Re: Bekele & Big Macs

On 2006-09-01, Mark Hutchinson <marhutch@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Or eat of hunk of white bread, or a dollop of white rice, or a
plate of pasta made from processed flour, etc. - all that good
stuff promoted so earnestly for so long.

Pasta and bread have been around for a long time.

No, it's indirect at best.

It's only indirect in the sense that it makes you eat more often.

So it's indirect. More importantly, it only has an effect if it *really*
does make you eat more often. And to do that, it needs to have the effect
on insulin levels that you claim it does. A calorie is a calorie
regardless of who eats it. But impact on insulin varies depending on a
number of parameters. So it is NOT a given that taking carbs will cause
this insulin roller coaster ride. But it is a given that too many calories
will make you fat.

So for example, would you say that it's harder to overconsume
heavy cream than, for example, apples or spinach ?

I would. Or perhaps eating an apple and the same amount of bacon?
Definitely.

Overconsume would mean same amount in terms of calories. And I'd have
to disagree with you.

Furthermore, after eating the apple I'd probably be
hungry again in a couple of hours.

I'd disagree again.

If you substitute fats and proteins for carbs, you will not be
able to eat as much.

I don't think that's true, unless you're talking about *grains*
as opposed to *carbs*.

I think it's true from personal experience. And there's research
out there that supports that.

Then go ahead and cite some of it.

Published research, please. Or at least something that cites published
research.

Also has the drawback that high protein foods are more expensive.

Aha! But we have not been discussing the cost of food rich in fat
and protein. But you're right - it IS more expensive.

Well, guess who has the biggest problem with weight? Hint: poor
people are the fattest socio-economic group in America. Hmmm....
let's see... cheap carbs... poor people fat... is there a clue in
there somewhere?

It's a clue that you really want to infer causality, even though you
have no basis for doing so. They don't just get cheap carbs. They consume
large amounts of cheap, fatty meat as well.

If you take in protein that ultimately ends up getting converted
into glycogen, that's an awfully expensive (and probably not very
healthy) way to get carbs in your diet.

That's a ridiculous statement. You don't eat protein to "get
carbs in your diet". You would eat carbs to get carbs in your
diet. Perhaps you meant something else?

Here's a question for you: if you stop eating carbs, you still need
glycogen. How does the glycogen you use get replenished if you are on
a very low carb diet ?

The trick is to determine how you get people to limit the
intake. The way you *not* do that is by encouraging them to
limit the intake of fat calories. Why?

Sure. You encourage them to lay off the junk food instead.

Define junk food.

I could provide a definition but it wouldn't be the same one that the
average person uses.

But they don't need a precise definition of junk food to avoid soda and
McDonalds food.

The Kenyans and Ethiopians follow a diet not unlike the USDA food
pyramid. It doesn't make them fat. But then, they don't consume
high fructose corn syrup.

But they don't consume much of anything, do they? Comparing the

The distance runners obviously consume quite a lot of *something* to
maintain a caloric balance. Not everyone in Kenya and Ethiopia is
starving. Even the people with access to grains aren't getting fat.

The USDA food pyramid is medieval nonsense, but note that it
doesn't recommend consumption of large amounts of high fructose
corn syrup. If people really did follow the USDA food pyramid,
sugar consumption would have dropped.

The point is (once more) that when you discourage the use of fats
in a diet, you, by default, encourage the use of carbs. And
unfortunately most people will not be able to distinguish between
the better, complex carbs and the simpler ones.

I don't buy that. Most people understand the difference between grains
and sugar.

An example is a box of cookies. If it's grandiously labeled as
"Fat Free", the average person will believe that's it's OK to eat
that.

According to the USDA, sugar goes on top of the pyramid. Even if it's
fat free.

It's "Fat Free"... the USDA says to avoid fats... so it's
gotta be good for you.

No, if they're eating a lot of cookies, they are not even following the
most naive interpretation of the USDA prescriptions.

And presto, 65% of the population is
overweight. See how misleading that recommendation can be?

I see how misleading your argument is.

Right. Now give my your hypothesis that accounts for the obesity
phenomenon.

I've already argued that it's impossible to prove any hypothesis. Why
present a hypothesis unless it can be falsified or validated with an experiment?
At best, we can speculate. I've already told you what my speculation is.

Atkins and co like to peddle this idea because a government conspiracy
is emotionally appealing. It appeals to a sort of populist mob mentality.
"It's not your fault you're fat! They LIED to you!". So they try really
hard to prove their theory (which is unprovable, but that doesn't stop
them trying really hard anyway)

What about the absolute amount, the number of grams of fat ? Did
that go down also ? Or did it go up ?

I don't know, perhaps you can look it up and contribute it to
this debate.

You will get different numbers depending on the source.

In terms of percentages, we went from about 40
percent of calories in fat and 45 percent carbohydrates to 34
percent fat and that much more carbohydrates.

According to one source who was arguing the case for Atkins.

Nutrition labels, even casual attention to popular media is
enough to enable one to make "healthy"/"unhealthy" distinctions
with reasonable level of accuracy.

I don't believe that's true. Most people don't even read
nutrition labels. Even if they did, the information is too
complex for the average person. As I pointed out earlier, even

I think people are smarter than you give them credit for.

Where is high fructose corn syrup on the USDA food pyramid ?

What's this fixation with HFCS?

HFCS is the simple carb that people actually consume. That article
of yours certainly mentions HFCS in a number of places. There's a
reason it comes up a lot. It is a low grade sweetener that is used
in processed food.

There are other simple carbs beside HFCS on the pyramid.

Yes, grains that have been around forever.

That wasn't the question. A Big Mac is the whole package,
including the bun. I asked if they would know the glycemic
difference between a beef hamburger patty and a french-fry. But I
already know the answer, as do you - they wouldn't know.

They don't need to know it.

And they would be wrong. There should be no nutritional
difference between a beef patty cooked at home and one cooked at
BK.
And there should no nutritional difference between two slices
of wheat bread at home and two slices of a wheat bun at BK. Or do
you see a difference?

The patty cooked at home is probably made from better quality meat. And
the wheat bread is probably nowhere near as high GI as the sugar-bun that
they typically put the burgers in.


You might consider getting some of your money back. ;-)
[snip]
You're welcome. But next time, make that web search more targeted
rather than random. ;-)

Seriously, cut it out. You've read a few web articles. They are not even
literature surverys that cite research publications. That doesn't make
you some kind of expert, so quit posturing already. I have read plenty on
this (though I wouldn't claim to be an expert either).

There are people who are considerably more knowledgeable than both of us, who
disagree on this topic. Questions like "what caused the obesity epidemic" are
very hard to answer for reasons I've already given.

Actually, that's not true. Vast majority of people do lose weight
on low-carb, kind of magically.

This is simply not correct. There is not at this stage any known weight loss
program that produces good long term outcomes in the vast majority of cases.

Almost any program produces good short term results. Getting people to stay
on almost any program is hard.

If the Atkins program was as miraculous as you think it is, it would have
already solved the obesity epidemic. People have known about it for a long
time. Every wannabe dieter has heard of it. If long term studies showed that
80% of people who started the diet lost weight and kept it off for 5 years, all
the annabe dieters would hear great things about it, then they would go on the
diet, and achieve miraculous results.

[snip]
Of course if you're running the sort of mileage that both of us
run, you will be pretty damn lean unless you try really hard to
avoid it.

You know, I thought so too, but from personal experience and from
the experience of other good runners I have talked to, we all
still have to watch every damned thing we eat.

Not Bekele (-;

Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/
.

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