17 thoughts on “A Fatally Flawed Paradigm”

  1. Too much carb/sugar. Like Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” we have a capitalist consumption complex that is pushing us to consume crap food., crap products, crap debt. The propaganda tools have been turned on people, to turn them into consumption batteries.

    Fast. Get out of debt. Smash your TV.

    The porn industry tactics has been mobilised into ALL consumer industries. Porn for our stomaches, if you like. Hiding behind a global “freemarket” imperialism. Taking the ticket takers down with it, world wide. Faustian spooky. Just my opinion though.

    Fat doctors are a crack up. Physician, heal thyself. Till then, stick your vaccine.

  2. I don’t cook and use a microwave. I bought a Zojirushi 3-Cup “Fuzzy Logic” Rice Cooker and watched my food bills implode. Brown rice, some chickpeas, lentils, and et Voila! I have a casserole dish full or rice medley that can be used to make other simple dishes — just remove from refrigerator and nuke in the microwave.

    No more frozen entrees and fast food meals… Lowered salt intake, cut out high-fructose corn sugar… and way cheaper. What’s not to like?

  3. I feel like there is still something missing. People have eaten carbs for a long time and yet we can look at pictures from the past, and while there were always fat people, people looked a lot slimmer in the not so distant past. Perhaps there is something(s) we use in food production that works with carbs to cause increased fat or that triggers the body to react this way to carbs?

    1. That’s a good insight, and a good question. We’ve been going through my late Mom’s house for several days, and have seen a great (great!) many photographs of family dating back to the late 1800s. My maternal grandparents were born into extreme wealth, and even during the Great Depression were bon vivants, dining with the rich and powerful of Chicago, a class to which they belonged. They remained slender their entire lives. Now, part of it was that they were physically very active. My grandfather was a nature photographer in a class that would be National Geographic today, and they went on safari to the Mata Grosso (my grandmother was the first woman to have killed a leopard with a bow and arrow), and they maintained horse ranches in Minnesota and Arizona. My Mom was slender up until the 1970s, when everyone suddenly ballooned. This despite the fact that she maintained her own horse ranch, and ate like a bird.

      For my own part, I know that First Law considerations do in fact work for weight reduction. In the late 1990s, I had some health problems which all seemed to be related to high blood pressure. My doctor told me that the one thing I had to do was lose weight.

      So I changed my diet to 50% protein, 50% carbs, and almost no fat. Moreover, I lowered my intake to 900 calories a day, walked at least five miles a day, didn’t ingest anything after 6:00 pm except for 1 gallon of ice water. Oh, and no alcohol.

      I lost 75 pounds in three months. It came off so fast that I was encouraged to keep up the regimen. However, many of my friends and colleagues were alarmed, thinking that I had cancer. At the end, I never felt better in my life, but people uniformly said I was too thin (I was still above my “ideal” weight, according to doctors).

      So First Law dieting worked for me. The question, based on your insight, is: did my diet exclude something that is causing everyone else to gain weight? Something we haven’t yet identified. It’s a good question.

      1. Sounds like you might have done intermittent fasting. A lot of IF people recommend it to combat insulin resistance.

        1. No, I never fasted, just reduced my intake drastically. It took three or four days to get used to, but in that time I lost two pounds. And that was the first impetus to keep me going.

    2. It is a puzzle. My well functioning gut bacteria biome got wrecked after having to take a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics (deep puncture wound). The replacement “off the shelf” gut bacteria just never worked as efficiently as my “inner friends” and I started gaining weight at that point on the same diet.

      Still, losing weight is always a workable plan.

        1. After decades of eating the same foods I feel that evolution gave me the ‘Right Stuff” in my gut. Starting over with a random selection of bacteria… not so much.

  4. One thing that I think would be worth emphasizing here is that we only consume part of the energy that we eat. Merely eating less means that the human body can compensate for eating less calories by extracting more calories from what is eaten – that compensation looks like it results in mental and physical distress for the person. As a result, it is a tough control problem.

    That certainly isn’t reflected in the “just eat less” model.

      1. It gives your fingers a tequila sunrise look with the fade from nacho cheese orange to nicotine yellow. Bugles go better with smokes

  5. Your article sounds good, but at the end of things, for nearly all people, eating less and exercising more leads to a weight reduction.
    Period.

  6. The prevailing theory is food eaten (calories in) is balanced out by either 1) Exercise or 2) Weight gain.

    There’s a third place calories in can go: 3) flushed away. I don’t think fecal matter is chemically inert and contains zero energy.

  7. I’m interested in what you all think of the discussion on “A Chemical Hunger”, which discusses why the obesity epidemic is so puzzling (our forebears typically ate worse diets than we do, the epidemic’s start was very abrupt, even lab animals and wild animals are getting obese, there is a weird anticorrelation with altitude, and many others) and why existing theories are inadequate.

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