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We need to call out the sugar industry. Sugar is as toxic and lethal as alcohol in the long run. Too many foods have hidden sugars. Fruits are also sugar products that needs to be limited when someone is obese. Nothing worst than eating GMO fruits that's been modified to be even more sugar dense than organic fruits. Stop eating sugar for a couple of weeks and see how quickly your body will lose weight.
It'd be great if food could be made with less sugar. Are people never allowed to indulge though? Some eat too much sugar but there are other foods like chips, cheetos, doritos, fattening dips, etc that are just as bad.
I guess everyone is different but I like to indulge in unhealthy food every now and then. As long as I don't let it get out of control I don't see what the big deal is. It's not alcohol or drugs. If someone has health issues obviously they need to be more careful. I weigh 130, pretty much always have and I've always struggled with cravings for certain foods. Maybe i'd weigh less if I never indulged but at 45 I'm kind of over it.
It'd be great if food could be made with less sugar. Are people never allowed to indulge though? Some eat too much sugar but there are other foods like chips, cheetos, doritos, fattening dips, etc that are just as bad.
I guess everyone is different but I like to indulge in unhealthy food every now and then. As long as I don't let it get out of control I don't see what the big deal is. It's not alcohol or drugs. If someone has health issues obviously they need to be more careful. I weigh 130, pretty much always have and I've always struggled with cravings for certain foods. Maybe i'd weigh less if I never indulged but at 45 I'm kind of over it.
Unhealthy food can be made more healthy. My wife makes fruit pies with lard, organic butter, and unsweetened organic fresh fruit. Sure, there are a lot of calories there, but it's the "natural" calories that the human body evolved to handle far better than store-bought pies.
An interesting story in the NYT recently about this subject, if you have access. It's titled "Bariatric surgery at 16" 20 percent of kids are now obese, up from 5 percent in the 70's. The poor girl profiled in the story has tried just about everything to lose weight without success.
"...But if our genes didn’t change significantly in the last century, why, then, are children getting bigger? No one knows for sure. One likely explanation, however, is the evolutionary mismatch between our genes and our surroundings. Children who end up with obesity were always at the highest genetic risk for that outcome, even if it wasn’t certain to develop, but now, Farooqi says, “the environment is likely unmasking their genetic susceptibility.” The most substantial transformation in their surroundings has been to the food they eat, which in the past was different in its composition and far more limited. Leibel refers to “a revolution in human environments” and notes that our genes haven’t changed “fast enough to accommodate something that’s really an invention of the past 75 years.” The amount of readily accessible food has expanded immensely, making it easier than ever to eat — open a phone app, say, or go to a drive-through. Plenty of Americans can consume as much as they want, whenever they want.
Today nearly 70 percent of what children eat is ultraprocessed food..."
An interesting story in the NYT recently about this subject, if you have access. It's titled "Bariatric surgery at 16" 20 percent of kids are now obese, up from 5 percent in the 70's. The poor girl profiled in the story has tried just about everything to lose weight without success.
"...But if our genes didn’t change significantly in the last century, why, then, are children getting bigger? No one knows for sure. One likely explanation, however, is the evolutionary mismatch between our genes and our surroundings. Children who end up with obesity were always at the highest genetic risk for that outcome, even if it wasn’t certain to develop, but now, Farooqi says, “the environment is likely unmasking their genetic susceptibility.” The most substantial transformation in their surroundings has been to the food they eat, which in the past was different in its composition and far more limited. Leibel refers to “a revolution in human environments” and notes that our genes haven’t changed “fast enough to accommodate something that’s really an invention of the past 75 years.” The amount of readily accessible food has expanded immensely, making it easier than ever to eat — open a phone app, say, or go to a drive-through. Plenty of Americans can consume as much as they want, whenever they want.
Today nearly 70 percent of what children eat is ultraprocessed food..."
Thank you for the link, I read that article when it was published and submitted a comment at that time but it was not published. The NY Times is very picky about what comments it publishes. Here's what I wrote them:
Quote:
No teen should ever have bariatric surgery. Fix their diets, instead.
Take sugar away from kids, and adults too for that matter.
High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in soft drinks and sports drinks (Gatorade, etc) drives obesity, diabetes, Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), dental cavities and more. HFCS can only be processed by the liver, causing fatty liver, eventually scarring and cirrhosis of the liver with often fatal effects, like raging alcoholics.
Recent research is leading to a realization that decades of sugar saturation is a very probable cause of Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia, so much so that some medical types are referring to these late-life horrors as Type 3 Diabetes. But because the damage is decades in the making the possible culprit of sugars goes without being addressed.
NY Times best-selling author Dr. Robert Lustig has great books for those who care to read:
- Fat Chance
In my passion for railroad and WW-2 history I get to look at thousands of photos every year, and in all those pix I hardly ever see an overweight person. In those days moms cooked from scratch, very few if any UPFs with their chemical additives, sugar, salt and fat. Born in 1948 I can attest that supermarkets were much smaller than today's mega stores which are loaded with UPFs and that my Mom cooked a lot from scratch.
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Lard and butter aren't exactly healthy...but whatever makes you feel better about not eating sugar
I said "more healthy."
There is nothing at all toxic about lard and butter. The human body deals with those fats without effort, unlike hydrogenated oils. All that's necessary is to control the total calories and don't make pie a diet staple.
Thank you for the link, I read that article when it was published and submitted a comment at that time but it was not published. The NY Times is very picky about what comments it publishes. Here's what I wrote them:
In my passion for railroad and WW-2 history I get to look at thousands of photos every year, and in all those pix I hardly ever see an overweight person. In those days moms cooked from scratch, very few if any UPFs with their chemical additives, sugar, salt and fat. Born in 1948 I can attest that supermarkets were much smaller than today's mega stores which are loaded with UPFs and that my Mom cooked a lot from scratch.
For the WWII pictures you have to remember that something like 25% of draftees reported for induction and were found to be suffering from malnutrition with over 10% so bad they were rejected, especially early in the War (one reason the school meals program was instituted after the end of the War).
For your mother cooking from scratch, while not every family was Leave It To Beaver enough were that has become the marker for those next couple decades or so.
Women stayed home where they had the time to make things from scratch (my aunt baked something every single day. Ine day a pie or two, the next a cake, sticky rolls almost every day, etc.). Nothing from a box.
Now, with something like 80% of families having both families working outside the home the time isn't there to do a lot of that. It's not surprising that surveys show that over 50% of people eat takeout/restaurant (both of which would include fast food) three or more times a week.
I've done likely 90%+ of the cooking over forty plus years of marriage and four kids. Why? Early on my work schedule was somewhat random and I was home. Later it was because I always had an early day while Mrs. NBP was at school much later (especially when she was in administration). It was easier for me to do it and we ate earlier. Rarely was something frozen, but I have to admit it would have been nice to have been able to come home and pop some frozen lasagna into the oven (today's "TV dinners").
I guess what I've said is that society has changed. Whether for good or ill is another discussion.
Obesity, unless there is a diagnosed health issue, is due to one's diet and exercise routine. If it were genetic, why when I went to elementary school in the 1960s, moved around the country for a good 30 years, were 99% of the students not obese? Now, as I watch them coming from school, probably 35% of them are obese, and some others headed that way.
Being on a "diet"? Yeah, that isn't what it is about. One has to change their diet and lifestyle, read labels, as they change all the time now. Processed foods, those "quick" meals, put on calories just as quickly. I had read that the biggest culprit (also difference) now is that of corn syrup being put in nearly everything. Watch for it in lunch meats, breads, cereals, and watch for "No High Fructose Syrup", because that means they most likely have corn syrup, just not classified as "high".
Eat as many foods raw as you can for nutrition and to keep the calories down.
Eating foods low in nutrition keeps the body hungry as it strives to get you to give it something worthwhile it can use.
So, no, but it seems to make people feel good to blame everything on genetics these days.
***Everyone wants to claim people are too busy to cook. I did it with: 2 boys, 1 husband, 1 full time job, 2 dogs, 2 cats and a guinea pig - and not much help from the 1 husband! Sadly, I just pulled our adult son out of a residential situation where I learned the only meal served in the "home" was a frozen dinner. He lost weigh really fast, but starvation will do that! I was told they can't hire people willing to cook, and I thought it would be the other necessary care. What a world.
I agree with most of the other posters, genetics is only one factor, and most of the time it is not the driving or primary factor. There are thousands of studies out there about this.
From what I gleaned from those studies behavior, environment, and genetic factors all have a role in causing people to be overweight and obese; and generally, it is in that order. Behavior is number one.
The only way I ever lost weight and kept it off was to track calories and weight continuously and religiously for a period of years. I used the one below to track them online it is a bit old-school but there are many others.
It's a lot of work and a tedious daily chore but worth it in the long run. After you have done that for a long period of time, you will know the caloric intake of everything you consume, without having to refer to a list or a guidebook. And you will know your "setpoint" very accurately (the amount of calories you can consume to maintain a constant weight) and you will also know the caloric deficit you will need to lose weight and at what rate.
I figured out that my setpoint was lower than most guides would suggest for men - it's about 2100 calories. I used a 1700 calorie target to lose weight at a rate of about 1 lb/week. I found that it took a long time to acclimate my body to lower calorie intake.
IMO a lot of people simply don't account for all the calories they are consuming. This is not a personal failing, because the brain/body constantly tries to make us eat more if food is in the environment. You can blame that on our primitive ancestors who needed to fatten up for the lean times.
Which is one of the things you learn quickly when you track calories. If high caloric density foods (usually those laden with sugars and fat) are in your home, you are far more likely to consume them. Just don't bring them home from the store.
In the end it is something you have to do for a lifetime, not during the course of a quick weight loss diet or a month of "good behavior".
I used My Fitness Pal religiously for over a year, lost 20 pounds over 4 months and have kept it off. I now know what my daily intake should be and just use My Fitness Pal once or twice a week to stay on track.
I didn't find the program that time consuming to use as it keeps track of frequently used items as well as recipes.
I have MFP paired with my Fitbit to monitor calories spent in activity but I don't think that's necessary.
Obesity is not genetic, or at least not mostly. Our genetic makeup hasn't changed in any meaningful way over the last few generations, yet obesity rates have skyrocketed as our portion sizes have increased, outdoor recreation time has gone down, and we've become best friends with the couch and television. For everyone who says that obesity is genetic, I say look at Japan. You're hard pressed to find overweight locals there. In fact, the only obese people I've seen in Japan were non-Japanese.
Originally Posted by msRB311 Lard and butter aren't exactly healthy...but whatever makes you feel better about not eating sugar
An awful lot of well informed sources disagree with that. In fact, they point out, both lard and butter are very healthy foods. They have been displaced not by science, but by marketing. Lard was displaced by the vegetable shortening companies, whose products have nothing to do with vegetables. And butter was displaced by the margarine companies, but it was/is all just marketing.
The cholesterol story and its association with ingested fats may be one of the greatest myths ever perpetrated on the public. And sugar?.... addictive. More addictive most of us can possibly imagine.
Crisco, vegetable shortenings, Canola oil, Pam, and butter substitutes are not used in our house.
We Americans are fat because we are addicted to sugars in many forms - all found in processed foods.
Just food for thought...
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