Palyne

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a closet sociologist of sorts. One of the things I’ve read and studied (informally) a lot in my life is that of group psychology, from family systems to other group dynamics. This naturally ties into ‘cult psychology’, because really, that is just human nature.

Every group has a ‘group-think’ or it wouldn’t be cohesive enough to call it a group. It’s only the “degree” of group-think, and some of the other conditions present, that start gradually moving a group toward ‘cultism’.

The definition of a cult is rather severe with several points, and I won’t bore you with it. Unless we find God in Protein, and/or convince ourselves we were the only ones on the planet with the only answer to salvation or survival, no eating plan membership could qualify fully as a cult by formal definition.

Some can darn sure do the hokey pokey that direction though.

***

There are a few things I should talk about up front, that I think predispose some people to being more vulnerable to ‘influence by environment’.

First, I think most of us have noticed, on lowcarb forums, that the strength of independence varies a great deal in the participants. There are people who would walk off a cliff with wide eyes if someone who sounded convincing enough led them that way, vs. people who can be given 60,000 bytes of text with research references and still won’t buy it if they didn’t experience it themselves. Most people are somewhere in between. But it is clear that by personality profile, some people are just a lot more susceptible to the danger of misinformation from others. Some of this may depend less on the personality than the era in their life. Eras of trauma, exhaustion or emotion can make almost anyone think in a simplified manner that appreciates greatly simple packages of clear info or steps we can follow and a leader.

Next, I think that some of us who are readers, forget that not everybody is. We are perfectly happy to gradually wade through books with information on nutrition and the body, read journals and/or blogs and more, and so when someone approaches us selling bridges, we can usually debate them under the table with two fingers on the keyboard and our eyes closed. But not everybody is a reader, so, many people are far more unaware of basics than we can imagine. It isn’t that they are stupid. We think from seeing the same info that the conclusions are obvious, but in reality, we are using tons of minor ‘passive data’ sitting in our brains to help us, and they don’t have that resource. Most of the time, they ‘could’ have it — they have often read the same threads we did that had the information — but because they are not readers, their comprehension and/or retention skills may be low. Not to mention that some people are unused to the quantity of data on the internet, and it pretty much overwhelms them.

I also think that people who are critical thinkers, often fail to account for the fact that many people are not. Again, this is not any sort of diss about people who are not. Everybody has their own kind of intelligence. Some of the most wise and beautiful souls I have ever known were totally non-intellectual. It doesn’t matter. But this particular trait goes a long way toward the first thing I mentioned: when one is not in the mode for critical thinking, even if that’s because they are just so filled with despair at a situation or hope for a solution or whatever, once the critical element shuts down, they are the Cliffwalkers of Carbism, just waiting for some bozo to assure them that living on a celery stalk a day is really good for you, and off the cliff they go.

***

Critical Thinking

The irony of this is that it involves my father, who is one of the more intelligent people I know. But for some reason, some people just have subjects they don’t “think” very hard about, and others they do I guess.

One day I went over to my father and stepmother’s house. They had been watching a 20/20 episode, and they were hot to tell me the latest dirt on my low-carb eating plan. “Low carb diets can be really dangerous!” they told me. “They are high protein and too much protein can be bad for you! It can give you kidney stones!”

They looked at me as if expecting a kidney to burst in me any moment now.

“I see,” I said. “Can you tell me: 1. How much protein do low carb diets recommend for a given body weight? and 2. How much protein was found to be dangerous for that given body weight?”

They had no idea. Of course. The show didn’t tell them that.

So for all they know, it could be 320g of protein before a 150lb woman was shown as harmed in research, and the LC plans may recommend 90g for that weight, so the whole ‘lowcarb/ high protein diets can be bad for you!” can be a hysteria that is not even applicable because LC would never have suggested that to begin with.

They were sorry they brought it up.

Damn right. Heh.

But many people watching that show, just like people reading lowcarb forum boards, might have come away with exactly what 20/20 wanted them to: the spoon-fed sound-byte that “lowcarb highprotein diets are dangerous ’cause “too much protein” can give you kidney stones.” The problem was not their absorption or retention of information. In fact, both separate factoids — that lowcarb diets tend to be high protein (I would say ‘adequate’), and that ‘too much protein can give you kidney stones’ — are true enough.

It’s simply that they don’t connect to each other, because lowcarb plans such as Atkins or Protein Power don’t recommend a quantity of protein that would be dangerous. 20/20 deliberately ‘made’ them fit together, glossing over that chasm in the middle so viewers didn’t have any reason to think of it — unless they were thinking critically. Which most people don’t do a lot of while watching TV. Especially if they don’t know anything about the subject. Lots of people in low-carb-land, especially those fairly new to it, or who have never read much about it, don’t have any idea what questions to ask.

Their concept of how lowcarb works is basically “magic math.” Carbs below 30 = weight loss occurs.

Food Lists

I have a close friend who IM’d me not long ago and told me she was on a cabbage diet. Seriously. This woman is extremely intelligent (despite holding a degree in Dumb Blonde Behavior, which is even more impressive since she’s asian). I couldn’t believe it. After days of eating nothing but boiled cabbage, she wasn’t feeling very well.

Gee I wonder why.

When I mentioned lowcarb, she began asking about it. But much as I tried to cover minimal basics in an IM box, replete with pleas to read the book and visit an LC forum, she kept trying to twist it into something else: the 10 Commandments of Food.
“So I can eat mangoes right? Those are low carb.”
No, not remotely.
“I thought they were. But it’s a fruit, you don’t mean fruit is bad for you?”
You’re missing the point. It’s about carbohydrates. Here’s an amazon.com link to a great book of nutrition counts.
“So what can I eat?”

For her, it was never going to be about counting carbs or protein grams, not without my providing a one-click brain download. (She’s pretty psychic. That could happen.) For her, any ‘diet’ is a food list.

I think that’s why eating plans that present it like, “Eat a palm-sized piece of meat, poultry or seafood” do well on the market. People can understand that. It is much less complicated than “4 oz of protein” or worse, “around 20g of protein at each of four meals.” Given the trouble people have with this simple math, I sometimes wonder how most people balance their checkbooks, but then I remember that I manage my money by how much my online account shows is still sitting there, which means I have zero room to talk.

***

Let us say that you join a lowcarb forum, and you meet lots of new people. Many of them are very nice, and some of them you think are smart or witty, and a few of them you feel like might be soul-friends you just didn’t meet till now. You share an eating plan and you talk about your food details and your daily efforts, and eventually everything else in your life like your kids and husband and pets and life events and late-night neurosis nobody else will talk to you about. You bond with several of them and you have a lot of fun seeing what’s in their life and talking to them, and you all get ‘excited together’ about what you’re doing on your eating plan because sure, that’s part of why congregating brings inspiration.

***

I’ve watched highly intelligent people, working on understanding their bodies, over-absorb all kinds of advice. Someone says it works for them, and they’re willing to try it. They’re high fat, they’re low fat, they’re coconut oil magic, they’re soy, they’re against soy, you name it.

Now much of this is normal. We have to work on how our bodies react to different foods. Most of us had no idea until we began an eating plan and started paying attention. Many of us had spent our whole lives eating foods we were actually intolerant to. Who knows what better weight we’d have had if we knew sooner!

But there is a fine line that separates “willing to try advice” and “willing to try advice that is unhealthy.”

The problem is, a lot of people don’t have enough knowledge of how the body functions to make intelligent evaluation of when advice is good or bad.

Most the time, trying a new thing or avoiding a certain thing is not going to hurt anybody, even if it’s not perfect for that individual. It’s all experiment. It’s all a work in progress.

***

Sometimes, a strong influence comes along. Someone who is very communicative, opinionated and even insistent, who goes out of their way to help others and walk them through the plan. That’s a good thing, yes? It’s great when people make the effort to help others. It’s damn time consuming. It’s a genuine gift of self.

When someone who claims phenomenal success at their weight loss and health efforts makes an effort to walk others through the process, it doesn’t just make a helper; it makes a hero.

When that hero becomes a philosophical and practical leader by example, it doesn’t just make a teacher; it makes a guru.

***

In the lowcarb world, the gurus have invariably been medical professionals. Richard Atkins was a cardiologist. Drs. Mary Dan and Michael Eades are endocrinology specialists (I think). The “Dr.” in front of the name of most anybody who is a proponent of ANY eating plan (even the most horrifying sorts) is the norm.

When someone shows up in a forum and you find out they lost 60 lbs (and that’s not counting a big gain in muscle) and they look utterly fabulous (such as the divine Amory), it’s easy to get a little starry-eyed about them. I know most of you are like me: you look at all the before and after photos and can’t get enough of it; it’s like visual inspiration, testimony to we-could-do-it-too-ness, a relief to have confirmation it’s possible. We all want that kind of success.

Thanks to the internet, now people who have no actual health credentials can become experts, based mostly on experience for their expertise.

But what if they just claim experience? This is the internet. What if it’s all a lie? Kimkins is a perfect example. Multiple counts of outright fraud but it just goes on and people buy it.

Or what if it’s true, but some obscure thing that worked for Jane, has the worst possible effect on you? Jane isn’t a doctor and isn’t using research to back her; she just rightfully talked about what worked for her. But your body isn’t her body and there’s no telling what will be the same and what won’t when it comes down to the details. I’ve spent years watching people on the same eating plan, working their butts off on it, have completely different results. Bodies are individual.

And then there’s the social pressure. In some forums or areas, it’s very hip to like vegetables, while in others, only meat-meat-meat is truly cool. People can be influenced in their eating just by the “popular fashion” on discussion boards.

But no matter what someone else does, it’s all about what works for you. In the end, it comes down to experiment. Try it for a little while. Evaluate the results. Probably no extreme is good for the long term, but who knows. Variety seems to be one of the things the body was designed to expect, so change it up now and then. Avoid the traps of group-think that are present even in the best places. No matter how smart the group is, your body is an individual. Let it be heard above the crowds.

We’re pretty much culturally indoctrinated to think that all weight problems relate to too-much-food intake. That the real exercise needed for weight-loss is “push-aways”. So it seems like a no-brainer that if you want to be thinner, you eat less.

This concept is so ingrained in most of us that even when we KNOW, intellectually, that we need to eat calories ‘near’ our basal metabolic rate in order to prevent our metabolism slowing down, it is often difficult to do.

Even though we may KNOW that for our body (this is my case) we need to eat regularly throughout the day, the more often the better, still, STILL!!, it is difficult to do it. At least for me. I’m working on that.

So, from late May to earliest June, I actually ate food. Not perfectly, no, forgot my supplements, should have had more water, failed the eat-every-3-hours test, but in general, every day I ate around 3 times. I was just restarting lowcarb eating. My calories should have been higher but they weren’t terribly low.

I recovered from my months of high carb eating, and lost 24 lbs the first week, which is merely water/glycol of course, not fat. When I dropped the carbs, my body dropped the water it holds to process them.

From early June to the end of June, my eating sucked. There were a few days that I ate a few times and made it to nearly 2000 calories, but by few I mean… maybe three days out of that month. Most the time, I forgot to eat… I might get a couple slimfasts down a day… I just wasn’t getting nearly enough calories. The new ketosis had killed my appetite, plus I’m lazy for cooking, and I have some issue with not-eating as a control thing I think (working on it!), so suffice to say, my calories were way too low and my eating frequency was too.

In the whole of June, my weight varied all over the map of 10 lbs up or down, as if my body couldn’t decide what to do, and refused to go much under that. Usually when my eating fails like that, I don’t vary so much, I just don’t lose anything at all. Period. By the end of June, I had lost: 1 pound. Yep. Four weeks, 1 pound. For someone who allegedly has a BMR of nearly 4000 calories a day, and was only eating <1000 for nearly a month, that is not quite simple math.

Late on July 1 I decided to get with the program and really start eating more regularly. It still was imperfect, my calories still low, but I made more of an effort to eat more often and/or to eat more food each day. The next day I began that time of month, so my weight went up 10 lbs which is normal for that. I kept on working on eating more regularly. Even if that meant having a couple tablespoons of peanut butter, I tried to eat SOMETHING every few hours.

As of today, five days later after I began eating halfway decently again, my weight ‘whooshed’ down fifteen pounds — finally for the first time breaking that seeming roadblock range. The only difference is that I finally started eating more calories, and more often.

I have seen this repeatedly over my several cycles of lowcarbing. If I don’t eat enough, I don’t lose weight, even though my BMR is ridiculous. When I make a POINT to eat many times through the day, and at least a couple thousand calories, the weight begins coming off.

Since this contradicts the idea that if we just eat fewer and fewer calories we’ll get skinnier in no time, I thought I’d make a point to post about it.

***

Click on the pic for Pink’s Video. It’s a spoof of modern females in the media and the body obsession.

I’m excited for my progress again. Finally!!

Why IS it that some people are fat and others are not?

Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, said:

…if you think about it in general terms, you can explain differences in weight in the population based on three possibilities.

…one possibility would be that the obese lack will power; this is a point of view favored by lean people, I generally find.

The second possibility that people consider is that we live in a toxic environment and that it’s the environment’s fault.

And then the third possibility is that there are biological drives that lead us to eat what we eat, and ultimately weigh what we weigh, in the same way as some of us are tall and some of us are short, others of us are destined to be heavy and others lean.

…I think most moderate scientists believe that of course that all three can be relevant, but that biology has really an underappreciated role in accounting for difference in weight, and we know a lot about the system now and so I think there’s a powerful set of data that supports that point of view.

{Ira Flatow: So when people are fat and they’re overweight, there is a major genetic factor here. It’s not as simple as saying “I have no will power” or “I tried the diet, doesn’t work.” There could be real hard wiring that’s the problem.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: …some of the most powerful evidence that this is a biological problem and not a “behavioral one” (in quotation marks) is genetics. And so there are a number of ways to assess the genetic contributions to a trait. It turns out if you look for obesity it is probably the second most heritable trait, second only to height, with which it is quite close. Based on estimates that can be done by analyzing twins, 80 percent of the variability in weight can be accounted for by genetic factors.

Good grief! 80%? That’s…. huge. So much for the just ‘eat less exercise more!’ solves-all-fat line.

Friedman points out that the belief in leanness is a modern thing, and implies that the expectation that everyone should be thin is itself nonsense:

…Historically, being obese was the desirable body habit as so. If you go to museums… all the rich people in Egypt would pay extra money to have extra chins put onto their sculpture. Rubenesque figures were the vogue in the 1700s. Renoir’s characters were all heavy. In aboriginal societies the chieftains were all quite obese. For reasons that — you all have as good an idea about as I do I guess –- things changed here about what our views of what was attractive in the 60s and it set up an idealized view of what people should weigh and who they should be that just isn’t matched by our genetic endowment.

…The problem is not that small amounts of weight that improve health can’t be achievable; I think it can be. The problem is that’s not what most obese people want or the public wants. The public wants to be normal weight. And so I would much prefer to see that the dialogue and the issue center on improved health and achievable goals rather than setting up some societal construct that says everybody has to be perfectly wonderfully thin, a wish that really runs counter to almost everything science has to tell us about this problem.

I think people should make their best efforts but recognize, but not be prejudicial about the fact, that for many people most of the things you do aren’t going to work. And so my argument is not “we shouldn’t think about the problem, we shouldn’t address it.” The issue has to do with “what are we going to do about it.” And so I would argue what we shouldn’t do is fall back on simple nostrums like “eat less, exercise more.”

And here he talks a little more about the weird social stigma that obesity has, and how illogical it is from a medical science perspective:

I think that to the extent that increased weight has health consequences, people should do their best. It certainly is a good thing to be fit. And it is a good thing to eat a heart healthy diet. And it’s probably a good thing to make one’s best efforts to keep one’s weight under control. So that means not doing much different than what Hippocrates would have recommended. But I think at the same time we have to recognize that those measures are rather limited in their efficacy and that to make the leap therefore that people who are not successful at keeping their weight off are at fault is just wrong headed. And there are all kinds of attributes about each of us that might draw the next person to draw a conclusion about them. But to draw conclusions about obese people, I think, is unenlightened to say the least about what their personal characteristics are.

(Ira Flatow: So to stigmatize them is sort of making fun of the situation that they don’t have much control over.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: I think that’s right and the ironic thing is that I think the more of an outlier one is for weight, the more obese, the more difficult it would be to actually normalize weight. And so if anyone should be stigmatized it would be someone like me who could easily lose 10 lbs. and doesn’t. I think for the people who are really significantly overweight, it’s just who they are — to a very, very large extent.

… It’d be much better to forget about the stigma and assume people weigh what they weigh, and then encourage people to do what they can to improve their health.

Back to Genetics, he said:

…So when you see a very obese person walking down the street there’s a very, very significant possibility that that individual just has a genetic alteration that makes them so.

(Ira Flatow: So all those years when you saw a very obese person and they said, “I have a glandular problem,” they were telling the truth in a certain sense genetically speaking.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well I think so. They just didn’t know which gland.

Then he got into some interesting stuff about how the functioning of a morbidly obese body is in many cases simply working differently than others. He used gastric bypass patients for this example.

(Question from the audience 1: When someone has a surgical intervention such that a massively obese person of, let’s say, 400 lbs. or 500 lbs. removes part of his colon and attains a weight more normal to his size, for his height. Does that rewire the person or does that then remold itself into the norm and the body strives to achieve the larger weight yet again?)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: …there’s another feature of this surgery that people, I think, ignore, and it’s this: when you do this procedure you limit the intake of a person to about 700 calories a day. Just so you know, none of you could consume 700 calories a day for very long; it is a very small number of calories. Despite that fact, these people still end up being clinically obese at the other end of the procedure. They lose a lot of weight but they would still on average be definable as significantly obese on average after the procedure.

Now think about it, they’re eating 700 calories a day and they’re still obese. I mean if that doesn’t say that there’s something metabolically different about the obese than the lean, I don’t know what does.

Geez. Me neither.

I can tell people, “I have tracked 3-4 weeks, repeatedly, of my food intake, and my BMR is allegedly like 4000 calories a day minimum, and I’m eating usually <1200 calories a day IF that, AND lowcarb… and not losing weight.” And plenty of them think I’m lying. I’ve actually had people suggest that if only I’d keep a food diary like they do in weight watchers (note: I *do*, or how could I be ‘tracking’ it??) that surely I would see all kinds of calories I didn’t know about. As if 3,000 calories is easy to hide, for someone who has to work hard just to successfully eat 1000-1200 calories a day! My biggest problem is getting my butt into the kitchen to eat anything at all. So it’s not like I’m grazing through fields all day and might ‘forget’ that ‘Oh yeah, I ate 3 pizzas or something while grazing through the lettuce greens!’, sheesh!

A reference was given me once of a Dr. Phil (I think) episode, where he tells this woman claiming the same thing that she defies the laws of nature, and then “discovers” from her husband that she is drinking thousands of calories a day in soda that she “didn’t think counted.” What a setup. She’s an idiot, yes, but I felt the producers worked hard to find some way to invalidate that and maintain the calorie-myth … tabloid journalism, essentially.

It’s basically insulting. I mean, I’ve had people argue what they are sure about on-paper. They heard it, or read it. Or, they are a fairly normal metabolism bodybuilder who gained weight from sheer overeating after leaving high school sports or something, and hence when they quit overeating and started working out again, it fell off. It is just not the same.

They think it’s a mathematical impossibility. I wish someone would find a way to communicate to the metabolic system how bad it is at math. I’m getting weary of people who would not doubt my intelligence or integrity on any other issue, acting like they’re sure I must be lying or deluding myself about what I eat, because they just can’t understand the calorie-math and why pounds aren’t dropping off me at the speed of light.

The more quantity of food and more often I eat, as long as it isn’t excessively of course, the more I lose weight. It’s hard to do, after my whole adult life of eating once daily in the evening.

If they’re consuming 700 calories every day they’re going to be expending more than that. And so what you would find, you would expect to see is as long as they’re that imbalanced they’re going to keep losing and losing and losing and losing. That’s not what happens in these people; they plateau and they stop losing weight at what is definable as a significantly obese level. Now, if I had that procedure you probably wouldn’t see me in profile anymore because I would just get so thin. That’s not what happens to these people and it appears that in the face of reduced intake the body shuts down caloric expenditure and they can’t lose any more weight.

But it’s all about the ‘basal metabolic rate’ right? How much exercise you get? He pops the balloon of what I call The Calorie Lie: the belief that to maintain obesity once must eat huge quantities of calories.

This is what sets me off most about conversation with people who seem to assume that every day I proactively DO SOMETHING to STAY fat. Sheesh!

Now this next part is pretty depressing, if eye-opening. This actually goes back to what Jonny Bowden was saying about how they used to measure the detail ‘calories burned’ by exercise, and it varied radically by person and was way outside what was ‘assumed’. According to Friedman, people who are obese and lose some weight (whether this is because they are obese or, more likely I just assume, this is part of WHY they are obese) actually burn FEWER calories in order to maintain the SAME weight as someone else who did not lose weight to get to the same place:

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: So it turns out – and this was some lovely work done by Jules Hirsch here at Rockefeller [this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, measured the metabolism of people who lost weight through a precisely controlled diet] –] it turns out they burn many fewer calories than you would predict based on their newer weight.

So let me put a finer point on this. Imagine you’re 250 pounds. and you lose 100 lbs. to 150 lbs. Now you ask how many calories does that person burn compared to someone who started out at 150 pounds.They burn like 300 or 400 calories fewer per day when they’re at that reduced weight. Now think about it. That person is hungry and now can only eat fewer calories than the equal weight person to maintain that weight, despite the fact that they weigh the same amount.

So just like Jonny said about how the calories burned in exercise was not consistent between different people, here Friedman makes clear, that even on a daily overall metabolic ratio (not just a limited exercise event), the amount of calories burned is not consistent between different people of the same weight. So Jane and Nancy, if eating the same things, and exercising the same amounts, may result eventually in a fat Jane and a slim Nancy, with no apparent behavioral difference.

And it’s possible that this “biases against Jane keeping that weight off.” Because eating identical food with identical exercise at the same body weight at point 1, a year later, Jane would be at least 36.5 lbs heavier. Multiply that by a few years and you have a very fat Jane, who never once needed to ingest pounds of bon-bons regularly in order to end up morbidly obese.

More:

(Ira Flatow: What about the other parts that control metabolism? Is it true that some people burn food faster and so it’s not the brain part and it’s just their thyroid, or whatever it is?

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: A very classic study was done about 15 years ago by a guy named Claude Bouchard. And Claude gathered up a set of identical twins and overfed them 1,000 calories a day for 84 days. And he asked what happened. So these people were in a room, they were given calories, they were forced to eat 1,000 extra calories a day; they should have put on a lot of weight. Some people put on a lot of weight, other people put on hardly any weight at all.

And when they looked, the twins were highly similar to one another, suggesting that there was some genetic predisposition to either put on weight or not put on weight when you were given extra calories. The people who didn’t put on weight activated metabolism because of metabolic circuitry and didn’t put on the weight. And this observation that some people can eat whatever they want and never put on weight and other people put on weight just by looking at it has been more or less proven based on that study, which actually was observed as far back as the 1700s.

Friedman said, regarding the twin studies, that the opposite variant of twins had also been studied, and it STILL comes out to being, at root, a genetic predisposition to gain weight or not, overwhelmingly, not environmental:

…they were then redone with identical twins reared apart compared to fraternal twins reared together. So you’re actually biasing against the identical twins so now the hereditability falls from 80 percent to 70 percent. Still 70 percent — and the other 30 percent could not be accounted for by the environment for those kids.

And finally, he referred to studies on adopted children, to see if it’s entirely about the environment provided by parents, e.g., take a fat mother, with fat children assumedly from “the environment she raises them in,” if you put a kid with different genetics in there, will they also be fat?

Another way to look at this, actually, is to take kids who are adopted and ask on average, do they resemble their adoptive parents or their biological parents, making the assumption that some go to one environment, others to the other. They, to a very large extent, resembled their biological parents independent of the environment that their adoptive parents provided.

Well, that’s pretty much a measure from all three angles you can measure it, and in every measure, it comes out to be overwhelmingly a matter of genetic predisposition, more than just food intake or exercise.

***

I don’t really want to believe this. It sorta makes me want to cry.

And of course, it goes greatly against what we are all indoctrinated with from our dietary plans of choice.

It is not 100% genetics. It is not a 100% failure of people to keep weight off. It’s just… 70-80% genetics, and 95-98% failure.

Can I be one of the 2%? Can I modify my eating habits, exercise and lifestyle that the 20-30% can balance out the rest? Can I be the freak of nature that actually succeeds?

Damn. I hope so.

Am I delusional? Probably. The alternative might be suicidal, so it’s all I’ve got.

Most folks who have been on a lowcarb eating plan for awhile already understand that individual metabolism is, well, individual and not really predictable. But I think a lot of people wouldn’t argue that a predisposition to being lean or overweight might have a genetic basis.

Think a minute about what we mean by genetic. Does that mean that some races of people might be “more” genetically prone to obesity based on the current eating habits of our world, than others?

Yes, that’s what it means.

Now think about the rampant and unabashed prejudice levied against obese people culture-wide.

Let us say, just as a hypothesis, that native Americans, known to be genetically susceptible to alcoholism more than most other races, were also genetically susceptible to obesity.

So if we choose to discriminate against obesity, as a culture in a myriad of ways, what we are really doing is “cloaking” racial prejudice in our obesity prejudice, because a disproportionate number of folks from certain races will suffer compared to others.

Sure, people might (maybe) be as prejudiced against white folks who are obese, but the reality is that if someone is arbitrarily deciding whether a person is too fat to adopt or if a child is too fat to be allowed to live with their family or too fat to deserve a job, there is a whole lot of “soft” room for discrimination in there, since obesity is a nice blanket over the top of it.

When Western governments are talking about “intervention” that dramatically invades the privacy and rights of individuals and families, this becomes a radical and racial issue.

Here are some selected quotes from Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University.

Ira Flatow: You said that we don’t have enough data to understand why there’s been a 7 to 10 pound. weight increase. Do you have a hypothesis of your own about why this might be?

Jeffrey Friedman: What I think is happening is this. It turns out that that weight increase isn’t uniform across the population, and there’s actually really good epidemiologic evidence to suggest that. I think that a lot of the weight gain is concentrated in specific ethnic groups.

…I think that what we’re seeing now is ethnic groups that are predisposed to obesity are now getting access to unlimited calories. And I think that has a lot to do with that weight increase. And there’s some evidence to support that but it’s not definitive. Actually a lot of the epidemiologic data that you would really want to understand things like this is lacking.

…it turns out actually that these really obese kids are concentrated in particular ethnic groups and the gene pools are different in different ethnic groups.

So eventually we’ll be able to say something like, if you’re Native American, your chances of being biased against even by government agencies, is ___% higher than if you were say, Romanian.

If there is a higher chance that someone native were obese than there is that someone Romanian would be obese, then if we pretend a child or parent’s obesity is mostly about environment (hence they should receive family “intervention” by the government), we are saying that natives inherently less-deserve to raise their own kids, because more of them are fat than some other racial groups. (Remember this is hypothetical.)

So, if you’re white enough (or whatever) to luck into thinner genes, you’re probably ok, but we’ll have to round up more of the kids from those darn (check one susceptible-to-obesity race)’s kids, ’cause they are just too damn fat so much more often.

Do the cultural leaders of the races most genetically predisposed to obesity realize this? Realize that not taking any issue with “obesity issues,” means building-in institutionalized bias against their people?

This morning I got the book ‘Shape Up by Jonny Bowden’ which my friend Sara recommended. So far it seems pretty sane. It is less a love-fest of any given kind of food, than a focus on the individual and what might work, or not work, for them.

I loved his examples from the works of biochemist Dr. Roger Williams, who wrote Biochemical Individuality, and others in that field. Just the few examples Bowden gave were so impressive that I want to quote the little section of chapter 2 here for others to see and consider.

From the Atlas of Human Anatomy, he reproduces illustrations of nineteen different laboratory speciman human stomachs of dramatically different shape and size and does the same for seventeen different livers. He reports on differences–dramatic differences–among normal healthy infants in leukocytes, neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils, lymphocytes and monocytes. He reports on huge differences in the musculature of the pectoralis minor muscle and on the variations in the amount of islet tissue in the pancrease. He suggests that the potential rate of production for insulin alone probably varies throughout a ten-fold or greater range, and that the number of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas varies from 200,000 to 2.5 million. This, by the way, in normal people. The thyroid gland in normal people varies from a weight of 8 grams to 50 grams. Pepsin, a digestive enzyme produced by the stomach and one of the two most important functional constituents of gastric juice, varies in the normal stomach by a thousand-fold. [...]

“The particular insertion of a muscle in the back of a hand can make the difference between a concert pianist and a person who’s all thumbs,” stated Dr. Alexander Ballin, in a lecture about biochemical individuality and vitamin needs. Twenty-two percent of people have differences in the structure of this muscle; 13 percent don’t have the muscle at all; 1 percent have two muscles.

…I’ll … sum it all up for you in two words: Everybody’s different.

He took on early another topic I consider in need of a voodoo doll and pins:

In 1980, when Consumers Guide published “Rating the Diets,” there were well over 100 diet books for their consideration. With few exceptions, the underlying concept was always this: Eat less. Whatever gimmick the authors sold, they were all buying the same underlying theory: Excess calories make you fat.

[...] During the 1980s and 90s, all manner of low-fat diets prevailed. Fat was the new demon … Pasta and bagels, solely on the basis of their having virtually no fat content, became touted as health foods, which is a little like promoting the Godfather as a role model because he liked to play with his grandkids. [...]

If you’re reading this book, chances are very good that that very diet made you fat or is preventing you from losing weight. And it’s almost certainly not making you any healthier.

[...] [Chemists] now had an objective measure of energy input from food, plus an objective measure of energy output from exercise and activity.

And the tyranny of the calorie equation was born.

He doesn’t discount calories at all, but he points out the (in my opinion vastly) more important issue on the “energy in vs. out” question, with an example and an analogy:

When I taught personal training at New York’s Equinox Fitness Clubs, we had an exercise physiology lab that contained an apparatus called a metabolic cart. You would get on a treadmill and put on a mask attached to a computer that would measure your oxygen intake and your carbon dioxide output at different levels of exercise intensity. Then the computer would calculate your caloric expenditure as you exercised. The individual variations were absolutely astonishing, and they would often vary enormously from what the standard equations would predict.

Suppose I rented a car in Los Angeles and wanted to buy just enough gas to get to San Diego. The distance is 120 miles. If I fill the tank and only use 1/3 of it, there’s no refund and I will have wasted money, so I want to get an idea of how much gas to buy. Think about it for a minute and see if you can guess the answer to this question: How many gallons should I purchase?

…There’s no correct answer unless you have one missing critical piece of information, which I didn’t give you. Before you can answer the question of how many gallons of gas I need, you have to answer another question: What kind of car did I rent?

If I rented a jeep I met get only ten miles to the gallon, but if I rented a Volkswagon I might get thirty. And it’s the same thing with calories. … we are all metabolically unique.

It’s about damn time someone pointed this out. I understand that science has already demonstrated sufficient research to support the point, but even many scientists just don’t seem to get it. If someone who weighs as much as me can eat fewer calories than someone who weighs 130 lbs should, and not lose weight (or at any rate remotely resembling the math), then obviously anybody who thinks that the whole weight gain/maintenance/loss equation is a matter of those numbers is misinformed.

As the saying goes, it only takes one white crow to disprove the theory that all crows are black. There are plenty of people with metabolisms like mine who put the lie to the ‘calorie theory’. There isn’t any doubt what a calorie is going in; but how that food is processed inside the body, and how many calories the body needs to use for its own maintenance, obviously varies so radically, that the calories-in numbers become almost “not applicable” to the answer: because we don’t know enough about the individual body’s processing to even know the real question.

Anyway that’s about as far as I got in the book. I recommend it so far.