New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Well, okay, that's not quite what the study says. But for those of us who are trying, not terribly successfully, to lose a few, this is a perfect thing to read when we're facing that pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. From the Bioenergetics: Open Access blog:
Our better understanding of obesity, as witnessed by an impressive amount of publications in the field over the last decades, suggests that body fat can be both detrimental and protective. Simplistic messaging that body fat is “bad” and weight loss is “good” for our health can be misleading and ignores the truth about the biological response and side effects of weight loss, as well as the importance of fat gain in maintaining body homeostasis in a “toxic” environment. Fat gain is part of a regulatory strategy that permits the recovery of energy balance and body weight stability in a world that has increasingly added obesogenic factors to our lifestyle over time.
Agree!
Pass the spoon.
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Aug '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
I am curious as to why chocolate, i.e. kisses, has a cooling effect as they melt in your mouth. Is that awesome or what ?
Now what was the question again ?
Nov '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Pseudodionysius
If I had just finished re-reading Josef Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture, I would say that its the old vice of sloth (acedia) dressed up in a buffet. ·
Whoever's read Pieper's Leisure is a person after my heart, . . .
. . . and also has a good start understanding the variety of ways societies can arrange things, such as getting enough food to survive, that are within the realm of necessity--as opposed to the realm of human freedom.
The lucky humans (e.g., Western Society) who seem to have (almost) completely mastered necessity with regard to food-getting have new difficulties: Now that we don't have to worry about starving, how exactly should we deal with eating? We could ask the same about other activities that formerly seemed to be more matters of necessity than freedom, e.g., sexual reproduction, which seems lately to have been freed from necessity, and placed fully under human control.
To elevate, by ceremony and ritual, the satisfaction of necessity is truly divine. But don't we "need necessity," at least a little?
Escaping necessity, do we get better or worse?
May '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
I generally prefer fast food to restaurants not because of prices but because I hate losing two hours to lunch and then fighting a food coma the rest of the day.
Casey
....
Oh, and don't waste that food... I paid for that!
For those of us who were raised to dutifully clean our plates, restaurants which pile it on to ensure customers feel like they have gotten their money's worth certainly present a challenge.
Mar '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
flownover: I am curious as to why chocolate, i.e. kisses, has a cooling effect as they melt in your mouth. Is that awesome or what ?
Now what was the question again ? · 29 minutes ago
Anything that requires heat to melt or evaporate gets that heat from the environment around it. Melting reduces the amount of heat, thus provides a little bit of cooling.
Gawd, I'm such a nerd.
Apr '12
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
America's obesity epidemic is a public-health problem and in the near future it will affect our overall longevity. It is interesting that some Americans are becoming healthier (more marathon runners,etc) while the general population becomes obese. Perhaps I am grumpy because I just saw three patients above 300 pounds during morning clinic.
May '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Wealth, stress, and boredom, IMO. The existential vacuum.
Food is cheap and everywhere and culture is impoverished. (Dittoes for Pieper.)
I also think the obesity problem has a lot to do with our sedentary way of living.
To stay thin, you have to make such a point of what you eat; to stay fit, you have to make a serious effort at getting exercise. Something wrong there. For me lately, staying thin is easier than making myself move.
When I visited France for three weeks a couple years ago, I lost about 10 lbs eating delicious food and drinking wine every day. It was all the walking I did.
May '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
I think we'd see a lot more healthy eating if we could switch to fee-for-service health care with insurance against catastrophe.
Jun '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Sorry to point out your typos, but I think you dropped a line right after the word "croissant." It must have gone something like, "as well as cookies, ice cream, cupcakes, and Hershey kisses." You're welcome.
Edited on April 18, 2012 at 9:27pmOct '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Looking at mean human lifespan at birth can be misleading, as that figure is dominated, prior to modern medicine and public health, by infant and child mortality. Even in the paleolithic, if you managed to live to age 15, you could expect to live another mean 39 years, for a total mean lifetime from birth of 54 years. (Since age can be estimated reasonably accurately from skeletal remains, there is a sufficient sample size to support this number.)
This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Fifty-odd years suffices to raise your offspring to replace you, and after that the benefits of elders hanging around are very much on the margin.
What this means in practice is that when you turn 55, evolution is no longer on your side—you've had only 500 generations at most for your hunter-gatherer genes to adapt to modern circumstances, and that changes little.
Dec '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Not to mention the psychological 'wear and tear' of obesity. No one with a debilitating weight problem is living a fulfilled and happy life because they aren't able to participate and/or succeed fully in society- whether it be the job market, dating, traveling, or even getting in and out of the car.
Argue all you want about the 'unfairness' of the prejudice, but it exists and it is here to stay. My advice is to work as hard as you can to avoid it in the first place. (One tip- forget about salad dressing, Doritos, and bread).
Feb '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
katievs
When I visited France for three weeks a couple years ago, I lost about 10 lbs eating delicious food and drinking wine every day. It was all the walking I did. · 1 hour ago
When I lived in NYC and walked all the time, I was in much better shape than I am now in the country. And when I lived in the town of Eugene, Oregon, I would go a week or more without ever getting in my car -- I walked, rode my bike, or took the bus, even when I had two little tadpoles. One of the hardest things about moving to rural NY State and having more than 2 children was the fact that to go anywhere I must get in my car and drive. I feel much less safe riding a bike or walking on my road here -- there are no lines on the road, people fly down it at 55 or more (posted 40mph), and half of them don't even seem to see pedestrians or bikes. I've jumped into the poison ivy patches that richly line the road more than once.
Dec '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
katievs
I think we'd see a lot more healthy eating if we could switch to fee-for-service health care with insurance against catastrophe.
That's exactly the plan my self-employed husband and I use and it works. Also, we have tested your field results en France beaucoup fois and find your data to be conclusive! :)
Edited on April 18, 2012 at 10:50pmMay '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
EThompson
katievs
I think we'd see a lot more healthy eating if we could switch to fee-for-service health care with insurance against catastrophe.
That's exactly the plan my self-employed husband and I use and it works. Also, we have tested your field results en Francebeaucoup fois and find your data to be conclusive! :) ·
Maybe we should get others to test the theory too, by way of an extended Ricochet meet-up in France.
May '10
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Mama Toad
When I lived in NYC and walked all the time, I was in much better shape than I am now in the country. And when I lived in the town of Eugene, Oregon, I would go a week or more without ever getting in my car -- I walked, rode my bike, or took the bus, even when I had two little tadpoles. One of the hardest things about moving to rural NY State and having more than 2 children was the fact that to go anywhere I must get in my car and drive...
It's one of the ironies of modern life, isn't it? Much harder to get enough exercise in the country. I have a friend who moved out of the city because she craves beauty and quiet. But, being a home-schooling mom, she spends most of her days in the car bringing her children to their various activities.
I remember a great essay by James Neuchterlein about how retiring and moving from NYC to Valpariso, IN, meant saying goodbye to the small town experience of Manhattan.
Something different happens to the human community when life is arranged around driving rather than walking distances.
Dec '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
katievs
EThompson
katievs
I think we'd see a lot more healthy eating if we could switch to fee-for-service health care with insurance against catastrophe.
That's exactly the plan my self-employed husband and I use and it works. Also, we have tested your field results en Francebeaucoup fois and find your data to be conclusive! :) ·
Maybe we should get others to test the theory too, by way of an extended Ricochet meet-up in France.
C'est une bonne idee!
May '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Because I care about the health of the Ricochet community, time to drop some knowledge in this post.
First, read Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes. It documents 150 years of nutritional science and how we got to the conventional (and wrong) wisdom about obesity today. Here is Taubes lecturing to some of the fittest people in the world at CrossFit. It will make you question what you thought you knew about obesity.
Second, watch Fat Head, one of the most popular documentaries on Netflix. It's very funny and very informative. The filmmaker is a big time libertarian/personal responsibility type. It's largely a refutation of Super Size Me.
Edited on April 19, 2012 at 12:13amMar '12
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
I've recently moved back from London and I see the same thing, though more of the obsession with everything that goes in our mouths rather than everything going in our mouths. Food is just more work, a bigger deal. Same as you, I'm trying to grasp at exactly why. I suspect it is a bit of a once God prounounced dead everyone had to be their own god problem. That is, food is a small, practical issue that we made important so we can imagine we have control.
By the way, inactive blog, Junkfoodscience, had great posts on the Obesity Paradox.
Apr '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
Is that the diet plan Pat Buchanan uses?
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
I tangentially pay attention to the latest food-fads from the US, and consistently find them utterly lunatic. One guru after another promoting some obsessive theory--paleo food, all-meat diets, all-raw diets, intermittent starvation--isn't it obvious that this is utterly abnormal and deranged? In Turkey, only the very wealthy exercise for sport; I suppose it's just a bit too close to "manual labor" for comfort. I can count the number of morbidly obese people I've seen here on one hand--indeed, I'm not sure I've seen any. Many people are a bit plump. No one sees this as problematic.
This may be a bit facile, but I suspect that if people would just stop worrying about it so much, the obsession would abate, and with it, the compulsion to overeat.
Mar '11
Re: New Study: It's Okay to be Fat
I agree, but I don't think it's only gurus. "Experts" are almost as bad. I remember when I was in my 20's being contemptuous of my non-American in-laws who hadn't heard that fats were unhealthful, only to learn in my 40's of the existence of "good fats." Back then, I was instructed to breastfeed my first baby for the first six months and avoid all solids. How I protested when my mother-in-law wanted to give him some yogurt! By the time my eighth was born, though, experts advised introducing her to small amounts of everything as early as possible to allay allergies. In short, I've learned that we know very little, and that humility, common sense and moderation will probably serve me much better than following religiously the latest food trends.