fat thursday

[moominmolly]

From Junkfood Science, via the_xtina, an article on the Minnesota Starvation Study (about the effects of dieting on healthy adults) that I found quite interesting.

EDIT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD: What I found interesting was: the mental effects of this deprivation on the healthy, normal-weight patients; the idea of patriotic conscientious objectors in a medical study; and the attitudes surrounding the study in general. The whole article was chock full of interesting attitudes toward the world. The general tone of the article and the obvious bias of the author are not my own.

Comments

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Wow, talk about a load of malarkey.

If you put normal weight people on a diet that causes them to become extremely thin, you cannot conclude that the results will occur when you put a heavy person on a diet that causes them to become average weight.

The big difference between a "diet" and "starvation" is that in the former, the people can offset the reduced calorie intake by using stored fat, an option unavailable to people of smaller sizes.

Duh.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Which is not to say that accumulation of fat is NOT a very complex biological process that is not as simple as calories in minus calories out = fat accumulated.

But it cracks me up that they acknowledge that weight is an "incredibly complex and sophisticated system" and then claim that the entire system depends on one single variable: a genetic "set point" that is fixed for life.

I hate bad science.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Heh, well, yes, it's true, it's an obvious problem -- I personally have had a few different weights that seemed to function as set points, as have other people I know.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

But it cracks me up that they acknowledge that weight is an "incredibly complex and sophisticated system" and then claim that the entire system depends on one single variable: a genetic "set point" that is fixed for life.

Yes! That!

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

It's not that I thought it was the be-all and end-all of weight research -- especially not of that of obese patients -- more that I was interested by the reporting of the mental effects of dieting on normal-weight adults.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to know if the mental effects were as a result of dieting (the process of eating below maintenance calories) or of being underweight. These are subtly different things.

For instance, a person with a malabsorbtive disorder might eat 5000 calories a day, and yet still be grossly underweight. Conversely, a person with a thyroid problem might eat a 500 calorie a day diet with nary an effect on his weight. Which of those two will show the metal effects this article ascribes to "dieting"? Surely the original study would offer insight, but this article treats them as if they were one and the same.

Anyway, I coulda told you that dieting makes me grouchy and fatigued. I mean, doh! Where's my grant money?

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I was curious how much it has to do with calorie restriction and how much with the psychological effects of deprivation: I definitely remember being cranky, humorless, and pretty obsessed with food while doing the elimination diet, despite getting plenty of calories. I wonder what would happen if you told people you were restricting their calories but in practice fed them the same number as usual...

[dda.livejournal.com]

more that I was interested by the reporting of the mental effects of dieting on normal-weight adults.

I seriously wonder about some of those mental effects; cutting off three fingers due to dieting stress?? Keep in mind that these guys were cooped up in a lab for months walking 3 miles and day and being tested over and over. I'm guessing your average dieter isn't dealing that that.

I can see effects from dieting; being hungry makes me cranky. But that study seemed a bit over the top.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

i'd need to look up the data to be sure, but my understanding is that...

1) body mass index -- while crude, is a serviceable ratio of height to weight -- has increased worldwide over the last several decades.

2) increases in a country's average bmi tend to correlate w/ increases in the country's gdp per capita.

so, if obesity is all genetic, humanity is undergoing rapid evolution, w/ abrupt increases in mutation rates correlated w/ economic growth. i had no idea we possessed that kind of environmental-genetic flexibility.


but the minnesota starvation study is nifty. i came across it a long time ago, and the article i read then had even more disturbing things about what long-term starvation did to the subjects' mental states.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

Well, it's worth noting that the huge jump in the US over the past decade or so of the percentage of adults who are considered overweight or obese is partly, possibly mostly, due to the fact that they changed the break point. Randomly. With, as far as I've been able to tell, no supporting evidence whatsoever. Just "oh, we'll drop the limit on being considered obese a couple of BMI points" one day.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

oh, yeah. the labelling is a problem, since afaik, it has no connection to what the human body is actually doing. but also afaik, the underlying bmi statistic, while a curious measure, has been tracked consistently.

[water-childe.livejournal.com]

The other thing they are discovering is how synthetic compounds not consumed by other generations, affects health and body mass.
I always just knew diet soda was the devil. But now they've discovered that it can put people at an extreme increased risk of diabetes. It's apparently the aspartame.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

do you have a citation for that? i'm not seeing anything like that in pubmed.

[water-childe.livejournal.com]

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<a href="http://tinyurl.com/2ohodr"NYTimes article citation here". <a>

The research itself seems to be in various other places on the web, although somewhat debated because, as someone already pointed out the info seems corrolative. All I know is that I personally don't trust sugar substitutes as they seem to have long history of being deemed "fine, OMG better then the real thing" and then a few years later, "OMG this stuff does scary unpredictable things to your body if you consume it regularly."
I'll stick to real sugar thanks. Still not great for me, but seemingly okay as long as it's not something I go crazy with.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Causation or corrolation?

I heard about a couple of studies recently but they were all corrolative. Just this week NPR reported on one that associated diet soda with metabolic syndrome and very carefully pointed out it was a corrolation; causation was unproven. (I didn't hear the whole report so no citation.)

[harimad.livejournal.com]

What an amazing crock of nonsense. And it does nothing to address wy obesity has greatly increased in the past 20-30 years. If I could hear a set point advocater address that issue in a cogent manner, I might believe the theory. I might also believe if I could hear a decent explanation of why a single person seems to experience multiple set points, even within a short period (say, a decade).

It is true that to maintain weight, calories in = calories out, that simple. But the mechanism isn't that simple. We can measure calories in (assuming an uncharacteristic level of either honesty by the subject or control by the measurer) but calories out is a bugger to determine. Plus fat isn't the passive nonentity we used to think it was; it's metabolically and hormonally active and seems to fight to protect itself.

My natural weight has varied over the years. At one point I was "gaunt," other times I was "slender," other times "plumpish." These represent very different average weights, not merely variations around a normal weight.

During gaunt times lunch might be a small frozen meal or - believe it or not - part of a McDonald's child's meal.[1] Which just amazes me in retrospect. How could that little bit of food satisfy me? Dunno but at that point, it was enough. I was happy, and saw friends, and read books, and exercised, and ... So why did my set point vary by so much, without external influence? How does that fit into set point theory?

[1] This is not the bulk of what I ate, just a part that is easy to quantify.

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

the fact that a person's weight set point, if such a thing exists, may change at different times during his or her life doesn't seem to me especially problematic for the theory of set points. your height has also changed in an irregular fashion at several points during your lifetime and yet i'm pretty sure it is both genetically determined and very difficult for you to deliberately affect.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Can you show me a study that references or "proves" multiple set points, or why they would vary? Your other example doesn't strike me as an applicable one. My height has not changed substantially and I don't expect it to till I get old. And when it changes when I get old, there is a well-substantiated explanation.

Further, that's not what Sandy Szwarc is saying. Here are some quotes:

one of the first demonstrations that each body has a natural, genetic set point

It also demonstrates that the body is not simply “reprogrammed" at a lower set point once weight loss has been achieved. The volunteers' experimental diet was unsuccessful in overriding their bodies' strong propensity to defend a particular weight level.

Note the use of the singular "a" natural set point, "a" particular weight level. All the references and implications are to one set point per person, and there are no references or implications of set points changing over time. Further, the second quote implies that its really, really tough to override a set point and that set points don't change. Where is there room for permanent weight change?

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Don't feel too bad about people seizing on something that wasn't your main point. I consider it a good day if people correctly identify what it is I am writing about.

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

oops. i thought you were proud of that. :)

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm proud to be confusing due to having more than one main topic per post! It's just that sometimes people don't correctly identify _any_ of them.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Heh! Thank you. It's not so much that I mind people seizing on the wrong point, exactly -- it's just that I basically avoid making assertions beyond my own experience in livejournal specifically so people won't tell me what a line of bullshit I'm feeding them. I mean, unless I'm willing to debate a point, which, on livejournal, I rarely am. :)

I'm not certain precisely what made me think that posting a link to an essay about weight loss and dieting would be okay without an entire opinion piece attached to it.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

I should clarify when I said "a load of malarkey", it wasn't you i thought was handing me that load. You were nothing but a passthrough. And I agree, the original study was interesting. But it was painful to read how stupidly it was interpreted by the author of that article; enough that it distracted from the interestingness, for me.

[moonshadow.livejournal.com]

I read about this study in Rethinking Thin. It was interesting to read more. Thanks for posting the link.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome! I'd like to read more about the study, now, too!