It would be easy to avoid eating those things if you mostly ate at hotel restaurants and you wern’t a breakfast person, but most people who live in Japan eat those things daily.
It would be easy to avoid eating those things if you mostly ate at hotel restaurants or traditional Japanese type restaurants and you weren’t a breakfast person, but most people who live in Japan do eat those things daily.
One thing to keep in mind is that the culture in America encourages the “more is better” attitude, it’s not just food.
For example (fresh in my mind from shopping yesterday), it used to be that you could find melatonin supplements in 300mcg and 3 mg (=3000 mcg) sizes.
A study was done testing which is better at helping people sleep. It found the smaller size more effective.
What was America’s response? Go bigger! In our local stores you only see sizes like 3, 5 and 10 (!) mg. The more effective 300mcg is hard to find.
It’s like this with a lot of things. Take cars. America car makers are phasing out their small and midsize models. America wants their pickup trucks, SUVs, etc. More is better! So you see people driving their Canyoneros alone.
When it comes to food, same thing. So you see ads for tripe chili bacon cheeseburgers. People go “ooh” and “aah” when a new mega burger is introduced. Never mind that for someone like me (and hopefully most people) a simple Whopper Junior is actually a bit too much food.
It’s not just food, It’s the whole flippin culture. If it can be overconsumed, it will be.
dup
It’s not. It’s a sugar (carbs) transportation and storage hormone. Sugars and fats are two completely different kinds of substances. There is a relationship between “having small carbs (sugars) available directly from the digestive system pretty much continuously” (a lot of Americans eat once a day, it’s just a very long once*) and “storing away sugar and fat without ever taking either out of storage”, but insulin is not part of the fat-storing mechanism itself.
- So did my Yaya, but in her case the only stuff that was sweet was fruit.
It more complicated than that.
“Glucose, a simple sugar, provides energy for cell functions. After food is digested, glucose is released into the bloodstream. In response, the pancreas secretes insulin, which directs the muscle and fat cells to take in glucose. Cells obtain energy from glucose or convert it to fat for long-term storage.”
Uhm… how does that in any way contradict what I said? The only “new” detail is that sugars (not only glucose, actually) can be converted into fat (fats can also be converted into sugars), but insulin is again not part of that conversion mechanism.
You’re right. My quote does not make that claim. However the link does.
“NIH study shows how insulin stimulates fat cells to take in glucose.”
Thought it was settled science.
Insulin isn’t what makes you fat. What creates fat is having more sugar in your system than your body is using. Insulin is just a part of that mechanism of dealing with the excess sugar. If you somehow suppressed the secretion of insulin and still consume the same amount of calories per day, you have bigger problems on your hands than fat. (You have diabetes.)
It does seem my food experience there was somewhat skewed and maybe not typical of everyday life.
I still doubt fried potatoes, macaroni and cheese, or bread with every meal is typical.
The keys reason is that Americans had a lot of food and other nations had less, so American mothers would tell their kids to clean their FULL plates because other kids are starving. Geez. Like this needs to be debated.
Geez. Have you considered simply writing your point more clearly when questioned initially?
It’s a very bad assumption and a terrible argument. Yes, the Japanese (and certain European countries) were starving — from about 1944 to a few years after the war. But there were other countries, such as Spain(!) which weren’t starving. Why didn’t Spanish kids become fat?
The amount of time that Japan has a serious calorie deficit was well over within a few years, certainly by the time anyone in their 50 was born, so they would have grown up with FULL plates.
Yet we don’t see as many obese Japanese in their 50s.
The same obesity problem in America did not occur in the 1950s when there would possibly have been a difference in how much kids were getting post war.
Yes, but once the insulin crams the sugar into the cells they turn it into fat. Here’s an NIH Study documenting that. That’s why when type II diabetics with poorly managed blood sugars end up injecting insulin they gain weight. Insulin lowers blood sugar by forcing it into cells where it is turned into fat.
But we all agree that insulin is not the CAUSE of obesity, right? It’s just part of the body’s response to consuming more calories than you burn.
Oh, actually during that particular period Spain was starving longer. No Marshal Plan, you see, as the Civil War had been won by the wrong side: our post-war famine lasted until Franco gave NATO permission to use us as a landing pad.
But the point stands: the famine ended long enough ago that children born as early as the mid-60s were already being told to think about children starving in India or Africa whenever our plates were fuller than we wanted. Are we the same size Americans were 20 years ago?
No… it’s part of the body’s baseline preparation to eating. People with healthy pancreases produce inactive insulin all the time. The insulin produced in the pancreas and released to the small intestine is not work-ready yet: it gets partially digested, and that activated form is then absorbed into the bloodstream and taken to every other organ. Eating will lead to the release of the other enzymes which perform that activation, so it does lead to insulin being activated, but it was already in place (again, if you don’t have T1 diabetes). The activation mechanism depends on eating, but not on how many calories.
Insulin stimulates all cells to take in glucose. It’s the glucose carrier, it’s the molecule that tells cells “yo, wake up and get your glucose!”, telling all cells to take glucose in is its job. Other molecules tell cells to take in fats, to store fats (which most cells can do, not only adipocites), to use fats to build new cells… or to use sugar to make fats, or fats to make sugars, depending on how much of either you eat and what kind of activity you’re doing. The metabolic network is not a single line, and those conversion pathways are two-ways.
I don’t agree. Constantly provoking an insulin response builds insulin resistance, type II diabetes, and weight gains. Type I diabetes is a disease caused by insufficient insulin, type II us a disease caused by too much insulin. It requires greater and greater amounts of insulin to force the glucose into the cells. Giving type II diabetics insulin lowers blood sugar by making them get fat.
In The Obesity Code and The Complete Guide to Fasting Jason Fung describes how intermittent fasting can reverse insulin resistance and type II diabetes. I personally know several people who were diagnosed as type II diabetics (HbA1c >6.5) and were on several medications for diabetes who now have normal blood sugar and are completely off their medications after following the diet outlined in those books.
Anybody can write a book and say anything they want. Are these findings backed up by actual published research articles?
A quick check of articles: one study said no, another said hopeful and two studies on rats showed promise.
I would rate this “needs further research”, Not “write a big book about it”.
Oh, you mean, “It works in practice, but how is it in theory?” It works just fine in theory. Here’s a list of references from one of the chapters in The Complete Guide to Fasting
.