No surprises there. I only know one person who has the lap band. She lost about 60 pounds, then gained it all back, no surprise. And that’s true of all bariatric surgeries, look at Carnie Wilson, she’s not as big as she was, but she’s back to being genuinely obese and she had the full deal, as we know.
Ya know, exaggeration and misrepresentation undermine the value of what’s being said no matter who says it. It also undermines complaints about it.
Exactly so, since that’s the heart of the matter.
“Fat Head” takes both an entertaining, yet also more political look at the whole question. There’s a comment made by one of the medical talking heads about the USDA existing to serve business, and selling the idea that grain is where its at has nothing to do with health and everything to do with money.
I watched “fat Head” and “Food, Inc” back to back yesterday, and taken together one can find oneself very pissed off about the degree to which we have all been misinformed and manipulated.
But to answer your question, Philster, here’s my vote for what constitutes eating right
The majority of meals and snacks made up of:
[ul]
[li]animal protein and fat, from animals that haven’t been filled with hormones and antibiotics. This includes eggs and dairy.[/li][li]Every kind of vegetable and every kind of fruit, (although super-starchy root vegetables should be kept to a minimum and never make up the majority of the calories from a meal, as in eating a bag of potato chips)[/li][li]Nuts[/li][li]Extracted fats from nuts and from vegetable sources that are naturally fatty, like olives and coconut (vs. corn or soybean oil)[/li][/ul]
To the extent that they are tolerated without weight gain or other ill-effect, legumes and whole grains can be a small part of the diet in combination with the above, such as whole grain bread for sandwiches.
And because we are in the real world, the “whites”, flour and sugar, should be considered very rare, potentially toxic “treats”, and that emphatically includes the devil’s water, aka SODA. Maybe once or twice a month.
I bet if we could, in fantasyland, get everyone to agree to raise their kids eating like this, obesity would be virtually wiped out.
Because while there’s obviously fierce disagreement over whether calories count or not, there seems to be a great deal of agreement that carbs DO trigger insulin spikes, that carbs DO leave you feeling hungry, that carbs DO tend, in a large percentage of people, to drive a kind of carb addiction that then drives people to eat more, much more, than they would otherwise. So treating them like the addictive drug they mimic would go a long way to heading off the addiction and the resulting obesity.
