic endocrinology textbook, you will find that the hormone insulin regulates fat accumulation. Insulin diverts energy into fat cells and prevents it from escaping. Which means your other cells can't access that energy and you get tired (sloth) and hungry (gluttony). Overeating and sedentary behavior are the symptoms of fat accumulation, not the cause. Some people have naturally low fasting insulin levels, and they can eat whatever they want and there insulin will not spike much at all. Other people need to secrete quite a bit of insulin to lower their blood sugar, and because of this they fatten easily. What increases our blood sugar are carbs; bread, pasta, potatoes, sugar,flour. All of these foods were absent from homo sapien diets for 99.9% of our existence as a species. Yet they form the base of the food guide pyramid. This just happens to coincide with the rise in obesity. Go figure. Eating nothing but 1500 calories of Twinkies is an excellent way to build up a resistance to insulin and become a fat diabetic. read Gary Taubes' cover story in Newsweek or watch one of his lectures online <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9mIvj6HmHBg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Exactly. MyPlate wasn't designed as a tool for proper portions. The whole food pyramid was scrapped and simplified so people would understand the basic need for a balanced diet. How many people are gonna remember to get x amount of proteins, y amount of dairy, z amount grains, etc,etc. What people can easily remember is that you should be getting vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains and proteins. Too much or too little of one thing isn't all that healthy. So when you look down at your plate, what do you see?
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