Dieting Myths

http://www.fatfiction.co.uk/fat/fat-people-eat-less-than-thin-people/

Have you ever met someone incredibly academically clever, yet lacking all common sense? Unless you happen to be that kind of person, you’ll recognise this as the guy who can mentally compute Pi to a thousand places, yet fail to work the pedestrian crossing. The girl who has committed the periodic table to memory, yet can’t seem to open the door.

What happens when those kind of people conduct scientific research? They miss the blindingly obvious right in front of their bespectacled noses. And there’s no greater example than the paper known as the “American Paradox”.

This paper isn’t new – it dates back to 1996 – but it should have been headline news. Called snappily “Divergent trends in obesity and fat intake patterns” , they tell us that

- from 1976 to 1991, the number of overweight US citizens rose 31%
- total calorie intake decreased from 1854 kcal to 1785 kcal, a drop of 4%
- average fat intake – adjusted for total calories – dropped from 41% to 36.6%, an 11% decrease.
- number of people eating low calorie products rose from 19% to 76%
- the incidence of a sedentary lifestyle did not change over this period.

In case your eyes glazed over, people got fatter the more low calorie / fat free products they ate. And they did so in spite of their overall number of calories going down.

Excellent, so what conclusions would you like to draw from this? Anyone? Anyone? Yes you who’s having trouble with your shoelaces at the back there, what do you think?

“These diverging trends suggest that there has been a dramatic decrease in total physical activity related energy expenditure. Efforts to increase the average American's total exercise- and non-exercise-related physical activities may be essential for the prevention of obesity.”

Erm. Right, yes, that is one way of interpreting it sure. So everyone needs to exercise a bit more to burn off the fat, but remember we did say sedentary lifestyles didn’t change over this period, so it’s possible that everyone stopped playing football, but there might something… shall we say a little more obvious. Anyone? Anyone?


It’s painful. Really painful. If you think it’s calories in, calories out, nothing whatsoever will shake you from that belief. Nothing at all. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to work out what this means. It’s not how much you eat, it’s what you eat that counts.

But what about exercise?
You exercise more, you eat more, simple. You’ll feel good sure, but it’s not an effective form of weight control, and this is coming from me who’s just run a first-time marathon. A physiologist tested this theory recently with marathon runners, and sure enough, she concluded:

"Despite conventional wisdom, a majority of runners do not lose body weight while training for a marathon; instead the program results mainly in weight stability."

So why do you get fat?
So being fat is not about calories. It’s not about exercise. And yes sure, some people do overeat – Sumo wrestlers spring to mind with their 5000 calories a day – but most people clearly don’t. They get fat because they can’t burn it off. They can’t burn it off because they are not eating the nutrients you need – the metabolic keys to the ignition. The thing was, we’d probably be just about OK if Ancel Keys hadn’t stepped up with his shonky science telling us to avoid saturated fat to avoid heart disease – a prediction in hindsight so gloriously flawed, it makes David Icke’s ideas about the Queen Mother’s reptilian ancestry seem quite sensible. But Ancel told us to avoid saturated fats, so governments around the world took heed. Fat consumption went down, and consumption of foods that strip out nutrients and minerals went up.

Is saturated fat bad?
Nope. I gloss over this like everyone knows it isn’t. Ironically everyone does seem to know within the multitude of paleo-ish health blogs out there, but it’s not a majority view. If you want to get the full, unadulterated story about how we came up with some of the worst dietary advice since “For mash get Smash”, read the man who launched a thousand nutritional careers, Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories Bad Calories. If you want the abbreviated version, together with some solid insight, Mark Sisson has done a great job explaining why cutting the fat off your bacon is devil’s work. Taking this to its logical SuperSize Me-esque conclusion, check out Tom Naughton and his movie Fat Head. It’s such a mammoth site, it deserves a review of its own, another time.

Foods and nutrients
So we ate less fat - and then ate foods that actively strip out nutrients. Like what? White flour and sugar, closely followed by other grains and legumes. And what nutrient have we stopped eating? Fat.

I know the big post on wheat which the entire premise of this site depends on is waaaaaaay overdue, but in the meantime, it’s old (2 months, which in internet terms is an entire Jurassic era) but brilliant - if you haven’t already read Denise Minger’s ridiculously good study of the data on wheat in the China study, go there now. The highlight is this – consumption of wheat is the strongest predictor of body weight and heart disease.

Is it just wheat causing the world to get fat? Of course not - I believe the root cause of obesity is simply a lack of nutrients. You either don’t eat enough, you eat foods that strip nutrients, or you eat foods that damage your ability to absorb nutrients. Refined wheat is in a unique position of occupying first place in all three categories. You eat until you get enough nutrients. It doesn't matter if that makes you fat, you'll do it anyway.

So have scientists dumped calories in calories out?

A qualified dietician, and there’s not many of those about, said in some frankly arse about face press release today:

“While we wish we didn’t have to say we told you so, the only hope of slowing the obesity epidemic is to reverse our culture of eating too much, too often one bite at a time,” says Meredith Luce

She’s devised a cunning way of tackling the obesity epidemic. Eat just 80 bites a day. She’s even created an Iphone app to help you count them. Or in another word, starve yourself. Slowly.

Run come save me. It doesn’t have to be this complicated.

http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2010/11/04/more-bad-science-thats-eggsactly-what-it-is/

According to a brand-new study, we common folks have a real problem with our diets: namely, we don’t appear to be letting bad scientists scare us away from real foods quite as much as we once did:

The public’s attention is beginning to drift away from the anti-cholesterol message that doctors have been preaching for 40 years, according to the authors of a review in the November 2010 issue of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

“A widespread misconception has been developing among the Canadian public and among physicians. It is increasingly believed that consumption of dietary cholesterol and egg yolks is harmless,” Dr J. David Spence and colleagues state.

Hmmm … perhaps the public believes egg yolks are harmless because egg yolks are harmless. After years of making omelets with Egg Beaters and other frankenfoods, it could be that people are thinking to themselves, “You know, my grandma ate eggs every day, and she was 97 before the yolks finally killed her.”

The long-standing recommendation to limit dietary cholesterol is still important, especially for people at risk for cardiovascular disease, but a single egg yolk contains approximately 215 mg to 275 mg of cholesterol, more than the 200-mg daily limit recommended by the American Heart Association and National Cholesterol Education Program, and even more than some infamous fast-food items such as KFC’s Double Down or Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, the authors note.

Allow me to interpret that gobbledygook: Eggs are bad because a single yolk contains more cholesterol than the daily limit recommended by organizations that don’t know diddly about heart disease and believe Cocoa Puffs are good for your heart.

Also, eggs are bad because they contain more cholesterol than foods that don’t actually contain much cholesterol, such as chicken and hamburgers. This is akin to saying strawberries are bad because just 10 of them contain more fructose than 50 pounds of sausage.

“We have become increasingly concerned about the pervasive success of egg marketing propaganda,” including a brochure touting the benefits of eggs promoted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, “quoting directly from the egg marketing propaganda,” Spence told HeartWire. “After I received that, I called the HSF and offered to meet with them to discuss the evidence, but I was brushed off as if I were someone they had never heard of.”

Oh, now, I don’t think they brushed you off as if you were someone they’ve never heard of. I’m guessing you were brushed off precisely because they have heard of you. I’ll bet the conversation in their offices went something like this:

“It’s Dr. Spence on the phone. Again.”

“Who?”

“You know, the nut-job who still thinks eggs are killers in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.”

“Oh, him. Uh … tell him we’re busy.”

“Despite widespread belief to the contrary, it is simply not true that dietary cholesterol is harmless,” because research over the past 40 years supports reducing dietary cholesterol to reduce LDL levels, which in turn reduces coronary risk, according to the authors.

Ah, yes … teleoanalysis in action. In case you didn’t watch the video of my Big Fat Fiasco speech, here’s how teleoanalysis works:

We cannot prove, in spite of many clinical-study attempts, that A (low-cholesterol diet) causes C (reduction in heart disease). But … if we can prove that A (low-cholesterol diet) sometimes leads to B (lower cholesterol in the blood) and B (lower cholesterol via statins) sometimes leads to C (reduction in heart disease), we can still claim that A causes C.

So that proves egg yolks will kill you … see?

The only trouble with Dr. Spence’s logic (besides the fact that teleoanlysis is utter hogwash) is that several studies have shown no connection between the amount of cholesterol you consume and the level of cholesterol in your blood — even Ancel Keys eventually admitted that fact. And of course, the link between high cholesterol and heart disease is about as statistically weak as you can get.

Epidemiological studies of egg consumption that failed to show a link between eggs and cardiovascular disease in healthy people were not powered to show an effect in healthy people …

Allow me to interpret again: dangit, if only we’d had a chance to crunch the numbers ourselves, we could have “powered” the data into producing the result we wanted.

… but did show an increased risk of cardiovascular disease with egg consumption among diabetics.

Or as a separate article in Science Daily about the same study explained:

The authors point out that in both studies, those who developed diabetes while consuming an egg a day doubled their risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those eating less than an egg a week.

We’ve covered those observational studies before. Eggs were associated with heart disease among people who also developed type 2 diabetes, but not among those who didn’t. In other words, the link only shows up in people with lousy diets overall.

Those would be people Dr. Mike Eades calls “non-adherers” and I call “people who don’t give a @#$%.” They don’t care if eggs are (supposedly) bad for them. They also don’t care if sugar is bad for them, or if smoking is bad for them. One of the studies noted specifically that the subjects who consumed more than one egg per day were also older, fatter, and more likely to smoke.

The studies also showed a significant increase of new onset diabetes with regular egg consumption.

Wowzers … such bad-science thinking, they didn’t even bother with the phrase “was associated with” this time. Read that sentence without knowing any better, and you’d think eating eggs causes diabetes. So let’s see how that idea holds up against actual evidence.

In the chart below, I plotted the rate of diabetes over the past several decades (in red), along with the per-capita consumption of eggs during the same period (in blue).



Hmmm … looks like back in the 1950s, when egg consumption was far higher than it is today, we had an amazingly low rate of diabetes. It would also appear that diabetes rates went up while per-capita egg consumption was going down. So what can we conclude from this? Thinking … thinking … aha, I’ve got it! — eggs don’t actually cause diabetes, or we’d see consistent and repeatable evidence that they do. No consistency, no scientific validity.

The authors conclude, “There is no question that egg white is classed as a valuable source of high-quality protein. Egg yolks, however, are not something that should be eaten indiscriminately by adults without regard to their global cardiovascular risk, genetic predisposition to heart attacks and overall food habits.”

The blogger concludes: the authors are lousy scientists.

http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/no-bologna-facts/

◦There’s never been a single study that proves saturated fat causes heart disease.

◦As heart-disease rates were skyrocketing in the mid-1900s, consumption of animal fat was going down, not up. Consumption of vegetable oils, however, was going up dramatically.

◦Half of all heart-attack victims have normal or low cholesterol. Autopsies performed on heart-attack victims routinely reveal plaque-filled arteries in people whose cholesterol was low (as low as 115 in one case).

◦Asian Indians - half of whom are vegetarians - have one of the highest rates of heart disease in the entire world. Yup, that fatty meat will kill you, all right.

◦When Morgan Spurlock tells you that a McDonald’s salad supplies almost a day’s allowance of fat, he’s basing that statement on the FDA’s low-fat/high-carbohydrate dietary guidelines, which in turn are based on … absolutely nothing. There’s no science behind those guidelines; they were simply made up by a congressional committee.

◦Kids who were diagnosed as suffering from ADD have been successfully treated by re-introducing natural saturated fats into their diets. Your brain is made largely of fat.

◦Many epileptics have reduced or eliminated seizures by adopting a diet low in sugar and starch and high in saturated animal fats.

◦Despite everything you’ve heard about saturated fat being linked to cancer, that link is statistically weak. However, there is a strong link between sugar and cancer. In Europe, doctors tell patients, “Sugar feeds cancer.”

◦Being fat is not, in and of itself, bad for your health. The behaviors that can make you fat - eating excess sugar and starch, not getting any exercise - can also ruin your health, and that’s why being fat is associated with bad health. But it’s entirely possible to be fat and healthy. It’s also possible to be thin while developing Type II diabetes and heart disease.

◦Saturated fat and cholesterol help produce testosterone. When men limit their saturated fat, their testosterone level drops. So, regardless of what a famous vegan chef believes, saturated fat does not impair sexual performance.

http://karateconditioning.blogspot.com/2010/12/metabolism-myths.html

The Metabolism Myth(s)
by Joe Berne

There are a couple of myths - in separate categories - that I see promulgated in the fitness community and popular consciousness related to metabolism. I thought it worthwhile to take a moment to clear them up.

Without getting overly technical, what we mean by "metabolism" is the calories burned by your body at rest - otherwise called Basal Metabolic Rate or Resting Metabolic Rate. These things may not be exactly the same but they're close enough for our purposes.

Basically, even if you sit on the couch and watch TV all day, your body burns bunches of calories just keeping your heart and lungs going, your body temperature normal, and maintaining itself. This sounds like a great thing, right? Calories burned means they're not being stored as fat. So everybody and their mom wants a super high metabolism, which means your body is like a little furnace burning energy, and you can eat tons of food without getting chubby.

There are two general myths regarding metabolism:

1. Eating food X or doing Y will elevate your metabolic rate. This isn't always wrong, but it is usually wrong or overstated. Stimulants (caffeine, green tea extract, and so on) might elevate your metabolism but only a little bit and only for a little while (you get used to them quickly). Otherwise all coffee drinkers would be thin, and we can see that's not true. Eating multiple meals a day won't work either - you get an energy burning effect from food (called TEF), but it's proportional to meal size, so splitting your bigger meals into smaller, more frequent meals will do all of jack for your caloric burn.

Vigorous exercise will elevate your metabolism as your body repairs itself, but it's not an enormous increase. Would burning an extra 50 or 100 calories be nice? Sure, but that's what, half a Twinkie's worth of calories? It's not exactly a licence to eat junk food.

There are supplements that will significantly elevate your metabolic rate, but they tend to have serious side effects - thyroid hormone among them. I am far from an expert on the use of pharmaceutical substances to aid fat loss, but they're out there and your nearest pro bodybuilder is probably using them.

Here's the bigger myth:

2. Raising your metabolic rate is unequivocally good. This isn't so much something people say as what they imply. Marketing campaigns for various products will often tout how good they are for your "metabolism." Diets do the same thing. A particularly egregious exampe is the High Everything Diet (I won't provide a link because it's crap, but feel free to google it). The HED advocates say that by eating a certain way - lots of starch, protein, and fat but no juice or artificial sweeteners - you can elevate your metabolism and eat tons of food while losing bodyfat.

Here's my question: even if they're right (and I don't think they are), would that be a good thing? Do you want your cells churning away, burning tons of energy more than you need, sucking calories away from your system?

Think about a car engine. What happens when two identical engines ar run at different rates - one faster than the other? Outside of a pretty narrow range you can count on the higher-revving engine blowing up quicker than the other one. Trust me, Formula One engineers don't turn the revs up when they think their engine might be on its last legs. All those processes in the cell that burn energy - what else do they do? They result in some damage to the cell, even if it's a small amount, as they oxidize all those lovely fats and carbs to generate ATP. I'm sure there are few short term consequences to this, but over the course of a lifetime of wear and tear, do you want your cells working hard or gently when you're at rest?

If you want to be healthy and intact for a long time a slow metabolism might be advantageous. Calorie restriction, the one way we know of to increase a mammal's lifespan, certainly doesn't make the cells rev faster or at a higher temperature. It makes the animals run cooler and slower.

I certainly wouldn't argue that slowing your metabolism more is always better, either. Being cold and lethargic all the time, whether it extends life or not, is not a fun way to live.

Take home message: if you're lean, or in the area of lean, and relatively healthy (have a decent amount of energy, etc.) then speeding up your "metabolism" may not be a good thing. Be wary of diets, exercise plans, and supplements that claim to do so - they probably don't work, and if they do work they might be limiting your longevity. Conversely, if someone criticizes your healthful lifestyle on the grounds that it might slow your metabolism, just smile, nod, and walk away. You can have the best revenge - outliving your enemies.

Osu.