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2010-03-07 Science & Technology

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Posted by Fred 2010-03-07 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11130 views ] Top

#1 Well, that was easy, wasn't it?

Posted by gorb 2010-03-07 00:48|| 2010-03-07 00:48|| Front Page Top

#2 I have heard this before from other studies but I believe they are going to discover the culprit is gluten. Humans did not evolve eating grains, we have only been eating them for about the past 6,000 years or so.

Posted by crosspatch 2010-03-07 02:52|| 2010-03-07 02:52|| Front Page Top

#3 Probably Gluten PLUS the bacteria.

Gluten opens the gut wall, and the bacteria have direct access to the blood stream.

It would be a massive benefit for a bacteria to make you eat more and thus feed it more.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2010-03-07 06:48|| 2010-03-07 06:48|| Front Page Top

#4 Humans have been eating gluten for a very long time, just not as a staple. Prior to the advent of grain growing (approximately 10,000 years ago) humans would eat grass seeds when they came upon them. (Actually, they'd eat just about anything that was edible on that basis.)

I've seen new evidence that suggests the original use of grain grown in bulk was for brewing, not baking, as well. But certainly by six or eight thousand years ago civilizations were growing grain as their primary food source.

However, analysis of bones from the immediate post ice age era prior to plant agriculture suggest that over 85% of the diet was meat, with smaller amounts of fruit as the bulk of the rest.

A diet high in grain-based carbs is the problem. If you look at different ethnic types, you'll find that the ones which have been growing rice, wheat, barley, corn, etc. the longest have the lowest percentage of individuals with celiac disease (also known as "sprue"), a skeletal disorder, which is directly related to consumption of the protein gluten.

But the risks of a high-grain diet aren't limited to the gluten component. If you look at ethnic groups that did not eat large amounts of grain until recently (meaning a century or three) - blacks and American Indians in particular - you find that when they adopt a diet high in grain products they develop diabetes at rates that are off the charts. This is due to the carb content, not gluten.

This has been exacerbated in the past forty or so years by the federal government, which simultaneously uses our tax money to subsidize massive grain production while putting out propaganda like the "food pyramid" which tells people to eat fifteen servings of grass seed a day.

Posted by no mo uro 2010-03-07 07:02|| 2010-03-07 07:02|| Front Page Top

#5 All scientific discoveries aside, the largest part of the obesitypriblem is and will always be the fact that certain people EAT (very) UNHEALTHY FOODS,are EATING PORTIONS THAT ARE WAY TO BIG or are refusing ANY FORM OF EXCERCISE.

As Dennis Leary said: "Dinosuars are big-boned, PUT DOWN THE FORK"

Posted by Snaigum Oppressor of the Sith8920 2010-03-07 07:30|| 2010-03-07 07:30|| Front Page Top

#6 What he said.

Posted by no mo uro 2010-03-07 07:52|| 2010-03-07 07:52|| Front Page Top

#7 So all these fat people are "bug" carriers ?

I think not, some may be like this guy,

Posted by Jack Ebberert6731 2010-03-07 07:55|| 2010-03-07 07:55|| Front Page Top

#8 Remember those pictures from Somalia [when people cared]? See any fat people? Technically, they all were fat because they had the bodies to extract any last bit of nourishment from anything that was 'food'. Those who couldn't had already died. Now you alter the environment in which food is plentiful and readily accessible and they start to 'put it on'. Tens of thousands of years of evolutionary defensive breeding against lean and hungry seasons means that less than a hundred years of sustained abundance doesn't weed out that gene from the pool. I wouldn't bet my tribe's existence that we are now beyond the time when food can become scarce again by 'fixing' it.

Just take a look at photographs from a hundred years ago. The rich were fat and the workers were skinny [even the shop keeps and help, not just the farmers and laborers]. The social critics and nannies bitched about that. Now its the poor who are fat and the rich who are skinny. The social critics and nannies still bitch. The one consistency is the critics and nannies of any society, complain, complain, complain.

Posted by Procopius2k 2010-03-07 09:48|| 2010-03-07 09:48|| Front Page Top

#9 The Pima Indians of Arizona are a very interesting case for this.

For many centuries, they lived on such a sparse diet that their livers are hyper efficient, as little as 800 calories a day would sustain them. Needless to say, in a McDonalds society, they are generally, if not universally, obese and have widespread diabetes.

They were smart, so that when casino money started rolling in, they built a world class diabetes research and treatment center as one of their first priorities.

Posted by Anonymoose 2010-03-07 10:42|| 2010-03-07 10:42|| Front Page Top

#10 The 'Eat Right 4 Your Type' tries to address the different diets according to ethnicity. Asians, with a rice-based diet, also gain weight when eating American style food. A real problem in determining a proper diet is our diversity and intermarriage. For instance, the Irish eat a lot of dairy but Native Americans are generally lactose-intolerant. Another problem in recent history, is food preservatives to ensure a long shelf-life and hormones to fatten beef up, increase dairy production, and hurry poultry through the food chain. These are xenoestrogens, not water-soluble and when ingested, convert the carbs into fat and are stored in the body without breaking down. Deprived of real nutrients, the body craves more food, making weight loss a vicious cycle. Estrogens also feed cancers, particularly breast and prostate tumors. Other symptoms exhibited are PMS, man-boobs, loss of libido, fibrocystic diseases, and metabolic syndrome. The new rule of thumb is fresh and raw, avoiding anything that didn't exist 1-200 years ago. Tougher to follow than you might think, too.

Posted by Lumpy Elmoluck5091 2010-03-07 11:16|| 2010-03-07 11:16|| Front Page Top

#11 Interestingly, that while type II diabetes is rampant in Australian Aboriginal populations, obesity isn't.

It's unusual to see even an overweight young Aboriginal. Most are rail thin to lean. Although their diet is the burger and fries fast food that is blamed for obesity.

Posted by phil_b 2010-03-07 16:42|| 2010-03-07 16:42|| Front Page Top

#12 Interestingly, that while type II diabetes is rampant in Australian Aboriginal populations, obesity isn't.

It's unusual to see even an overweight young Aboriginal. Are you implying that Australian aborigines with Type II DM are not obese? That would be a very interesting condition indeed. I suspect your observation is off by separating thin young people from fat older people. The ones with Type II DM are most likely fat & not particularly young. The thin young ones (if anyone bothered to study them) would already have impaired glucose tolerance, and as they age, will put on weight & many will develop Type II DM. Studies on youthful, slim & apparently healthy adults using PET scanners to follow glucose metabolism at the cellular level have show that descendants of Type II diabetics have abnormalities in their glucose metabolism like those I mentioned, even though they have no outward or clinical sign of DM or even obesity.
Some influences on populations take time to show up. When I worked near the Navajo reservation in 1975, there were almost no overweight young Navajos. 35 years later that is not the case. In 1975 (to my best knowledge) there was only one Type I diabetic among the Navajos, an astoundingly small incidence of that disease. Virtually none had high blood pressure or ischemic strokes. It was extremely uncommon to find evidence of old heart attacks on EKG's, and it wasn't because we weren't looking for them. Very few kids were hyperactive & believe me, there was plenty of opportunity to observe that in the waiting rooms. I expect that tribe has done a lot of catching-up since then.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-03-07 19:45|| 2010-03-07 19:45|| Front Page Top

#13 The new rule of thumb is fresh and raw, avoiding anything that didn't exist 1-200 years ago. Tougher to follow than you might think, too.
There is nothing harder than to profoundly change one's diet and to stick to it for years. Nothing. Can anything be tougher to do than that?

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-03-07 19:47|| 2010-03-07 19:47|| Front Page Top

#14 Gosh, Ive noticed something and it is not sugar coated because that is fattening:

People who are not wheelchair bound or otherwise physically incapacitated or exceptionally unable due to limitations physically are obese because they

A) eat too many sugar, alcohol, refined carbs and such.
B) their caloric intake exceeds their basal resting metabolic rates (ie: how many calories you use just staying alive )by large margins
and
C) they don't get out and exercise

"lost 20 pounds...How? I drank bear piss and took up fencing. How the f^&* you think, son? I exercised."

- popular social networking site quote "Sh&* my Dad says'

Absent a better and compelling truth to this study people are fat because they eat too much crap and sit around on their ass or never break a sweat.

Posted by GirlThursday 2010-03-07 20:54|| 2010-03-07 20:54|| Front Page Top

#15 "The 'Eat Right 4 Your Type' tries to address the different diets according to ethnicity. Asians, with a rice-based diet, also gain weight when eating American style food. "

Ive read this book. Overall,IMHO its point is good but it hits a brick wall when dealing with what those among us who are an AB+ blood type. AB+ blood type is a rarer blood type that tends to emerge in Eur-Asian decent.

The book lays out what AB pluses like me are supposed to be able to eat with good results. However, in these 'catch all' categories, catch all should be coined "catch many, not nearly all" because what the book doesn't completely hash out is many AB + can eat a variety of everything! One of my AB+ friends name is nicknamed "garbage disposal" this guy eats everything and his body accepts it fine. Same with me. I eat a b-r-o-a-d span of every kind of food and have never had a picky constitution.

Books like this may be useful for some, but for some it just induces paranoia when whats best is eating a variety and not worrying is the way to go. I would bet if you polled a bunch of AB's the old wisdom of eat a variety and you're good would be common but not unnanimous. I'd be curious if any other hybrid types (admittedly unscientifically polled) are "garbage disposals" too.

Posted by GirlThursday 2010-03-07 21:24|| 2010-03-07 21:24|| Front Page Top

#16 The new rule of thumb is fresh and raw, avoiding anything that didn't exist 1-200 years ago.

In other words, eat as farmers did in the summer two centuries ago? Because I guarantee that fresh and raw was how nobody ate during the winter back then, or even very much until the first fruits of summer were harvested, except inasmuch as was available from thinning the garden. Greenhouses became the hobby of moneyed Victorians, when glass production was finally industrialized and therefore affordable in quantity, and canning was a 19th century activity, to the best of my knowledge. Before that fruits were mostly dried or preserved in alcohol for winter use, hence the traditional candied fruit cake for Christmas. Until then scurvy, rickets, and osteoporosis were the order of the day, not to mention all sorts of other debilitating metabolic disorders due to lack of proper nutrition much of the year.

Oh, and the latest hypothesis I've seen posits we developed the ability to talk after we discovered the pleasures of cooked meat, resulting in the evolution of weaker jaw muscles and therefore finer motor control of the jaw, teeth and tongue to make communicative sounds. H. sapian sapian evolved to be nourished on cooked as well as raw foods.

Some of us have nastier caries-producing bacteria in our mouths, some have nastier obesity or infection-causing bacteria in our intestines. If this study is indeed correct, all the probiotic-containing foods and pills are likely the best first line of defence we have against obesity as well as intestinal discomfort, as we provide and encourage good bacteria to displace bad. I shall make a point of picking up some probiotic yoghurt and a box of Align tomorrow at the grocery store. On the other hand, like so many other things, obesity is known to have multiple causes, and even if one's bacteria make one crave large volumes of unhealthy food, one is perfectly capable of resisting the impulse or choosing to exercise more -- it is that ability of thoughtful choice that makes us different from the other animals on this planet.

Posted by trailing wife 2010-03-07 21:42|| 2010-03-07 21:42|| Front Page Top

#17 Girl Thursday, I'm O- and of pure Middle European Jewish descent (German, Russian, Latvian). Except for not eating forbidden foods (pork, shellfish, insects, birds and animals of prey or carrion-eaters), I eat most cuisines and many foods with gusto and without apparent harm. I haven't read the book, but as you can see from my post above, it's not likely the arguments contained within would persuade me, no matter how well presented.

Posted by trailing wife 2010-03-07 21:47|| 2010-03-07 21:47|| Front Page Top

#18 Im of some unknown origins. However, Russian is one Im certain of.

I Agree the book can't really convince me to limit my liberal (ooh I hate to use that term) eating habits.

When in Asia a group of us ate some meat parts considered strange or repugnant by American dietary norms that were standard local fare, which was followed by several of our American group landing in the ER with food poisoning and dehydration. We'd all eaten the same things from a central platter. I weathered it fine, and almost felt apologetic for doing well. Again, human garbage disposal, AB+.

I do take acidophilus chewables wafers every day--a banana strawberry flavor are yum!

Posted by GirlThursday 2010-03-07 22:24|| 2010-03-07 22:24|| Front Page Top

#19 Ah yes, you would have had more adventurous gustatory adventures than I, Girl Thursday. ;-) Except for joining Mr. Wife on a business trip to the far side of Malaysia, I've never dined anywhere outside of civilization, so I don't really know what my system can handle.

Posted by trailing wife 2010-03-07 22:46|| 2010-03-07 22:46|| Front Page Top

#20 Are you implying that Australian aborigines with Type II DM are not obese? That would be a very interesting condition indeed.

I worked for a while at the local Aboriginal Medical Service and I have spent time at remote Aboriginal communities. I'm not a medical person but I do have a degree in genetics.

Obese or even overweight Aboriginal children are rare, certainly much rarer than the white population. You do see overweight adults, but probably no more than the white population. Although, many adults by middle age develop a pronounced extended 'fat' stomach.

Type II diabetes is about 40 times the white population. Diet is generally pretty bad - fat, sugar starch.

Perhaps the other factor is that young Aboriginals walk a great deal more due to their parents owning few cars. A sedentary lifestyle only sets in with adulthood.

Posted by phil_b 2010-03-07 23:02|| 2010-03-07 23:02|| Front Page Top

23:59 JosephMendiola
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21:59 trailing wife
21:58 ~~war on terror~~