mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Two news items about the interplay of genetics and weight

Link: Genes May Determine Obesity After Weight Surgery

Link: Genes May Be to Blame for Picky Eaters.

So if genetics plays a role in post-bariatric surgery weight, wouldn't it also play a role in weight before surgery as well? And if genetics influences picky eating, wouldn't it also influence the opposite of such eating patterns too? In other words, if one is wondering why the hell weight management can be such a struggle, the answer may well be that one is attempting to change behaviors that are at least partly hardwired into ones genes. Not that one should just roll over and give up the struggle. But I for one feel it helps me to have an accurate assessment of what it is I'm up against.

Are fears of a fat planet overblown? - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Are fears of a fat planet overblown? - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

Here we go, a compendium of all the issues various skeptics have raised concerning the so-called "obesity epidemic." The first page of the article mainly covers various contrarian opinions and studies, including the infamous "obesity paradox" in which researchers grudgingly admit that fat people actually survive some conditions better than thin people. But it's the second page where things really get down and dirty--where the article starts following the money to see who stands to profit from the war on obesity--and who might even be feuling the war to benefit their own bottom lines:

"Experts on both sides of the obesity debate have often criticized WHO's overweight and obesity measures, saying they are too low. When WHO defined the body mass index scores constituting normal, overweight and obese, they appeared to be the result of an independent expert committee convened by WHO. Yet the 1997 Geneva consultation was held jointly with the International Obesity Task Force, an advocacy group whose self-described mission is "to inform the world about the urgency of the (obesity) problem." According to the task force's most recent available annual report, more than 70 percent of their funding came from Abbott Laboratories and F. Hoffman La-Roche, companies which make top-selling anti-fat pills."

Obviously, there are indeed health benefits to taking off a reasonable amount of weight in a reasonable way--I'm proof of that. But the so-called War on Obesity, as far as I can see, is not about reasonable (let alone inexpensive) approaches to the problem. It's about scare tactics, knee-jerk rejection of data that doesn't fit the official party line, and big profits for the medical, pharmaceutical, and diet industries.

Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

Even though the whole philosophy of disease-ifying weight continues to bug me, I confess to being intrugued by this kind of research. As I had already started to surmise as just a Scientific American level layperson, this research demonstrates that the body's genetic regulatory systems are not just a simple set of on/off switches, but an incredibly complex system rife with multiple feedback loops, redundancies, and ohter complexities. So when you're talking about the impact of high levels of body fat on overall health, it's only to be expected that there are numerous different command-and-control gene networks involved in mediating that impact. Which would suggest  why most current medical solutions for obseity, which typically tend to intervene at just one point in what turns out to be a complex cascade of biochemical events, tend to backfire in all the ways that they do--it's like pulling just one pickup stick out of a whole pile and not anticipating that the rest of the pile won't shift around or even come tumbling down.

As I read between the lines of this article, I also note more evidence for the fact that adipose tissue is not just an inert "container" for body fat, but living tissue like any other bodily tissue, with its own unique genetically-supervised functions, including feedback loops that influence other tissues of the body.

I've also learned, from long experience of reading these kinds of articles in mass media, that things can often get oversimplified. So I went and looked up the abstracts of the original scientific research papers on which this article is based. At least to judge from the abstracts, the NBC article seems to be more-or-less on track--though unfortunately one can't see the full texts without shelling out bucks. But if you want to check out the abstracts, you can go here and here.

Sigh--the diet pundits have re-discovered carbs

Link: Why carbs are the new diet craze - Health - MSNBC.com.

Oh, I just love it when the diet industry pundits suddenly "discover" a nutrient that's been there all along. But apparently, at least according to this Wikipedia article, resistant starch is a legitimate nutritional entity, a category of starch distinct from both soluble and insoluble fiber, which plays its own role in keeping one's system regular and one's appetite sated. Interestingly, I've always enjoyed my bananas on the green side, and don't mind eating cold leftover potatoes as a snack, never dreaming that these foods are apparently rich in this so-called resistant starch. Who knew? I guess my bod had been intuitively zeroing in on this type of starch all on its own, without the pundits to guide me.

Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com

Link: Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com.

I confess I had been getting increasingly irked at the strain of innuendo among certain health pundits to the effect of "those awful inconsiderate fat people, costing the rest of us so much in inflated insurance and medical costs because of their unhealthy lifestyles." But, as one person is quoted in this article, this study “throws a bucket of cold water” onto that whole line of fear-mongering: statistically, thin healthy people actually cost the system more over their lifetimes than fat people.

Of course I don't want heavier people given short shrift in any way when seeking real, useful medical help for their health issues. But, again as the article says, I'd like to see that help offered for the right reasons--not because of some blame-the-victim mythology about how many healthcare dollars society erroneously believes fat people are "wasting".

But I also think the article doesn't go quite far enough. I'm willing to speculate that the cost differences uncovered by this study may well have been known all along by the health care industry. Hell, those insurance companies do their managed-care cost savings analyses on every little thing these days; so I find it hard to believe that it's escaped their attention that long-lived healthy people generate more revenue for them than obese people.

I can't help thinking: if I were a Machiavellian health-care bean-counter, aware that fat people aren't costing the system/bringing in as much revenue as thin people, how would I suggest the company take advantage of that disparity? Would I recommend to my bosses that "curing" fat people be less of a priority because they don't earn the company as much (which is how they used to treat us)? Or perhaps that the company participate in this new-fangled War on Obesity, diseasifying fat and coming up with costly new "treatments" so that it contributes more to their bottom line (which is this brave new world of super-expensive bariatric surgeries and medically-supervised fasts)?

Thnk that's overly cynical? Well, considering such health-insurance practices as taking claims for major--and expensive--health care crises as a cue to find any flimsy excuse to cancel the claimant's policy so the comapny doesn't have to pay up, thus dooming the claimant to medical and/or financial disaster, I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to imagine other egregious ethics violations on the part of this industry. There's just been too many examples of the bottom line trumping patient needs to leave me anything other than cynical.

Genes that beat cold blamed for obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Genes that beat cold blamed for obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

I have long joked about my physical build being the result of evolutionary impacts on my Eastern European Jewish ancestors--my people self-selected, so I quip, for the genetic traits of being squat and low-slung, all the better to avoid being blown off the Russian steppes by the wintry winds while digging potatoes out of the frozen ground.

Now obviously evolutionary selection doesn't work over quite that short a timeframe (i.e. mere centuries), but it always seemed plausible to me that it was indeed influencing our species shape over the long-term--and here is a report of a study implying exactly that.

Nevermind that the story misses the full implications of this point by still referring to obesity as a "disease"--nope, folks, your own study is implying that obesity is simply another evolutionary adaptation, like the massive amounts of fat carried by polar bears to survive in their native habitat. The fact that our environment has changed such that our evolutionary adaptations are now backfiring on us does make it a health problem, but disease-ifying a natural variation in human physiognomy is not helping the heads of people trying to cope with that variation one bit.

(In fact, it smacks of similar language I've seen used by certain plastic surgeons, who define small breast size in women as a "disease" for which breast augmentation surgery is the "cure".)

Holiday weight-gain fears often exaggerated - Nutrition Notes- msnbc.com

Link: Holiday weight-gain fears often exaggerated - Nutrition Notes- msnbc.com.

The main point of this article, as reflected by the headline, is intriguing enough. But I found the point in the second paragraph even more compelling: "Although our annual holiday gains may be small, many people fail to lose the additional weight from year to year." (Emphasis added.) The article details a research study in which "more than half of the study participants’ annual weight gain was put on during the six-week holiday season."

So the problem is not so much whatever weight you might put on through the annual holiday noshing, but simply going back to one's usual eating patterns--which will continue to hold your weight steady without doing anything to take off the holiday weight. Do that enough years in a row, and all those little gains will eventually add up.

In other words, once again we see that overweight is not a problem that just suddenly appears overnight, but is a long slow almost impercepably gradual process of accumulation. Which is one of many reasons why, when addressing the overweight problem, a long slow gradual process of weight loss through long-term behavior change works much better than crash-dieting.

ScienceDaily: Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets

Link: ScienceDaily: Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets.

Wow. This is fascinating stuff on a number of different levels--not the least of which is journalistic manipulation. In other words: don't let the sensationalistic headline distract you from the fact, right in the second paragraph of the article, that even though the low-meat diet edged out the vegetarian diet on efficient resource use, both the vegetarian and low meat diets offered huge resource savings over the typical American high-meat high-dairy diet.

By the way, the secret of the seemingly paradoxical finding about low-meat diets being ecologically a hair more efficient than all-vegetarian diets is that grazing animals like cattle and goats can eat off of land too low in quality to grow plant food for human consumption. It's all there in the article.

But also note the cute little zinger statistic right at the end:

"According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005. 'In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day,' Peters said."

Wow. I'm eating eight to ten ounces of protein a day, most of which is usually meat. And here I thought I was being so ahead of that curve. And while I have no stats to back it up, I have trouble believing that low average is exclusively due to ethical by-choice vegetarianism. I suspect there's a lot of people too poor to afford a lot of meat behind that little stat. Hmmmm ...

MedlinePlus: FDA warns Hain over stevia use, calls herb unsafe

Link: MedlinePlus: FDA warns Hain over stevia use, calls herb unsafe.

Okay, this pisses me off. The FDA is harshing on Hain, a longtime natural foods manufacturer, about the use of stevia--even though it's been used safely in other countries for ages and the studies questioning its safety have long been exposeds as bullshit--and meanwhile Coca-Cola and Cargill are planning to market the stuff with nary a peep from the FDA in their direction. Now tell me, in how many ways is this whole situation full of crap? As if we needed any more proof that the FDA is in the pocket of big business ... grrr.

AP: Nutrition education ineffective - USATODAY.com

Link: AP: Nutrition education ineffective - USATODAY.com.

Hmmmm ... why do I have the distinct feeling that a bunch of these nutrition education programs have a lot in common with similar government programs designed to deal with drug use ("Just Say No!") and sexual activity/teen pregnancy (abstinence only)? In other words, lots of nice friendly helpful information that totally misses the real point, not even addressing the deep-seated psychological, behavioral, familial, socioeconomic, and media/cultural issues behind the problem?

Particularly when dealing with weight, my experience is that without engaging the behavior-modification component, only a very few of these students will ever actualize all that nutritional education. As I've said before, the mighty Lizard Brain doesn't give a good goddamn about your fancy book-learnin' -- it just wants to chow down, and attempting to reason with it will only get your head bitten off as a snack. You have to treat your Lizard Brain the way the Dog Whisperer on TV trains dogs--he doesn't reason with them, he cuts to the chase by assuming the alpha dog role and initiating behavior modification.

Whether the gummint has the skills, will, wisdom, and sensitivity to create a program that does what the Dog Whisperer does, without screwing it up royally and turning it into something genuinely harmful, is a whole other issue. Frankly, especially given the current Neanderthal political regime, I don't even want them to try. Way too scary a 1984 scenario.

So I guess I'm saying I'd rather see this administration waste taxpayer money on an ineffective program, than waste a few orders of magnitude more taxpayer money coming up with a frightening and dangerous program. Sad, huh?