You also need to change the crappy ingredients in the foods today. Eating "healthy" foods is great but no one can avoid it 100%. All the chemicals and bad oils in foods isn't helping.
In the 1970's what we consider "bad" foods today were totally different!
As a Registered Dietitian who graduated in 1988, I educated clients in the eat 6 small meals/d mantra. It breaks my heart knowing I was part of that. I still hear eat less, move more!😳🙄 I still see posters in hospitals telling us not to eat red meat. Slowly, very slowly things are changing, but it's so hard to educate clients out of that mindset that has been around for 50+ years.
A news program recommends 3 meals a day plus snacks to “keep your energy up” which strikes me as incompetent. I watch it at times if there is a storm on the horizon.
I applaud the search for a root cause to the obesity epidemic. Unless I missed it, I don't see a true root cause in your article. As you correctly state, in essence, Wonderbread, Twinkies, Campbell's Soup, and McDonalds were all around in the 70s and as you say, our population wasn't fat then. All of the financial incentives were true then as now... So, what then is the root cause, since these ultraprocessed foods were available then? Not sure the root cause is that we now eat more of them even though they were available then. Why now has the obesity epidemic happened?
The rise in diabetes and metabolic disorders has been blamed on food which is indeed a factor.
However a bigger factor is toxicity of certain metals like aluminum and lead which displace the useful metals, causing reduction in chemical processes of the body.
The aluminum from quackzines are the primary reason why there's so much damage to the pancreas and liver.
Also consider that many of us grew up being poisoned by vaporized lead through leaded gasoline....
It's still about calories though isn't it? It's just that some foods have downstream effects that make you eat more calories and others do not. In a word, eating correctly satiates you while eating incorrectly triggers more hunger and thus more calories. The key seems to be to focus on satiating foods and explains why natural food based keto and Mediterranean diets seems to work for many people.
This makes so much sense if we consider the dictates of capitalism to spur over-consumption. Yes the nature of ultraprocessed food to be palatable, non-nutritive and therefore non satiating is part of it—producing the drive for “more.” But some people are more susceptible to that than others. And so , in order to really drive up consumption as much as possible, the doctrine of frequent eating events (snacking) was key. The more frequent the food intake, the more chances there will be for overeating. So a perfect storm not only for weight gain and disease, but for $$$ for food corporations. Nothing you haven’t written before, Dr Fung, but now that I’m reading Blake Lindsay’s book the Permanent Problem about the disconnect, even contradiction between economic plenty and actual flourishing, it seems so much more pertinent. The social implications are relevant too—people eat alone, whenever they want, out of a bag or a box, and not together with their families. You should connect with him.
All this is good, but I don't really like the money/sad emojis for pharma/docs/food. In this field, they're indeed wrong, and absolutely they have incentives for the wrong thing, but they were not responsible for assembling those incentives - theoretically reliable doctors/researchers, scientists and regulators (and customers!) have required/demanded they to adhere to the (as you say, incorrect) beliefs about nutrition/metabolism.
They didn't set the rules, they're just playing the game the only way they can (in many cases legally!): by offering things that customers (and in a lot of cases, the "customer" is CMS) actually truly want. And indeed, in many other areas, where the "what the customer wants" incentives are more accurate, they do wonderful, massively beneficial things.
This is not to defend these people/groups, but rather to try to prevent the adoption of the general heuristic of "they are malicious, and if it makes these groups money, it must be bad and wrong" which can lead to bad outcomes (for patients) in areas where the incentives and understanding of mechanisms is accurate.
Your attached video is the most succinct explanation I’ve seen of the importance of eating in a low glycemic way (to keep insulin low). Thank you for teaching why foods that raise insulin are more fattening, despite calorie count being the same🧡
You also need to change the crappy ingredients in the foods today. Eating "healthy" foods is great but no one can avoid it 100%. All the chemicals and bad oils in foods isn't helping.
In the 1970's what we consider "bad" foods today were totally different!
As a Registered Dietitian who graduated in 1988, I educated clients in the eat 6 small meals/d mantra. It breaks my heart knowing I was part of that. I still hear eat less, move more!😳🙄 I still see posters in hospitals telling us not to eat red meat. Slowly, very slowly things are changing, but it's so hard to educate clients out of that mindset that has been around for 50+ years.
A news program recommends 3 meals a day plus snacks to “keep your energy up” which strikes me as incompetent. I watch it at times if there is a storm on the horizon.
I applaud the search for a root cause to the obesity epidemic. Unless I missed it, I don't see a true root cause in your article. As you correctly state, in essence, Wonderbread, Twinkies, Campbell's Soup, and McDonalds were all around in the 70s and as you say, our population wasn't fat then. All of the financial incentives were true then as now... So, what then is the root cause, since these ultraprocessed foods were available then? Not sure the root cause is that we now eat more of them even though they were available then. Why now has the obesity epidemic happened?
The rise in diabetes and metabolic disorders has been blamed on food which is indeed a factor.
However a bigger factor is toxicity of certain metals like aluminum and lead which displace the useful metals, causing reduction in chemical processes of the body.
The aluminum from quackzines are the primary reason why there's so much damage to the pancreas and liver.
Also consider that many of us grew up being poisoned by vaporized lead through leaded gasoline....
https://robc137.substack.com/p/violence-down-since-they-banned-lead
@Clarayeo
It's still about calories though isn't it? It's just that some foods have downstream effects that make you eat more calories and others do not. In a word, eating correctly satiates you while eating incorrectly triggers more hunger and thus more calories. The key seems to be to focus on satiating foods and explains why natural food based keto and Mediterranean diets seems to work for many people.
This makes so much sense if we consider the dictates of capitalism to spur over-consumption. Yes the nature of ultraprocessed food to be palatable, non-nutritive and therefore non satiating is part of it—producing the drive for “more.” But some people are more susceptible to that than others. And so , in order to really drive up consumption as much as possible, the doctrine of frequent eating events (snacking) was key. The more frequent the food intake, the more chances there will be for overeating. So a perfect storm not only for weight gain and disease, but for $$$ for food corporations. Nothing you haven’t written before, Dr Fung, but now that I’m reading Blake Lindsay’s book the Permanent Problem about the disconnect, even contradiction between economic plenty and actual flourishing, it seems so much more pertinent. The social implications are relevant too—people eat alone, whenever they want, out of a bag or a box, and not together with their families. You should connect with him.
All this is good, but I don't really like the money/sad emojis for pharma/docs/food. In this field, they're indeed wrong, and absolutely they have incentives for the wrong thing, but they were not responsible for assembling those incentives - theoretically reliable doctors/researchers, scientists and regulators (and customers!) have required/demanded they to adhere to the (as you say, incorrect) beliefs about nutrition/metabolism.
They didn't set the rules, they're just playing the game the only way they can (in many cases legally!): by offering things that customers (and in a lot of cases, the "customer" is CMS) actually truly want. And indeed, in many other areas, where the "what the customer wants" incentives are more accurate, they do wonderful, massively beneficial things.
This is not to defend these people/groups, but rather to try to prevent the adoption of the general heuristic of "they are malicious, and if it makes these groups money, it must be bad and wrong" which can lead to bad outcomes (for patients) in areas where the incentives and understanding of mechanisms is accurate.
Your attached video is the most succinct explanation I’ve seen of the importance of eating in a low glycemic way (to keep insulin low). Thank you for teaching why foods that raise insulin are more fattening, despite calorie count being the same🧡
I believe a number of factors
1-Explosion of 7/11 and promotion of snacking in the media.
2- ultra processed food with engineered bliss point, by the tobacco scientists when tobacco was found out to be addictive and poison.
3- seed oils and high fructose corn syrup which overrides the normal satiety signal from real food.
Dr Fung please replace that thumbnail.
The whole mouth open thing is beneath you and kinda repulsive.
Looking forward to the new book.