Re: Bekele & Big Macs

Donovan Rebbechi said...
On 2006-09-01, Mark Hutchinson <marhutch@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Pasta and bread have been around for a long time.

As I have painstakingly taken the time the time to chronicle,
grain products have only been available since the advent of
agriculture - starting roughly 10,000 years ago, in the fertile
crescent of Mesopotamia, and spreading over the next several
thousand years over the rest of the world.

But that was the whole-grain variety of products. The refined
variety did not become available until a few hundred years ago.
These time spans are too short to be credibly explained by the
possibility of an evolutionary adaptation.

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.

The notion that carbs cause insulin swings is generally accepted.
The notion that insulin swings cause hunger cycles is generally
accepted. Please present credible evidence that carbs do not have
the effect on insulin production and subsequent hunger cycles as
outlined above.

A calorie is a calorie regardless of who eats it.

That's very profound, but it has never been a point of
contentions. What has been contended is that the source of that
calorie will have a differential impact on the human metabolism.

Namely, that a calorie consumed in the form of a carb will cause
insulin to swing more rapidly than a calorie consumed in the form
of a fat. If you have information showing otherwise, please share
it.

But impact on insulin varies depending on a number of parameters.

Which ones?

So it is NOT a given that taking carbs will cause this insulin
roller coaster ride.

If you have information showing that the ingestion of carbs does
not cause increased production of insulin, please share it.

But it is a given that too many calories will make you fat.

Again, this is not the point being argued. The point being argued
is that insulin swings will cause the normal human being to
consume more calories. If you have information showing that this
is not so, please share it.

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

Overconsume would mean same amount in terms of calories.

Aah, but now you are rewriting the rules. :-) How would anyone
know how many calories they have consumed? I don't have a
built-in calorie counter, do you?

Generally, people will eat until they feel sated. I proposed that
eating fatty foods will make most people feel sated more quickly
than eating low-fat foods that are rich in carbs. Do you have
information that shows otherwise?

And I'd have to disagree with you.

OK, that's fair. :-)

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

I'd disagree again.

You don't say why, but OK, if you need to simply disagree for
some bizarre reason, I can accept that.

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.

Any study of the low-carb diet shows that fewer total calories get
consumed without reporting any significant hunger sensations.
Why do you think that is? Clearly, eating lower-carb, higher-fat
food somehow results in the satiation point being reached more
quickly than when eating higher-carb, lower-fat foods. That's
simply indisputable.

And that's the whole secret, or magic, of the lower carb approach.
You simply *will* have a lower total caloric intake if you
restrict carbs and substitute fats. And if you take in fewer
calories, the laws of thermodynamics will dictate that you lose
weight. Or do you see it differently?

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.

They do? What kind of cheap, fatty meat do they consume? Please
share the stats on the composition of cheap meat consumed by poor
people and the proportion of cheap carbs in their diet.

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 ?

From fats and proteins - I knew that, and so did you.

But here's a question for you: knowing that, why did you make that
ridiculous statement? I only highlighted it because it
demonstrates the shallowness of your knowledge and thinking. No
serious student of nutrition would ever state that one would eat
protein to "get carbs in your diet". That's just way too sloppy.

Define junk food.

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

I see. So you really don't have a definition. I understand. It
*seems* like a very simple question until you try to answer it.
:-)

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

Oh, so now "they don't need a precise definition". Well, aren't
we elitist. >:-|

We know what junk food is, but we aren't willing to share that
information with the unwashed masses. They simply need to
innately know to avoid McDonald's food, right?

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.

When I first read it, I simply refused to believe that your
statement "Kenyans and Ethiopians follow a diet..." could possibly
pertain only to Kenyan and Ethiopian runners and not to the
populations at large. Because clearly the discussion has been
about populations at large, not some tiny privileged subgroups.
It's actually astonishing that you would be making that kind of a
reference now, because logically it makes no sense whatsoever. Do
you understand how ridiculous that reference is?

Not everyone in Kenya and Ethiopia is starving. Even the people
with access to grains aren't getting fat.

Holy sweet baby Jesus! You keep insisting on comparing the
availability of foods in the US and Ethiopia. That borders on
insanity!

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.

How do you know that?

Sure, most people can tell the difference between bread and sugar,
but do they understand the difference in how the body handles
refined sugar and refined grain products?

And what's more important, do *you* know if there is fundamental
difference?

If you are a student of nutrition as you claim, you know that
there isn't a fundamental difference. In fact, some simple, as
well as complex, carbs get converted by the body even more quickly
than plain table sugar. In general, starchy foods like refined
grain products and potatoes have a high GI - some are up to 50%
higher than table sugar.

For instance, in our example, white wheat bread has a GI of 70 and
a GL of 9.4. Plain table sugar has a GI of 58 and a GL of 5.8.

So eating table sugar will be less "bad" for your insulin cycle
than eating white bread. Now try explaining that to the average
person. Those types of nutritional nuances create an
extraordinarily complicated message which is very difficult to
understand and follow by the public.

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

Yes, it does now. But where has it been for the last 25 years?
At the very bottom, right there along with grains, breads, cereal,
rice, and pasta.

You see, most people will not be able to classify a cookie as
belonging to the top of the pyramid (the 'sweets' apex), but are
more likely to think it belongs to the bottom part. A cookie has
grains in it, right? So it has to be good for you. Especially
if the package says "Fat Free". And grains have been at the
bottom of the pyramid.

Yes, some of that may be self-deception, but the original food
pyramid classifications allowed and even encouraged that type of
thinking.

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.

Which has been what? Avoid fats and eat carbs? That's exactly
what they have been doing. See above.

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

I see how misleading your argument is.

How is my argument misleading?

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.

Please repeat it then. And remember, until you define what junk
food is, you can't use it in your speculation.

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)

I see. So when we are faced with an epidemic of obesity and
someone comes along with a logically plausible explanation, we
must dismiss it because it is emotionally appealing?

And we must also decline to offer an alternative explanation
because it just might be "unprovable"?

So, in effect, we must do nothing -- lest we appeal to the
"populist mob mentality"?

An excellent prescription for inaction, paralysis and enduring
failure.

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.

All right -- so you don't know either :-).

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.

Then please quote another source with a different set of figures.

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.

It's not a matter of me giving anyone credit. This statistic was
actually recently reported. The majority of women and most men do
NOT read labels. I'm sure you can dig up the report if you don't
believe me.

There are other simple carbs beside HFCS on the pyramid.

Yes, grains that have been around forever.

No, they haven't.

As I have painstakingly taken the time the time to chronicle,
grain products have only been available since the advent of
agriculture - starting roughly 10,000 years ago, in the fertile
crescent of Mesopotamia, and spreading over the next several
thousand years over the rest of the world.

But that was the whole-grain variety of products. The refined
variety did not become available until a few hundred years ago.
These time spans are too short to be credibly explained by the
possibility of an evolutionary adaptation.

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.

WOW! So now "they don't need to know it"? What an incredibly
arrogant statement! So in your view the public at large should
be kept ignorant with regard to the glycemic properties of food?

With an attitude like that, I am grateful you are not at some
institution of higher learning where you could do some real
damage. ;-)

The patty cooked at home is probably made from better quality
meat.

What does that mean? How is ground beef purchased at the
supermarket better quality than Burger King's? Does BK get its
meat from roadkill or something? Please present data illustrating
the difference between ground beef purchased at the food market
and beef used in BK's burgers.

And the wheat bread is probably nowhere near as high GI as the
sugar-bun that they typically put the burgers in.

So you think there's a glycemic difference between white wheat
bread at home and the wheat bun they typically put the burgers in?
Please support that statement with some facts.

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.

Cut what out? Challenging you surprisingly ignorant views? Isn't
that what Usenet is all about? You seem to have a shallow grasp
of the subject and attempt to hide it by throwing out flip,
meaningless arguments. In the past I have given you credit for
intellectual honesty, but unfortunately in this debate you are
exhibiting very little of it.

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.

Just exactly how am I posturing? I am having a fucking debate on
the Usenet about the abstract idea of a public nutritional policy.
That's "posturing"?

I have read plenty on this (though I wouldn't claim to be an
expert either).

Never, ever claim that you know anything because you "have read
plenty on this". On Usenet you are only as good as your last
post. Nobody gives a *** what you look like, what your
educational background is, how successful you have been in the
stock market, or what you have read.

If you are truly a student of this topic, you have failed to
demonstrate your knowledge in these postings. You present
nothing new or convincing in your arguments, other than that you
disagree with my views. How does that help anyone formulate their
own judgement?

You refer to having "read books" on the subject as if that would
give you some superior knowledge over information available on
the web. The problem with books is that they typically represent
a one-sided view (the author's) on any given subject. In a
dynamically evolving area like human nutrition, they can be out of
date by the time they are published.

The web, on the other hand, presents you with a rich variety of
opposing views, ideas, and latest research. If you are truly
interested, I would again encourage you to dig around on this
subject on the web and see if the books you have read in the past
still contain valid information.

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.

Of course they are hard to answer. But as long as someone
presents me a logically plausible explanation, I will tend to
believe it unless someone else shows me a comparably plausible
counter-argument.

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.

Actually, the low-carb approach has been proven over and over
again to be an extremely effective approach to controlling weight.
I really don't understand this zealous opposition to something
that really works.

Does the notion of not going hungry while losing weight somehow
offend your sense of puritanical self-righteousness?

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.

This debate has had nothing to do with the Atkins diet as such.
This debate has been about the effects of the increased
consumption of carbs and its effect on the obesity epidemic.

The Atkins diet is only mentioned in the context of demonstrating
how the government's dietary recommendations have over the last 25
years caused an epidemic rise in obesity. The Atkins diet per se
is simply used as a counterpoint to those misguided governmental
recommendations.

As the article notes, the idea that carbs cause weight gain has
been known for over 150 years (Brillat-Savarin's work). Atkins
invented nothing new, he simply appropriated and marketed a
well-known dietary phenomenon.

I myself became familiar with the low-carb approach long before
Atkins made it popular. In the old days, it was known as the
Air-Force diet. I had tried it back then simply out of
intellectual curiosity. It just seemed too counter-intuitive to
work. But I was astonished how effective it was.

What's fascinating about this whole thing is that people tend to
regard this debate as a political and religious match, rather than
a scientific one. You are either 'for' or 'against' -- and don't
bring up any facts that may fail to fit the pre-conceived notions.


Just look at this particular debate -- I suggested a well-written
article by an unbiased journalist (unbiased in the sense that he
doesn't benefit from either side of this) and you take the time to
engage in all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to "disprove" this
hypothesis -- without a solid foundation in facts. Why is that?
What is it about this issue that makes a theory, presented so
logically, such a threat to anyone?

The low-carb approach to a diet produces weight loss - that's
simply indisputable. Why fight this notion so desperately?

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 (-;

See, you have missed the entire point of this debate. There's
nothing wrong with Bekele getting that burger. You may consider
the burger as "junk food", but that's not necessarily so. The
only "junk" part is the refined flour bun. The rest of it -- the
meat, the fat, the mayo, the lettuce and tomato, etc., are all OK.

You can find plenty of non-junk food in a fast-food place. And
you can find lots of junk food in a supermarket. The trick is
knowing the difference.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

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