Obesity: Blame it on your 1950s mom.

In My Humble Opinion
41

I think that part of the problem is that we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that people have to go to a specific place to exercise, and that time has to be carved out for it. I’ve found that if I take advantage of opportunities to walk or ride my bike as they present themselves, I get my exercise in without having to plan for it. For example, I had back-to-back appointments at the VA a couple of weeks ago. Instead of sitting around on my ass for that 90 minutes, I walked around the building for an hour. (It helps that the complex is HUGE.) I got my exercise in for the day and didn’t have to do anything special to do it, aside from making sure I wore running shoes and had my Zune with me, and these are things I’d do anyway. (Did I mention the complex is HUGE?) Since I’ve started taking advantage of this “casual exercise”, I’ve boosted my weight loss, which is no easy feat at this stage, and I’ve done it while improving my overall conditioning.

I also think that the modern car culture has contributed to the loss of that “casual exercise.” We’re so used to driving that it doesn’t occur to us that we can walk or ride just as easily, and for better benefit. There is no reason at all, for example, to drive to the library when I can walk or ride. It’s about 2/3 of a mile door-to-door, or 1 1/3 miles round trip. That’s not even a major walk for me anymore. But it’s a hell of a lot better than driving.

42

It may not be the whole story but “simplistic to the point of uselessness” is a bit of an exaggeration on your part.

Or have you come up with one of those eat as much as you want as often as you want and lose weight diets?

43

Um, no. For the most part, it really is just an issue of “calories in, calories out.” Consume less calories, lose weight.

44

No, CrafterMan. Look at that last study DSeid. Both sets of animals were fed exactly the same number of calories. But the form those calories took (saturated versus unsaturated fats) had a profound difference on their brain function. Equal calories - but very different biochemical effects. The “a calorie is a calorie” mantra ignores the reality that foods aren’t merely sources of energy, but are rather complex mixtures of chemicals which may have all kinds of varying effects on human metabolism. 250 calories of steak does not equal 250 calories of spinach does not equal 250 calories of Coca-Cola.

The problem with the “calories in, calories out” mantra is that it tells us nothing that is really useful. It’s the dietary equivalent of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, or the abstinence-only sex education programs some school districts teach - and it’s just as (in)effective. Telling people “Just don’t do something pleasurable!” never works to change the behavior of the majority of the population. Monstero and Martin Hyde are right; unless we can find a way to make food much less readily available and much less tasty, understanding why some people are more easily sated than others is going to be important.

45

Simplistic to the point of uselessness is EXACTLY what that statement is. Everyone already knows that eating too much is why people gain weight. What no one fully understands is why some people are much better at regulating their food intake than others. By and large, everyone eats because they’re hungry. What we don’t understand is why some people are seemingly hungrier than they should be. Why is eating seemingly so much more pleasurable an act for some folks than for others? And what factors in our modern lifestyle need to be changed if we’re going to successfully reverse the obesity trend every developed nation on the planet is experiencing?

46

Enh. My brother’s placenta dislodged about a month before his normal-term birth, meaning he starved the last month in the womb. He was born skinny and stayed skinny even though he DID eat like he was making up for lost time. :stuck_out_tongue:

My other brother had a normal, normal-term gestation, and was exactly the same, so…

I’m going for genetics+choice=‘natural’ body type. And of course, it doesn’t really matter what you’re born WITH, it’s what you DO with it that matters. Can have the best genes in the world and still waste them.

47

Just about every other day I see someone in the parking lot of the gym waiting for someone to pull their car out and leave, so they can get a space as close as possible to the gym door, and not have to walk across the parking lot.

48

A bit of a correction artemis, all groups were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. Substitution of saturated fat with unsaturated fats resulted in the animals both eating less and losing weight. At least some of the weight loss was due to the decreased consumption. It also reversed the insulin resistance, improved glucose control, and reversed the inflammation in the hypothalamus. Injecting the omega 3 and 9 fatty acids directly into the cerebral hemispheres also resulted in decreased intake, reversed hypothalamic inflammation and resulted in the hypothalamus being more responsive to leptin thereby sending signals out to burn more (“pro-thermogenic signaling”). Thus some weight loss was presumably due to changes in metabolism in addition to the decrease in intake. And the peripheral effects were at least somewhat, if not primarily, due to central effects.

But yes different sources of nutrition have very different effects on different brains and the brain effects seem to lead the show in the development of and the defense of obesity. Some brains are more likely to respond to various environmental triggers with inflammation or with various receptor and functional changes than others. The various developing brains in utero, with their own genetic predispositions, respond to the nutrition that gets to them across the placenta and are, as a result, more or less likely to react to later environmental triggers in different ways.

To me this is fascinating stuff. Pertinent to the op’s premise- Yes placental insufficiency and fetal undernutrition is both correlated with risk for obesity and with increased risk for metabolic syndrome even if not overweight or obese. (Yes, Taomist, your brother is at relative increased risk for developing metabolic syndrome even with a normal BMI. The good news: increased risk does not mean destiny.) One suspects that such is mediated by these central effects. And yes a maternal diet relatively low in unsaturated fats while high in (?certain?) saturated fats (?and other substances?) will cause central hypothalamic damage that is associated with later risk for both obesity and metabolic syndrome, at least in the animal model. Thus it is not the fat mother to be, but the food that the mother to be eats which is of course correlated with her being overweight or obese herself. Of course if she eats little enough of it she won’t be clinically obese (see our often mentioned professor on his Twinkie diet), but the damage to her baby and to her own hypothalamus, and thus the future long term risks to both of them, are still incurred.

The story gets even more interesting because there are multiple receptor networks involved with both various tissue and various CNS locations, each of which may respond to various stimuli differently …

Those who are not interested in the unfolding of the science explaining how the genetic predisposition to obesity is impacted by our current nutrition and who want to keep their understanding limited to thinking that the 1/3rd of the adult population of Americans who are neither overweight or obese are just more disciplined than the other 2/3rds of the population, that reciting “just move more and eat less” is the whole story, are welcome to their ways. But IMHO they are missing out on some very exciting emerging science.

My interest, beyond the thrill of seeing scientific understanding unfold, is learning how to prevent obesity. Prenatal nutrition is part of the story. Altering the horrible nutritional and activity milieus that kids grow up in in our society by working at multiple levels is part of it as well.

MsRobyn I completely agree.

49

Yeah. I think there’s a reason why people didn’t “work out” en mass before the late 20th century. Simply living was a work out.

But then again, there weren’t billboards with big juicy hamburgers on them everywhere.

Also, our concept of time is really different than it was back in the past. Everything now has its own dedicated time slot, with “consequences”. If you don’t get in the shower before 6:00, then you won’t be able to get out of the house before rush hour, which means you will be late to work. So better not risk squeezing in an early morning work-out session. You take your morning break at 10:00, but you can’t be late returning to your desk or Boss Man will fire you (so do you go take a walk and synthesize some Vitamin D? or do you have another cup of coffee in the breakroom?) And you can’t be a second late leaving at the end of the day, because you’ll be stuck in traffic and be late picking up the kids from day care (and they charge by the minute when you’re late). And one of the kids has soccer practice to get to, so that’s another reason you’ve got to stick to the Schedule and not stop by the gym. And if ya’ll expect to eat dinner before bedtime, you’ve got to get home and pop that chicken in the oven. And OMG, if you miss “Wheel of Fortunate” and “Survivor”, you will be so PISSED! So no gym during prime time!

Giving everything a deadline keeps a person focused and organized. I do it myself, and it does make me feel like I’m holding it together. But it creates the illusion that there’s no time to spare for exercise. Life is rigid when there’s a consequence everywhere you turn.

Every day for the last month, I have been able to squeeze in an hour of yoga practice. Combined with the 2 hours of walking I do, I feel like I’m made out of iron. I haven’t cut out anything, though. I have just gotten into the habit of thinking of my schedule as a fluid thing that is not tied to position of the clock hands.

50

I completely understand what you’re saying, but some of it illustrates my point. For example, what’s wrong with walking around the field when the kids are at soccer practice? I and a few other parents did just that last season; while the kids were running around getting their exercise, we just walked. As long as we were on site, it was OK with the coach, and it beat sitting around for an hour. And that’s an hour I’d already carved out for something else.

It seems to me that if we started with exercise when it’s convenient, as opposed to scheduled, there would be greater compliance and willingness to do it.

51

The problem is, some people THINK they’re hungry when they’re really not. People don’t eat until they’re full – they eat until they’re stuffed. I sometimes find myself get an urge to snack out of boredom, not actual hunger.

52

The most convincing hypothesis that I’ve seen on this subject is summarized here in a long, but fascinating video by Robert Lustig, who argues that sugar is making us fat. He talks about a meta-analysis that was done on seven countries comparing rates of heart disease with diet. A positive correlation was found between heart disease and fat, which influenced the old food pyramid seen here. Little fats and oils, high carbohydrates. Americans started focusing on low-fat foods. When you take a close look at low-fat/fat-free foods, what are they typically high in?

Sugar.

When you go back to that meta-analysis, you’ll note that there is another diet component which is positively correlated with heart disease. What is it?

Sugar.

In 1957, HFCS was produced in a lab. It was a cheap way to get rid of excess corn that we produce base on corn subsidy. I’ve been trying to avoid HFCS since early 2000 and now things are starting to change, but HFCS is in nearly everything, especially breads and other carb-heavy products. Ten years ago, it was nearly impossible to purchase a loaf of bread that didn’t have HFCS in it unless you were in a major city or specialty mark. What is HFCS basically?

Sugar.

Look at how much our HFCS ingestion has increased over time since 1965. What popular beverages are full of HFCS? Soft drinks, which are linked to increased obesity and many fruit juices. If you are a label looker like me, you’ll notice that HFCS has been in nearly every jam/jelly/fruit drink until recently. Things labeled ‘organic’ even sometimes have HFCS in them. I see a lot of parents pushing their kids to drink fruit juice, thinking it’s a healthier option, but it’s actually not. Fructose accounted for 10.2% of total caloric intake in one study.

So, if you followed the food pyramid, drank fruit juice, and stuck to low-fat foods, you could be making yourself fat. As that study notes, “The largest source of fructose was sugar-sweetened beverages (30%) followed by grains (22%) and fruit or fruit juice (19%).”

I also think that the increased use of birth control has led to heavier women. I and many of my friends have had extreme weight gain on some pills. Once you gain weight, it is harder to maintain a lower weight than it is if you never had gained the weight in the first place. There are also many medicines for depression that cause weight gain, and we take much more antidepressants than we did in the 50s. Would more exercise and better portion control help? Absolutely. However, eating a diet with lots of calories coming from whole wheat bread full of HFCS will certainly cause an individual to gain more weight than one where most of the calories come from vegetables.

53

Just a note: if you are going to summarize Lustig’s presentation you’d be doing an injustice if you did not note two bits of what he states:

  1. Sucrose and HFS are both roughly the same proportion of glucose and fructose and equally bad in Lustig’s mind.

  2. Real fruit is more than okay, he states, because it is packaged with fructose’s “antidote”: fiber.

He does not go on to explain why fiber is 'the antidote" but the answers may include the fact that fiber, in particular insoluble fiber, increases insulin sensitivity, has high satiety resulting in less overall intake, and because some of the adverse effects of fructose may be mediated by uric acid, the excretion of which is increased by fiber’s biding to it in the gut, and by querctin (found in many fruits) up-regulating a renal uric acid transporter. Soluble fiber also has many beneficial effects. Real fruits are chock full of both sorts of fiber.

Hence diets high in fructose from fruits (with their fiber) are not associated with obesity. The MyPlate guidelines (the pyramid is gone) is pretty dang good.

54

For the most science geeky among those interested in the op here is another recent review:

Much detail follows with some focus on epigenetic factors. Enjoy.

55

It is also worth noting that epigenetic changes to DNA have a longterm (multigenerational) impact on health and behaviour, so look beyond your mother to your grandmother.

Half of the genes that influence you now were laid down (with epigenetic changes) in your mothers ova while your grandmother was pregnant with her.

Male genes reflect immediate conditions, as they are produced continuously (although a recent study showed the possibility of some longterm epigenetic changes in sperm).

It is complex and the connections between environment, genes and behaviour/response are tangled.

Si