The conventional wisdom is that is more obesity in kids these days because they exercise less. If this is true, then you would expect that adding exercise into the routine of school kids would help the problem. However, research just presented at a recent Canadian Paediatric Society conference suggests that it doesn’t:

Harris said researchers looked at 13 trials of six months to three years duration in which pre- and post-BMI measurements were taken.

In studies involving nearly 10,000 children, primarily in elementary schools, none demonstrated a reduction in BMI with those who were assigned to the most phys-ed time, compared to those who didn’t have as much.

“School-based physical activity interventions do not improve BMI although they may have other beneficial health effects,” he said. “There are improvements to bone mineral density, aerobic capacity, reduced blood pressure and increased flexibility,” he added.

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Three months ago, I made the switch to a low carb diet. I had two goals, one was to continue losing weight. The other was to improve my health and reduce my risk of heart disease. After reading a number of things, most recently Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, I wanted to try a diet with very little carbohydrates and almost no sugar at all. I started a diet of mostly meat, eggs, cheese and vegetables (plus nuts and berries).

I have lost some more weight, another 10 pounds since I started. But I was also interested in the effect it would have on cholesterol and triglycerides. I hoped that it would lower my triglycerides, raise my HDL cholesterol and not raise my LDL cholesterol too much. Fortunately, I had my lipid profile done last December so I could compare. Here were the numbers then (the normal range is within brackets[]):

Triglyceride (mg/dl): 112 [40-160]
Cholesterol (mg/dl): 153 [<200]
HDL (mg/dl): 31 [29-67]
LDL (mg/dl): 100 [<130]
TC/HDL ratio: 4.94 [<5]

Not a terrible profile by conventional standards. Everything is within normal ranges. Still, HDL is a little low and the ratio is just within normal range. And even though the triglycerides aren’t bad, there is plenty of room to push that lower.

So after three months of meat, eggs, cheese, veggies and nuts, what is my lipid profile now?

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How often have you heard some variation to, “There’s no secret to weight loss, you just have to exercise and eat less.” The implications are clear, if you are fat, it’s because you are lazy (you don’t exercise enough) or you are slovenly (you eat too much). Obesity and the associated diseases are the wages of sin and the only way to overcome these temptations is through will power and virtue.

These ideas that obesity is the result of eating too much or exercising too little or both is treated as a self-evident truth. People invoke the First Law of Thermodynamics and people who argue otherwise are marginalized as not understanding the First Law.

But what if it’s wrong? What if the causality is all mixed up? What if you eat more because your body is getting fat? What if you don’t feel like exercising because you are already obese? What if simple calorie restriction is not particularly effective in losing weight? It isn’t and yet it’s repeated over and over again, “You are overweight because you overeat,” and “If you just eat less, you will lose weight.”

In this lecture by Gary Taubes, he does a great job of showing the fallacy of the conventional wisdom:

It’s a longish video, about 70 minutes, but it’s a nice introduction to his ideas. If you find it all compelling I highly recommend his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s not a diet book, it’s a science book, and it sets out to demolish some of the conventional paradigms we have about diet, obesity and disease.

UPDATE: Changed the title because we don’t need a new paradigm really, we need an old one. If you watch the video, you will understand what I mean.

I find it interesting that in the book Omnivore’s Dilemma, the author Michael Pollan takes, not one but two jabs Gary Taubes and his 2002 article, “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” The first is in the introduction, and the second is here:

It remains to be seen whether the current Atkins school theory of ketosis—the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates—will someday seem as quaintly quackish as Kellogg’s theory of colonic autointoxication. What is striking is just how little it takes to set off one of these applecart-toppling nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can alter this nation’s diet overnight. One article in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 almost single-handedly set off the recent spasm of carbophobia in America.

I wonder if Pollan has read Taubes book. I’d be shocked if he hadn’t. To me there is much that they agree on. For instance, I bet they both would agree that we would be more healthy if we ate like our great grandparents did, and that traditional cuisines lead to healthier people than modern processed diets. They both see the large amount of processed carbohydrates like high fructose corn syrup as harmful to those that eat it. Furthermore, Taubes goes to great lengths to establish that cutting carbs to lose weight is not a late 20th century fad. It’s the accumulated wisdom of doctors and patients going back at least two centuries, precisely the kind of cultural wisdom that Pollan so admires in traditional cuisines.

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Last Spring, I listened to Freakonomics on CD as I drove from Illinois to Arizona. In the appendix, the authors have a short article on Seth Roberts and his strange idea that drinking sugar water can lead to weight loss.

A month or two later, frustrated with my inability to lose weight on my own, I looked up Seth’s scientific paper online about what makes food fattening and tried his method. It worked! I started losing weight again.

After a few weeks of sipping sugar water and drinking olive oil, I spent a week in New York for the Del Close Marathon. I was explaining it to a friend and he responded, “Oh you mean the Shangri-la Diet.”

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So far so good. I’ve made it through the first five full days on a low carb diet. Besides a small serving of berries and full fat yogurt each day, my diet has been meat, egg and cheese (usually with a serving or two of green leafy vegetables a day). My typical breakfast looks like this:

After five days, I’ve had no real weight loss. After a big meal, I’ve occasionally felt a bit overfull, which probably means I’m eating more than I need to. And on day two I had a small carb crash. But in general I’ve felt good. I haven’t felt very hungry. The food is relatively satisfying and the restrictions haven’t been hard to stay within. I miss the fruits and vegetables a bit, but I’m thinking that I’ll add a few servings of them back eventually.

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I’m surprised how long it has taken me to get through Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. After 2 and half weeks, I’m still not done. I’m on the last chapter though. Maybe I’m just a slow reader.

The book is dense, bringing together a huge number of scientific studies that date back to the beginning of the the 20th century. His goal seems to be to overwhelm the reader with evidence that many of the assumptions about diet, obesity and disease are wrong. He isn’t content to give you one or two examples of studies that suggest that carbohydrates are the primary factor behind obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and a range of other modern illnesses that were rare before the 20th century. He piles it on, determined to make sure that someone can’t read his book and dismiss it as “some fad diet book.” If you say he is wrong, you better bring your citations with you.

I’ve enjoyed the ride, but I wonder how many readers get bogged down and don’t finish it, or don’t care so much about the reams of evidence that Taubes has compiled and want to skip to his conclusions. One passage near the end that jumped out at me as something that people need to know:

By the mid-1960s, four facts had been established beyond reasonable doubt: (1) carbohydrates are singularly responsible for prompting insulin secretion; (2) insulin is singularly responsible for inducing fat accumulation; (3) dietary carbohydrates are required for excess fat accumulation; and (4) both Type 2 diabetics and the obese have abnormally elevated levels of circulating insulin and a “greatly exaggerated” insulin response to carbohydrates in the diet

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I have been slowing moving toward a low carb diet over the last couple of months and yesterday I took a big plunge to a diet that is mostly meat, eggs, cheese and some dairy. I am having a small amount of fruit and vegetables, but I’m cutting all sugar, bread, pasta, potatoes or other big sources of carbs for a while.

It’s very odd eating this much meat, cheese and eggs, especially when it’s not mixed in with noodles or bread. It’s almost a chore to eat two scrambled eggs and a ham steak for breakfast. I get full fast and even after a couple of days I’m kinda bored with the menu. On the positive side, I’ve already seen the scale start to budge a little and I’m feeling pretty good overall.

On the negative side, I think I’m experiencing a little carb crash. Today after lunch, I got very tired and my body felt a little tingly. It’s supposed to go away after a few days as your body switches gears and gets used to all the missing carbs. My plan is to eat a few berries with plain yogurt when I feel that way.

Yesterday morning (3/26), before I started the low carb diet, I weighed 176.4, about 20 pounds from my goal weight.

In my search to find relevant scientific research on various diet and nutrition subjects, I’ve spent a fair amount of time searching for papers published on the internet. Often this is frustrating because many (most?) scientific journals keep their articles behind some sort of subscription firewall. Since I’m neither a scientist or a student studying science, it doesn’t seem practical to subscribe to these journals just to read one or two articles.

However, since I’m taking some classes at the local community college, I do have access to their journal resources. I decided to check out what’s available at the library. When I got there, I started by searching for some of the articles I had found before, ones which only had the abstract available publicly. When I brought of the article on the screen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could read the whole thing online. Apparently if I access the article directly from these computers, I don’t need a subscription.

Next I noticed that the article was a bit long and I only had a few minutes before I needed to leave. I considered printing the article and then I remembered that if you send HTML documents to your Kindle email address, the document will be sent to your Kindle for only $0.10, a lot less than printing it out on paper.

I was very excited as the first few papers showed up on my Kindle only a few minutes after I had emailed them to be processed. I’m guessing that I’ll be doing this quite frequently in the future. If I have a document that I need to bring with me, I’ll send it to my Kindle instead of printing it.