IrongarmX

Not having excess weight on your body is always a plus. Having adequate nutrients is also important, but getting people to just NOT EAT is extremely difficult. One of the things I used to run into with clients was this constant need to know what they could eat and when. Most of them could have gone several days without food with no ill effects, but the minute you tell someone that there is nothing wrong with being hungry, they tend to freak out a little bit. Plus, I know my fair share of overweight people who have panic attacks or get really nasty when they feel hungry and don’t have food immediately in front of them. This past weekend for example, family reunion at my house, more than half the adults are morbidly obese, but all felt it was logical to bring out the snacks at probably 2 hour intervals so that “nobody gets hungry”. Now that I’m not eating to support heavy training any more, I’m eating less. I do try to have more fruits and vegetables, but eating less regardless of content always does the trick in keeping my weight down. But, I also love pie. I also don’t eat pie very often.

Bram wrote:

A few things I’ve been reading lately have been trumping the importance of keeping land-based animal fats on the low-end, fruit/veggie/nut consumption on the high-end…both for combating brain-related aging…and for fighting heart disease/stroke/cancer. The basic argument is that “healthy foods” don’t obstruct blood flow…and obstructed blood flow causes a lot of issues.

I am sorry to be blunt, but “healthy foods don’t obstruct blood flow” is hogwash. Cardiovascular system is a bit more complicated than a toilet, and foods you eat don’t “clog the arteries”. Atherosclerosis leads to the obstruction of the blood flow, and it is a very complicated condition. More than that, there is some data demonstrating that cancer and atherosclerosis may be the poles of the disease spectrum. In other words, patients get either atherosclerosis related conditions or cancers most of the time, and less commonly both of these. Which points us to the idea that the causes of these conditions may be very different. As I said in my original post, a lot of benefits of various diets can be explained by the reduced caloric intake. And to reiterate, reduced intake has a lot of very high quality evidence on its side, while benefits of “quality foods” are limited to observational studies and have way less convincing statistical strength.

I think quantity has the greatest health impact – if your caloric intake matches your lifestyle, things will work out.  Quality is then a self-regulating occurrence – if you eat the right amount of calories, say by eating exclusively Twinkies, you’re going to feel like crap in the short term, but without any lasting health impact unless you force yourself to continue that diet (unlikely).  Rather, you’re likely to find things that don’t make you feel lousy.  There was a pretty good section in ‘Comfort Crisis’ about this – a reasonably quality diet is the best (only?) way to hit your optimal caloric intake while providing yourself a sense of satiety (and I’ll add, not feeling like you ate something nasty…).   The book also mentioned getting comfortable with hunger, but I didn’t think it really shed any insight on how to do that.  I share Syaigh’s experience with people who get anxious or even mad when they’ve been without food for a few hours.  I don’t know how to help them deal with that it’s just not something I’ve ever experienced.

God Bless America, but Americans will do anything but just move more and eat less.

Fwiw, I am one of them.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by
  Boris .

In terms of quality vs. quantity, they are both important.  For weight maintenance, certainly quantity is the most important lever, but in terms of general health and well-being, quality is critical as well.

My husband once saw a kid in the ER who ate nothing but hotdogs his whole life. He was late teens/early twenties. Not necessarily retarded, but serious country redneck of dubious intelligence. Anyway, he was in complete immune system failure from all the preservatives and malnutrition.

syaigh wrote:

…he was in complete immune system failure from all the preservatives and malnutrition.

Whats “complete immune system failure”? How do they know it’s from eating hot dogs? Is it even practically possible to eat nothing but hotdogs? Let’s assume he did eat hotdogs exclusively – it is unlikely the rest of the family were exemplary healthy eaters, is it? Was the rest of the family sick?

An undernourished vegan is a common event, and many of these folk get frequent colds and infections because of exactly that, malnourishment. But nobody says “he is sick because of all of those carotenoids and flavonoids”.

The kid in question is a typical representative of a low socio-economic class. Sure, he eats crap, but he is also likely smoking, drinking, not sleeping enough and working crappy job. Likely to have been sick for weeks before ending up in ER. It is very likely he had nutritional deficiencies and nothing to do with preservatives.

For fucks sake Sangoma, I am not a doctor. This was almost twenty years ago and the kids white count was in the toilet. There was no other evidence of disease at he time except for severe malnourishment. This was at a teaching hospital and that was the conclusion of all the specialists consulted at the time. His mom apparently bought him hot dogs by the case and he ate little to nothing else. Maybe they eventually found he had leukemia. I have no idea. But if you dismiss his all hot dog diet as a cause you are being dense. And yes, he ate nothing but hot dogs according to his parents. There are some seriously poor and uneducated people in this part of my country. You’d be surprised what shows up in the ER sometimes.

Here is another case with chicken nuggets: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/british-teen-stacey-irvine-hospitalized-after-eating-nothing-but-chicken-nuggets-for-15-years/

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by
  syaigh .
• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by
  syaigh .

Smet on the warpath.  I like it.

Sangoma wrote:

The kid in question is a typical representative of a low socio-economic class. Sure, he eats crap, but he is also likely smoking, drinking, not sleeping enough and working crappy job. Likely to have been sick for weeks before ending up in ER. It is very likely he had nutritional deficiencies and nothing to do with preservatives.

But here you’re kind of talking out of both sides of your mouth.  On the one hand you say that there’s little evidence regarding the quality of food (vis-à-vis quantity) being a driver of health and on the other you’re acknowledging that poor nutrition is a major factor.  Which is it you yellow cossack son of a bitch?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by
  Fat Cat .