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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[moonshadow.livejournal.com]

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