Obesity

[winjim]

The bottom line is, Humans are hardwired to fill up when there is plentiful food in order to survive the famine that's round the corner - the legacy of our hunter-gatherer past. Except in this day and age, and certainly in the western world, famine in incredibly unlikely. But our bodies still want us to eat as much as possible - just in case.

It's important to note, amidst all this talk of choices, that some people are more 'hard wired' than others. There are genetic and epigenetic factors at work. For example, a fetus which is small for gestational age may initiate a starvation response meaning that after birth and for the rest of their life, they have a greater propensity to eat as much as they can and store the energy as fat. This has an effect on not only their weight but also morbidities such as CV disease, diabetes etc.

And... here's the interesting bit, the starvation response is achieved by DNA methylation in utero, silencing various genes and activating others. This methylation is itself heritable, meaning that the starvation response is passed down through the generations. So if your grandmother had a small baby, it is possible that you and your children will have that epigenetic alteration and be prone to overeating and obesity.

Then you have the effect of particularly fat and sugar combinations which are not found 'naturally', triggering hormonal responses which we've not properly adapted to, be it addictive pleasure responses or simply messing with our sense of satiety. We haven't evolved to eat this sort of modern diet and it does weird things to our brain.

I'm sure there's more, that's all just basic biology before we even get into psychological and socioeconomic issues. So anybody who claims that it's a 'simple' matter of 'choice' needs to think about their own circumstances and how they may differ from others not just at a superficial level but also at a deeper level, possibly going back generations.




Yes I have just taken a nutrition exam and yes I think I did alright in it, thanks for asking.

 

[battered]

There have been studies done, but it escapes me where - they were referenced on "Eat Well for Less" however.

I should have been clearer that it is on processed food versus the home cooked version of the same thing. Highly processed and refined foods (and yes, ready meals are processed to within an inch of their life) are easier for your gut to extract the calories from than the same thing you've cooked at home from scratch.

I make ready meals, amongst other things, for a living. They are not "processed to within an inch of their life". I can walk you through the manufacture of, say, a meat pie and demonstrate this. The thing that changes is the scale. They are not easier for your gut to digest.
Edit - the whole point of manufactured foods is that they are as close as is humanly possible to something that you make at home. There have been great strides in "clean label" development etc. The point is here that if you read the ingredients you won't often find anything that sounds like a chemistry set, you will find stuff you can buy in the supermarket. This means no more modified starch, but more "maize starch" and "potato flour". No more E162, but more "beetroot juice". I might make flaky pastry on a 72-fold laminator, and it's a beautiful thing, but it's no different from me rolling and folding at home 72 times, or an artisan baker doing the same thing with a series of passes through a Rondo. It's just quicker, and fortunately I don't make a tonne of pastry at a time in my kitchen, or add butter 25kg at a time.

 

[Reynard]

It's important to note, amidst all this talk of choices, that some people are more 'hard wired' than others. There are genetic and epigenetic factors at work. For example, a fetus which is small for gestational age may initiate a starvation response meaning that after birth and for the rest of their life, they have a greater propensity to eat as much as they can and store the energy as fat. This has an effect on not only their weight but also morbidities such as CV disease, diabetes etc.

And... here's the interesting bit, the starvation response is achieved by DNA methylation in utero, silencing various genes and activating others. This methylation is itself heritable, meaning that the starvation response is passed down through the generations. So if your grandmother had a small baby, it is possible that you and your children will have that epigenetic alteration and be prone to overeating and obesity.

Then you have the effect of particularly fat and sugar combinations which are not found 'naturally', triggering hormonal responses which we've not properly adapted to, be it addictive pleasure responses or simply messing with our sense of satiety. We haven't evolved to eat this sort of modern diet and it does weird things to our brain.

I'm sure there's more, that's all just basic biology before we even get into psychological and socioeconomic issues. So anybody who claims that it's a 'simple' matter of 'choice' needs to think about their own circumstances and how they may differ from others not just at a superficial level but also at a deeper level, possibly going back generations.




Yes I have just taken a nutrition exam and yes I think I did alright in it, thanks for asking.

Oh, I'm not going to argue with that.

As I mentioned upthread, the women on my dad's side of the family are short, like to eat (read grazing) and are, well, lardy. Oddly, the blokes were all pushing 6ft and skinny.

I'm, erm, undertall and I rather like my food. But I do manage to stay at a sensible size (8 / 10), because the vision of one of my dad's cousins in a red velour tracksuit is, shall I say, rather motivational.

Having said that, I have been a size 16 a few times in my life, and on my 4ft 11 frame, that is most definitely not good. So I'm no angel, but I do know what my weaknesses are and I try my best to avoid falling into old habits.

 

[Oldhippy]

I don't know if it is true or not but I seem to remember being told/read somewhere that McD chips had 20 odd ingredients! How? Short of reconstituted mush with added crap I can't imagine how they would manage it. Wouldn't surprise me though.

 

[Reynard]

I make ready meals, amongst other things, for a living. They are not "processed to within an inch of their life". I can walk you through the manufacture of, say, a meat pie and demonstrate this. The thing that changes is the scale. They are not easier for your gut to digest.
Edit - the whole point of manufactured foods is that they are as close as is humanly possible to something that you make at home. There have been great strides in "clean label" development etc. The point is here that if you read the ingredients you won't often find anything that sounds like a chemistry set, you will find stuff you can buy in the supermarket. This means no more modified starch, but more "maize starch" and "potato flour". No more E162, but more "beetroot juice". I might make flaky pastry on a 72-fold laminator, and it's a beautiful thing, but it's no different from me rolling and folding at home 72 times, or an artisan baker doing the same thing with a series of passes through a Rondo. It's just quicker, and fortunately I don't make a tonne of pastry at a time in my kitchen, or add butter 25kg at a time.

I can only go by what my friends who also work in the food industry say. There are ready meals and there are ready meals, I suppose.

On the flip side, I am a champion preserve maker, and when I compare the list of ingredients for my marmalades and chutneys to what's in the ones available in the supermarkets, the mind does boggle somewhat.

 

[neil_merseyside]

I make ready meals, amongst other things, for a living. They are not "processed to within an inch of their life". I can walk you through the manufacture of, say, a meat pie and demonstrate this. The thing that changes is the scale. They are not easier for your gut to digest.
Edit - the whole point of manufactured foods is that they are as close as is humanly possible to something that you make at home. There have been great strides in "clean label" development etc. The point is here that if you read the ingredients you won't often find anything that sounds like a chemistry set, you will find stuff you can buy in the supermarket. This means no more modified starch, but more "maize starch" and "potato flour". No more E162, but more "beetroot juice". I might make flaky pastry on a 72-fold laminator, and it's a beautiful thing, but it's no different from me rolling and folding at home 72 times, or an artisan baker doing the same thing with a series of passes through a Rondo. It's just quicker, and fortunately I don't make a tonne of pastry at a time in my kitchen, or add butter 25kg at a time.

A ready meal isn't a meat pie though is it in the context of this conversation, it is the 99p fish pie or cottage pie et

 

[battered]

. But I do manage to stay at a sensible size (8 / 10), because the vision of one of my dad's cousins in a red velour tracksuit is, shall I say, rather motivational.

My motivation came at a "well man" checkup around Christmas.
- About 1.5 st overweight according to the height/weight chart, BMI 27ish.
- 34 waist for 5ft6, so don't get fatter.
- 3 goes at the blood pressure til she got one she liked.
- Cholesterol came back high.
4 out of 4. That's a pretty good score.
So I sorted it out, starting mid January. It's taken 4 months, but it's possible. What's most interesting is that I have known about this for 2 years and not tackled it. If I could bottle the motivation I've found and sell it, I'd be a millionaire within a week.

 

[battered]

A ready meal isn't a meat pie though is it in the context of this conversation, it is the 99p fish pie or cottage pie et

I've made those too. I can bore you to death on the subject of weight control via Turbo depositors and Ishida multihead weighers, but I'll spare you the details. There's very little difference between a meat pie and a ready meal, it's just manufacturing. I may use a travelling oven with a heating section 20m long, but it's just an oven with a steel conveyor belt travelling at a particular speed and giving a particular dwell time.

 

[Reynard]

My motivation came at a "well man" checkup around Christmas.
- About 1.5 st overweight according to the height/weight chart, BMI 27ish.
- 34 waist for 5ft6, so don't get fatter.
- 3 goes at the blood pressure til she got one she liked.
- Cholesterol came back high.
4 out of 4. That's a pretty good score.
So I sorted it out, starting mid January. It's taken 4 months, but it's possible. What's most interesting is that I have known about this for 2 years and not tackled it. If I could bottle the motivation I've found and sell it, I'd be a millionaire within a week.

A quick way to check you're not carrying too much of a spare tyre is to cut a piece of string the same height as yourself, fold it double and put it around your waist. Ideally, your waist should be less than half your height.

 

[Fab Foodie]

This equates with personal experience, when I worked as a volunteer at CA, a Food Bank, and a Debt Advice Centre. There is a similar correlation with scratch card purchase, general gambling, and tattoo acquisition, in my (admittedly not statistically significant) experience.

The common denominator is that they are all means of self gratification. The super-rich buy yachts, houses and Ferarris, the poor buy take-aways, tattoos and scratch cards. They’re almost 2 sides of the same coin....

 

[winjim]

The common denominator is that they are all means of self gratification. The super-rich buy yachts, houses and Ferarris, the poor buy take-aways, tattoos and scratch cards. They’re almost 2 sides of the same coin....

The middle class gamble on the stock market and in other financial deals, the difference being that a lot of the time when they get it wrong, we all lose.

 

[Fab Foodie]

This is the difficulty with the taxation solution. It's extremely difficult to hit the target without taxing other foods which to be honest didn't need it. As an example the sugar tax on soft drinks has hit cordials, which are now propped up with arti sweeteners to get the final sugar content below 5%, and tonic water, which was never consumed in excess and is, again, now arti sweetened to <5%. It has however been successful in reducing sugar consumption in carbonated soft drinks.

I’m generally in favour of nudge taxation and fully support the sugar tax. High Sugar carbonated drinks offer no nutritional benefit so that’s quite straightforward. One could make the same arguments for cake and confectionary.
There are foods however that might be high in sugars, Salt and fats that do however offer other nutritional benefits. Potato crisps (as opposed to Maize snacks) coukd be argued to be beneficial in that for many people a bag of crisps might be a significant source of vitamin C and fibre despite the fat and salt content. Milk is now frowned-upon, but it’s a source of great nutrition. Cheese is high fat, but a good source of Calcium and so on and so forth (I know you know this stuff). So nudge taxing is complex, however, I think there are foods for which some nutritional benefit can be claimed vs.those that are bereft of any goodness but high in cals/salt/sugar etc.

 

[Fab Foodie]

One of the Two Fat Ladies chefs went to her doc with health problems. He ran checks and asked "have you been taking antimalarial drugs for a long time?" No, never. "Well, that's strange, because the blood tests show that you have mild quinine poisoning."
You guessed it, the tonic water. You have to drink a LOT of tonic water to get quinine poisoning.

She wasn’t diluting her tonic enough....

 

[KnittyNorah]

If we can just find a few more vintage 1947s, we might have a statistically significant sample!

1947 vintage reporting for duty!

I suppose from a lower-middle-class background - dad was a schoolteacher, that being the first step up the ladder - a keen gardener, with a large allotment and a greenhouse, and mum was a excellent cook, as well as being that unusual thing - a working married woman, and mother, in the 1940s and 50s.
We seemed to eat and eat and eat. My aunts on both sides of the family seemed to be in perpetual competition with each other as to who could put the greatest amount of food on the table and which of my cousins could eat the most - yet none of us were fat; I had one cousin who was referred to as a 'bonny lass' until the age of about 9 when a growth spurt saw her rapidly change into a skinny-ma-link! My two boy cousins were said to have 'hollow legs' - where else did all the food they ate, go? Cooked breakfasts, elevenses, hot dinners, cooked teas, suppers ...
We were undoubtedly much more active in all sorts of obvious, and not so obvious ways and access to junk food much more restricted. Shops were open very restricted hours; even those children who had the money, couldn't buy sweets, crisps and fizzy drinks if the shop was closed, could they?
If anyone doubts that 'real' food is lots, lots cheaper than 'fast' food, they need to have a look at the blog https://cookingonabootstrap.com/
But of course to cook 'real' food, you need to (a) know how and (b) have a minimum of equipment to actually do it. A kilo of potatoes is cheap, but if you don't have a pan and a hob at a minimum, you're still going to go hungry ...

 

[Fab Foodie]

So... why can't fast food be part of the causes?

[I'm not saying it definitely IS! I'm saying that the other confounding factors don't RULE OUT fast food being a cause.]

Well it can and it is!