Two human studies, published in 1995 and 2000, tested the effect of carbohydrate vs. fat overfeeding on body fat gain in humans. What did they find, and why is it important?We know that daily calorie intake has increased the US, in parallel with the dramatic increase in body fatness. These excess calories appear to have come from fat, carbohydrate, and protein all at the same time (although carbohydrate increased the most). Since the increase in calories, carbohydrate, fat, and protein all happened at the same time, how do we know that the obesity epidemic was due to increased calorie intake and not just increased carbohydrate or fat intake? If our calorie intake had increased solely by the addition of carbohydrate...
Garden Update: A Banner Year
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Things are warming up here in Seattle and the flowers are blooming. I just planted my first crops of the year-- potatoes and strawberries. 2013 was a banner year for my 500-square-foot urban vegetable garden, including my first experience growing and processing a grain. I never got around to posting about it last year-- so here it is.Interbay mulch techniqueThe bed on the right has been mulched with leaves, spent coffee grounds, and burlap sacks ($1/sack at the local hardware store)....
More Graphs of Calorie Intake vs. BMI
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In the last post, a reader commented that the correlation would be more convincing if I graphed calories vs. average BMI rather than the prevalence of obesity. It was a valid point, so I went searching for average BMI values from NHANES surveys. I dug up a CDC document that contains data from surveys between 1960 and 2002 (1). Because these data only cover five survey periods, we only get five data points to analyze, as opposed to the eight used in the last post. The document...
Calorie Intake and the US Obesity Epidemic
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Between 1960 and 2008, the prevalence of obesity in US adults increased from 13 to 34 percent, and the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from 0.9 to 6 percent (NHANES surveys). This major shift in population fatness is called the "obesity epidemic". What caused the obesity epidemic? As I've noted in my writing and talks, the obesity epidemic was paralleled by an increase in daily calorie intake that was sufficiently large to fully account for it. There are two main sources...
Uncovering the True Health Costs of Excess Weight
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Is excess weight hazardous to health, or can it actually be protective? This question has provoked intense debate in the academic community, in some cases even leading researchers to angrily denounce the work of others (1). There is good evidence to suggest that excess body fat increases the risk of specific diseases, including many of our major killers: diabetes, heart attack, stroke, heart failure, cancer, and kidney failure (2). Yet strangely, the studies relating excess weight to the total risk of dying-- an overall measure of health that's hard to argue with-- are inconsistent. Why?Read more...
New Position with Nestlé
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Warning -- Satire -- April Fool's PostI'm happy to announce that I've accepted a Product Research and Development position with Nestlé Foods. Nestlé is known for its skillful application of 'neuromarketing'-- using neuroscience to enhance product development and sales-- and the company recruited me for my background in neuroscience and food reward.As Whole Health Source readers know well, food reward has a major impact on food selection and consumption, and therefore it has huge potential as a product development strategy. Although product development by the food industry has always relied to some extent on a basic understanding of food reward, corporations still lag far behind the cutting edge of food reward research, and they...