PBS show on Obesity

#81

People ate very much carbs hundreds of years ago too… It’s more like those very available treats and sweets I would think. More tempting for a not even hungry person than a piece of bread or a bowl of millet…

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #82

In the U.S., people mostly ate meat, up until Ancel Keys started blaming Eisenhower’s heart attacks on his diet. Potato and vegetables were decidedly secondary, and everyone knew that eating a lot of carbs made us fat. (One of the reasons Type II diabetes and gout used to be diseases of the rich was that sugar was quite expensive. Now sugar is in every single processed food, and the benefits of diabetes and gout have been extended to the masses.)

In fact, up till the 1960’s or so, Americans were considered the healthiest people in the world, because of how much meat they ate. Nina Teicholz has discussed and documented this in The Big Fat Surprise. In fact, Crédit Suisse and Swiss Re, two of the giant companies in the insurance business, have identified a high-carb, low-fat diet as one of the primary causes of the current decline in life expectancy, and they are promoting a low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet. They have a direct economic stake in promoting keto, because life insurance is not profitable in a market where life expectancies are declining.

#83

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(Marianne) #84

I think that’s because they didn’t have dressing. :joy:

#85

My peasant anchestors didn’t live on meat though. They had that (unlike poor ones who really lived on carbs, poor souls, how could they last for any time?), mostly pork and fowl but they had lots of starches and sugar. Vegs and grains galore, surely plenty of dairy and fat and much fruits.They were pretty healthy (at least the last generations that I know about, it ends somewhere in the end of the 19th century), I inherited most of those genes, I just need to be active too! And eat well, of course.

The “salad” stayed put so it wasn’t needed to paint ritualistic paintings to get it :smiley:
We all know how determined our anchestors were to make plant eating happen. I STILL can’t wrap my head around it whenever I see a wheat field… Give me a whole field with these modern big ears and I still won’t think it’s something worth to work my fingers off for… Just to get a bunch of pretty much inedible flour. Our anchestors had to be super desperate. it’s beyond being opportunistic. If I am an opportunist ancient man, I put bugs and cuter plant parts into my mouth… HOW they figured out that those hard seeds make food in very big amounts with lots of work…? I still don’t fully understand how it can work now. SOOOO much work for so little result.

(GINA ) #86

My grandmother had years worth of reunion pictures of the women in my family (why just the women I don’t know). They were all lined up with the oldest generation sitting and holding the youngest, and everyone else lined up behind. Everyone was thin, until they hit menopause age and started sitting in that front row holding grandbabies and those ladies were chunky (not hugely obese, but overweight). If they lived past 80 or so, they thinned back down again.

(Robin) #87

Good looking dude.

(Edith) #88

And less seed oil, artificial flavors or colorings, fewer preservatives…

#89

People are way less active too…
And I still totally blame that people just grab some snack all the time sometimes. My anchestors had breakfast then they went to work and didn’t even think about food until lunch. As normal people should, actually unless they get hungry (breakfasts always made me hungry but that’s why I skipped them when I wasn’t a kid anymore. and I tested, keto breakfasts do the same).

(GINA ) #90

…and less often. People ate 3 meals a day and snacking was for small children. You might sit down for a midmorning or afternoon coffee or tea, and it might even have milk and sugar in it, but drinks didn’t come in 16-oz-40-grams-of-sugar vats to be slurped over hours.

Blood sugar went up, but it also had a chance to come back down before the next rise. Our cells weren’t soaking in a constant blood sugar and insulin bath.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #91

It’s important to remember the reason for eating so often—it’s a high load of carbohydrate in the diet. It prompts insulin to (a) cause sugar crashes, and (b) lock up our energy as fat in our fat cells, thus making a lot of the energy we consume unavailable. So the result is constant hunger.

I am old enough to remember when the advice to eat six or seven times a day was introduced—precisely to cope with this constant hunger. The idea was that you tried to eat enough so that the hunger was manageable, but not so much that you got fat. Because a calorie is a calorie, right? Right?

Funnily enough, no researcher has ever thought to question this dietary advice. Or if they did, their funding was cut off. The authorities are now so locked into the ideas that “a calorie is a calorie” and “fat causes heart disease” that we ignore the old common wisdom, which was that carbohydrate is fattening, so we’d better not eat too much. Instead, we are taught to few pasta as a health food, not something that will make us fat. There are too many commercial interests now invested in the status quo for this situation to change. The only thing we can do is to seize control over our own health and eat in a way that really works.

#92

@PaulL, do you know why some people have these crashes and constant hunger and not available fat while other people use the fat just fine and stay satiated for a long time after a big carby meal? Even I am like that and carbs are definitely not good and hunger-inducing for me. Maybe it’s a low-fat thing, that’s why I never saw it in my family? (I think I asked that before…) But I never heard it about anyone else in my personal life either. People eat carby meals and they get satiated just fine, if they wouldn’t, they just would eat more…? Never heard people complaining about constant hunger, it sounds something extreme and worrying to me.

My anchestors ate their carby meals and were okay working for quite a few hours. It’s how people work, isn’t it? So I don’t get it. Most people eat high-carb and it may be not healthy for them and some may be hungry a lot but it doesn’t make nearly everything hungry all the time.

But if we eat 6-7 (7? are there even words for so many meals? second dinner? before-bed snack?) meals, all day long, doesn’t make it our energy intake higher normally…? Or we need to be super careful to eat mini meals? Sounds bad. But probably yes, at least the not 3 main ones, we can read “an apple” and similar things here and there (when it’s not women dieting desperately with 4-5 mini cakes a day to show off they eat so well, I saw such things).

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #93

It depends on the degree of insulin sensitivity. Anyone with a lot of insulin resistance is going to have all sorts of metabolic trouble. But even the people with less-damaged metabolisms, and who “use the fat just fine,” are not using that fat during the period when insulin is elevated. A serum insulin greater than 25 μU/mL inhibits fatty-acid metabolism and promotes glucose metabolism. As more cells stop responding so well to insulin, it takes more an more insulin to clear the same amount from the blood stream, so the insulin response to carbohydrate is greater and lasts longer.

This insulin effect serves two purposes: (a) it clears damaging amounts of glucose from the blood (hyperglycaemia can be fatal); and (b) it allows a bear, say, to fatten up for the winter. In the autumn, an animal that wants to hibernate later needs to put on fat and stay hungry while eating a lot more food than normal. After the autumn fattening period, insulin drops, and the animal starts using the massive fat store to feed itself while hibernating.

I doubt our ancestors needed to hibernate on the plains of Africa, but this mechanism had advantages for populations that moved to colder climates. But these days, when autumnal berries and fruits are available to us year-round, this mechanism is a problem, rather than a solution. In the case of the bear preparing to hibernate, the insulin resistance is temporary. In our case, however, it worsens over time, until we develop Type II diabetes, obesity, gout, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer, high cholesterol, and all sorts of other interesting conditions.

#94

While my question relates to this quote, it isn’t a direct response but it is something I’ve wondered about.

I’ve heard that a person with diabetes has destroyed many of the insulin producing cells. If this is true, then as we improve our metabolic functioning do some of those cells increase or do we just use what we have left more efficiently? Or is it a matter of reduced demand?

#95

I know that. They use it later, no problem. Just like I surely don’t use up all the fat I eat at a carni OMAD meal right away, it must be stored temporarily. It’s fine. Main thing it can get used when there is a need for it.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #96

It depends on what you mean.

Type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease, in which the β-cells in the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas are destroyed by the immune system. There is often a “honeymoon” period from the onset of symptoms to the destruction of the last β-cell, where the pancreas continues to secrete a certain amount of insulin. This honeymoon can be prolonged, but it appears that it inevitably ends at some point. At that point, the patient is utterly dependent on exogenous insulin.

Type II diabetes is a disease of resistance to insulin, resulting in hyperinsulinaemia. If Type II is left untreated, eventually the β-cells wear out and stop secreting insulin. From that point on, the disease has effectively become Type I, but it is the very end stage, and can be entirely avoided by relieving the β-cells of stress by cutting carbohydrate intake. As has been demonstrated in many patients now, it is entirely possible to reverse Type II diabetes simply by eating the proper diet.

Treatment with insulin relieves some of the burden on the pancreas, but it adds to the damage already caused by excessive insulin secretion. And at best it can only delay the progression of the disease, not completely halt it.

And to answer your other question, I believe that as long as there are some functioning β-cells left in the pancreas of a Type II diabetic, they can regenerate, at least to some degree.

(Rebecca ) #97

This is pretty much my belief, also.

(B Creighton) #98

I wish that was all that is going on. It is worse really. The gubbermint subsidizes all kinds of foods, and those industries don’t want their subsidies to go away. Their lobbyists show up out of the woodwork if anything threatens the status quo. When Obama tried to change the school lunch program, here came the lobbyists, out of the woodwork to prevent schools from eliminating soda and junk food from school lunches. With Keto it is the sugar industry which is still subsidized, the “vegetable” oil industry, and the other junk food industries who all feel threatened. Even with all the new scientific evidence supporting a ketogenic diet, the gubbermint still recommends eating packaged foods drowning in PUFAs. Any attempt to change that will be met with stiff resistance due to the threat to the seed oil industry and the large multinational food giants.

(BuckRimfire) #99

And their ugly, even-less-nutritious modern equivalents: Dr. Pepper and every other HFCS-containing product, which is to say practically every processed food product.

(BuckRimfire) #100

I wonder what percentage of their (or the median) original insulin secretion capacity someone’s pancreas needs to retain to successfully follow a very-low-carb diet without any medication? I would imagine it’s a pretty small number, maybe as low as 10%, but that’s a WAG.