Why the Campaign to Stop America's Obesity Crisis Keeps Failing

the daily beast ^ | May 7, 2012 | Gary Taubes

[re_tail20]

Most of my favorite factoids about obesity are historical ones, and they don’t make it into the new, four-part HBO documentary on the subject, The Weight of the Nation. Absent, for instance, is the fact that the very first childhood-obesity clinic in the United States was founded in the late 1930s at Columbia University by a young German physician, Hilde Bruch. As Bruch later told it, her inspiration was simple: she arrived in New York in 1934 and was “startled” by the number of fat kids she saw—“really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.”

What makes Bruch’s story relevant to the obesity problem today is that this was New York in the worst year of the Great Depression, an era of bread lines and soup kitchens, when 6 in 10 Americans were living in poverty. The conventional wisdom these days—promoted by government, obesity researchers, physicians, and probably your personal trainer as well—is that we get fat because we have too much to eat and not enough reasons to be physically active. But then why were the PC- and Big Mac–-deprived Depression-era kids fat? How can we blame the obesity epidemic on gluttony and sloth if we easily find epidemics of obesity throughout the past century in populations that barely had food to survive and had to work hard to earn it?

These seem like obvious questions to ask, but you won’t get the answers from the anti-obesity establishment, which this month has come together to unfold a major anti-fat effort, including The Weight of the Nation, which begins airing May 14 and “a nationwide community-based outreach campaign.” The project was created by a coalition among HBO and three key public-health institutions: the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, and two federal agencies...

[driftdiver]

Yep, and your immediate response was to throw out personal insults.

go eat a gob of fat

[lawdave]

Seriously, thanks for the input. I am doing the TKD twice a week. I have incorporated the “Couch to 5K” program into my routine also. I need to up my cardio endurance. I am planning on testing for my black belt in about 1 1/2 years and at 51(age now) I am really huffing and puffing. To go through that test I need to be in really good shape. I would like to add some weight training, but finding the time is difficult.Up to now “weight training” has consisted of lugging my fat $#s to the fridge.

[ladyrustic]

You need a chill pill, dude.

[Bigg Red]

So his diet is basically meat, eggs, green leafy vegetables and no grains or sugars? No fruit? No dairy?

[lawdave]

According to him, fruits are very high in sugars because they have been hydridized to increase sweetness. So he limits them. Dairy has a sugar called Lactose. So he limits that as well.

[reformedliberal]

Most of the older Amish ladies are overweight. Once the men retire, they are, as well. They have many of the very same health problems everyone else does, including heart disease. They also shop in Walmart and eat loads of sugar and white flour. At a summer lunch table, we were served plain iceberg lettuce as a salad.

We live amongst them and they are also some of my husband’s
massage clients.

[Theoria]

Thanks for the info. I don’t live near a community like that and my perception of them of course is distorted thru the media and other venues. My idea of some austere lifestyle with sprinkles of luddism is clearly wrong.

[wideawake]

I find jumping rope and fartlek training to be extremely effective for cardio. Doesn't take much time, doesn't require much space.

Also bodyweight exercises (pushups, pullups, muscleups, dips, pistols) are just as good as weight training (unless you're very advanced and need to lift more than you weigh to advance) and require less equipment.

[Bigg Red]

Okay. Thanks.

[trailhkr1]

I live among the Amish as well-well I did when I was growing up. Was a "yodertoter" for several summers. Oh the funny stories I can tell.

Anyway, yes, the older Amish women are fat but also the younger women in their 30's and 40's are starting to be as well. I've noticed Amish women tend to have large, fat, flabby arms...even more so than the "English" ...must be genetic.

The younger men still are in fairly good hwp but have noticed them getting some gut's as well.

[trailhkr1]

I find jumping rope and fartlek training to be extremely effective for cardio. Doesn't take much time, doesn't require much space. Also bodyweight exercises (pushups, pullups, muscleups, dips, pistols) are just as good as weight training (unless you're very advanced and need to lift more than you weigh to advance) and require less equipment.

Yes, great info... also HIT training(High Intensity Training) for 20 minutes burns more calories than a hour of regular cardio but make sure your heart can handle it.

[trailhkr1]

Thanks for the info. I don’t live near a community like that and my perception of them of course is distorted thru the media and other venues. My idea of some austere lifestyle with sprinkles of luddism is clearly wrong.

Something else about the Amish..they are just like you and I. There are honest ones and dishonest ones, some who are great craftsman and some whose work just plain sucks and I would not have them build me a doghouse.

In our area that was some sexual abuse with young Amish kids 5-6 years back that was hushed up for a while but got so bad (repeat offenders) even the elders finally called in the police and hauled off the perps. There is physical domestic violence abuse you also don't normally hear about as well. The Elders/Church tries to take care of this stuff in house so you don't hear about it. The perps either change their ways, get shunned or they move to a different Amish community in another state.

All in all great people though.

[reformedliberal]

Yodertoter!! LOL! Driving the Amish is a retirement job, out here. Never heard that word!!

[trailhkr1]

Yodertoter!! LOL! Driving the Amish is a retirement job, out here. Never heard that word!!

I did it in HS and college. Mostly construction crews.

[mo]

See the “Pure Food and Drug Act”- 1906....

Grants the USDA the power to regulate the food industry as well as the CONTENT of the American Diet.

[reformedliberal]

Well, no cars, but some really spiffy buggies. Propane refrigerators. Flush toilets with holding tanks instead of septics. The tanks need pumping, of course. The businesses can have phones and faxes, but no computers. They ship UPS because UPS will give them a dedicated unit that doesn’t need to go online.

It isn’t Luddism, IMO. The car thing is about staying in touch with family, although they travel a lot by bus or train and one couple we know rented an RV and hired an English driver to go on vacation to a Amish resort in Sarasota. No phones, but one farmer will have one in a booth in a field. I have heard stories of Amish men w/cell phones in the sales barns. No vacuum cleaners, but they love Swiffers.

They complain of digestive problems and most of the women will admit their diet is low in fruits and vegetables, which I do not see them buying when I see them in the store, although they will buy canned ones.

They have their own mail order catalogs and are really big consumers of herbal and *patent* medications.

I’d say they are legalistic and if they can find a way around an Elder’s injunction, they will. Most of their machinery runs on diesel and uses belts and pulleys instead of electricity.

I gather it all varies by community and depends on individual Bishops. Our local Amish are Old Order, aka:Barefoot Amish, but that is only the kids and younger women, from what I see and they are barefoot Memorial Day to Labor Day, regardless of temperature.

[trailhkr1]

Yes, the Amish are a ingenious lot to get around the rules don't they? Lot of strange stuff though as you mentioned.

My Dad had some work done on his house last year and the Amish crew had every modern air/electric power tool known to man. Funny thing though..they would not plug into the electric wall outlets in the house-not allowed in their particular faith but had no problem plugging in the gas powered generator they brought with them running out in the yard.

Funny story. I hauled 12-14 of them to a construction trade show which had many "booth babes" ..scantily clad women who was giving away signed posters of themselves in a bikini etc representing a particular tool or construction item,..i.e Ridgid Tool.

All the younger guys grabbed up these posters and as we were nearing their homes they folded them up and was hiding them in their bags so their parents would not see them. It was their version of internet porn..lol.

I would see stuff like this all the time.

[reformedliberal]

Absolutely could not agree with you more.

We had sexual abuse here, as well. While I never saw physical bruises on my Amish clients, there was a young girl, very pretty, who had just stopped talking. There was not a thing wrong with her that the docs could find and we found no soft tissue issues that would affect her larynx. I always had suspicions, though.

Lots of stories from the 60s by the then-younger English men: being paid to impregnate Amish women though a hole in a sheet with the men standing guard so there was no other contact, was the most bizarre. This was their way of avoiding birth defects because they are so interrelated. Men who are now Elders were known drunks and more than few were known to have smoked pot. There are still young girls who have not yet joined the church who meet young English guys at the local restaurant, where they go into the restrooms and change into regular clothing. Rumspringa, I suppose.

The women have a hard life. It is common to see someone barely 28 with 5 kids. Like anyone else, they love pretty things and will admire my antique glass collection. Their own homes are plain, but the more affluent ones are very elegant, with antique furniture and lovely rag rags, all kept spotless.

Somehow, they have become enshrined in people’s minds as these saints, when, as you said, they are just people and some are great, while others are not.

[caveat emptor]

Here's an interesting (and long) review of Taubes' Why We Get Fat, by Yoni Freedhoff at Weighty Matters.



It's rare that I've had the occasion to read a book whose premises I agree with (that we eat way too many carbs, that they in turn impact on our weights, and that weight-wise exercise isn't much to write home about), but whose arguments make me cringe. Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat met that billing.

Let me start out by stating that I'm quite low-carb friendly and that I readily agree that science has proven that saturated fat has been wrongly demonized by the medical establishment for decades, including somewhat by me when I co-wrote my book in 2006/7 (a guy's allowed to learn, and it was in this spirit that I approached reading Taubes' book). Furthermore, I also agree that carbohydrates, more specifically the refined highly processed ones, contribute dramatically to both obesity and chronic disease and their reduction may well have a role to play in most folks' weight management efforts, and that a myopic view of dietary fat as causal to chronic disease and obesity has likely in and of itself, by means of a consequent dietary shift to carbohydrates, contributed dramatically to the rise in the societal prevalence of chronic disease and obesity.

All that said, I found Why We Get Fat to be an extremely difficult read. Not because the writing wasn't engaging. On the contrary, Taubes is an excellent writer. I found the book difficult to read because for reasons I can't understand, Taubes seems to have decided to abandon journalistic and scientific integrity in place of observational data, straw men and logical fallacy.

Taubes' manifesto is straight forward. Carbohydrates make us fat and they do so independently of the first law of thermodynamics. Forget about calories, you can eat as many or as few of those as you'd like, ultimately weight is purely about carbohydrates.

Continue reading... BUMP

[Cloverfarm]

Amish ...

If you have ever been behind an Amish mom at the grocery, as I have, you would know how much junk food they enjoy. And sweets of all sorts.

But, it’s true, they are a little more active than some of us.