Re: Low-fat or low-carb?

Trinkwasser <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 18 Apr 2010 05:36:12 -0700 (PDT), Bob
<anothascreename@xxxxxxx> wrote:

The latest trend is to connect genes to lifestyle counselling,
determining what type of diet or exercise is best. That's what the
maker of the new diet test hopes to do.

Believe it or not I tend to agree!

Ron Krauss and other reputable researchers have found marked
differences in lipid metabolism, for example.

I've seen papers where individual subjects are graphed, not just the
averages, and you will often see a trend, but with some individuals
completely out of line with the rest.

Current numbers suggest that 30% of the population *will* become Type
2 (leading to the need to avoid diagnosing and adequately treating
them purely for financial reasons, and totally ignoring the fact that
changing dietary recommendations may significantly reduce that number
back to what it used to be)

National medical politics. Look at how difficult it was to change the
criteria for clinical obesity. And in that case there was no
scientific controversy. It was just that as populations got fatter,
the population averages etc. that are used in epidemiological studies
got bigger, clothing sizes drifted up, and so on. So although everyone
realised that people (in the rich nations) were getting fatter, there
was a natural generosity in the usual statistics which was playing
down the size of the problem.

But when the world scientific community tried to correct the weight
norms and the obesity criteria they met huge opposition from
politicians worried about how people would react and worried about the
economic implications for national health policies. They had to
compromise and revise the criteria only part of the way down to
scientifically justifiable criteria.

Even so, there were outraged howls of protest, especially in the US,
when the population and media woke up to discover that overnight the
number of obese people had jumped dramatically upwards. Of course in
fact nobody had got any fatter, All that had changed was a somewhat
subjective and arbitrary threshold marker in a long gradient.

Gerald Reaven himself stated that up to 70% of the population may be
carbohydrate intolerant. Hmmm, isn't obesity and overweight heading up
to around 70%?

And all the politicians whose reputations depend in some part on
national health statistics are going to do their best to make sure
that the bad news is delayed until someone else in office.

The corollary of course is that 30% will (probably) not become
overweight and 60% will (probably) not become Type 2. So looking at
the differences is important in making generalised dietary
recommendations.

Fortunately we also have the very profitable genomics industry making
it much cheaper and easier to make such distinctions, and lobbying for
national medical policy to make more use of their services. Big
medical money isn't all conspiring to maximise the profits of the
current big players.

There are still considerable geographical differences in the UK wrt
blood groups and disease incidence which relate to whether the
original invaders/settlers were Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French
etc. significantly differing gene pools after all this time

It's amazing how well these differences are preserved, especially
along the coasts where local populations tend to be more stable.

The researchers also tested themselves.

"It confirmed my suspicion," Nelson said of her result. "When I eat a
lot of carbohydrates, I tend to put on weight."

Do we really need a gene test to tell us that?

It seems we really do need gene tests to make the case that some
people really do put on weight while trying to starve themselves
thinner, while others can't get any fatter if they try. There's a huge
amount of misery based on the misconception that what makes fat people
fat are the moral failings of greed and sloth. What's worse is there's
a profitable industry feeding on that misery without reducing the
weight of anything but fat people's wallets.

--
Chris Malcolm
.

Relevant Pages

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