tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post7923323579409586901..comments2024-03-28T08:06:43.198-04:00Comments on The Silicon Graybeard: Had To Adult TodaySiGraybeardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00280583031339062059noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-21720243097652784612017-01-31T21:29:46.144-05:002017-01-31T21:29:46.144-05:00We're about a mile from the original topic of ...We're about a mile from the original topic of the article, which is my disagreement with the French (or Blooomberg's) interference in peoples' lives by outlawing sodas, so I'll just leave it here. You say an awful lot that I've never heard anyone else say. No offense, but my motto is always, "in God we trust, everyone else bring data and keep your hands where I can see them". Let's just leave it there. <br /><br />SiGraybeardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00280583031339062059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-30897958816281248522017-01-31T16:33:51.374-05:002017-01-31T16:33:51.374-05:00SOME physicians are switching over to treating ob...SOME physicians are switching over to treating obesity by carb restriction certainly not all. It is a fad and not a healthy fad. Dieting does work but it requires will power. Since your weight is in a large degree determined by genetics everyone who diets will experience different results. I am lucky, I eat everything and eat four meals a day plus snacks and my weight is normal for my height. I have been the same weight for 50 years. My wife recently decided to lose 60 lbs and did it in 6 months by merely cutting her meal portions and sticking to it. Arguably she could have done the same with any fad diet (i.e. low fat, vegan, Mediterranean, etc.) <br /><br />That there are more ‘fat’ people today I would not argue against. The reasons are really simple. I blame welfare and it’s associated programs for a lot of it. And of course the more obvious one is simply the low cost and ready availability of food in Western society. I am 73 and I agree that there are more fat people today, especially more fat young people than there was 70 or 50 years ago. I also grew up poor and I could write a whole book about what we ate and how often we were hungry. Also when I was a kid we were moving all the time during our waking hours. Not so today, between TV and computers kids today are 10 times more sedentary than 50 years ago. This takes a toll. <br /><br />The problem with the BMI is it is totally arbitrary. It was established long ago in a small population of people during a time when humans were shorter and food was harder to get. I doubt there is any value at all to BMI except as a scare tactic. It shouldn't be necessary since your eye can tell you if someone is overweight or obese. What the BMI and your eye cannot tell you is if someone is healthy. Oddly there is something called the obesity paradox where statistically people who are overweight (according to the BMI) by the same factor as a group that is underweight are statistically healthier. <br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-49299084337073656732017-01-31T16:32:39.222-05:002017-01-31T16:32:39.222-05:00Metabolic syndrome is a made up condition. All i...Metabolic syndrome is a made up condition. All it really means is some of your lab tests fall outside or near the edge of what has been determined to be normal. You could be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome at age 18 and live to be 100, it is largely meaningless. It is used as a scare tactic by doctors to encourage you to change bad habits but by itself it means nothing. The rate of type 2 diabetes has not changed. There are two things going on that have allowed through the magic of statistics to make you believe that the rate of diabetes has changed: 1. Some years back science acknowledged that about half of the people with diabetes were undiagnosed. And that since early treatment is beneficial it is worth the effort to test more people and at younger ages to find those undiagnosed diabetics. But as soon as they began diagnosing them it increased the number of people with diagnosed diabetes and parts of the medical community ran with that claiming that the rate of diabetes was increasing. A lie! 2. Different ethnic groups have different rates of diabetes . Not surprising since diabetes is genetic (not caused by eating carbs). The U.S. population is gaining an increasing percentage of those ethnic groups with higher rates of diabetes (Blacks and Hispanics). Thus as a result the overall rate of diabetes in the entire population of the U.S. is increasing slightly. The rate for Northern Europeans, Africans and Hispanics hasn’t changed but the percentage of each of these groups in the population has and thus the apparent rate has increased slightly.<br /><br />Fructose and glucose are the two predominant sugars in our diet. Glucose is absorbed directly and easily converted to glycogen for essential body functions. Fructose is easily converted to glycogen by the liver. Both of these processes are normal and correct functions and present zero harm to people with normal health. Sugar is essential. You cannot maintain body temperature, think or perform physical activity without it. If you do not consume carbs your body will convert fat and protein to glycogen. If you do not consume any food your body cannibalizes itself turning muscle and fats into glycogen. <br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-47441586526815443992017-01-31T12:07:22.107-05:002017-01-31T12:07:22.107-05:00I can't summarize whole books here, but that i...I can't summarize whole books here, but that information is about half true, and jumbled together so that it misses the point. <br /><br />Yes, you get the <i>tendency toward obesity</i> from your parents, but there's a lot of good solid studies (I've heard around 70) backing up the observation that excess carbohydrate leads to the host of problems we're observing in every country since the medical establishments started pounding not to eat fat: things like fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, etc.. Yes, the glucose from a potato or apple is exactly the same as the glucose from table sugar, but that's the whole point. The apple, the potato and the table sugar should <i>all</i> be avoided. The fructose in the apple and table sugar brings its own problems that there's no room to get into here. <br /><br />The inherited genetic tendency means <i>not everyone is susceptible</i>, but just looking at the western population, I'd guess on the order of 65 to 75% is susceptible; that is, they do have that genetic tendency. "Dieting" in the sense of "eat less and move more", has been demonstrated to be singularly ineffective at getting susceptible people to lose weight and keep it off. In head to head studies, low carbohydate diets outperform calorie restricted diets. (See the <a href="http://www.drperlmutter.com/study/comparison-of-the-atkins-zone-ornish/" rel="nofollow">A to Z study</a>). Furthermore, looking at apparent weight is a bad judge because there are people who have the metabolic problems but are not obese ("fat on the inside, skinny on the outside"). Physicians are switching over to treating obesity by carbohydrate restriction <i>because it's working</i> and getting people off medication. <br /><br />If you look at pictures of normal people, crowds at fairs and pictures of people at home, from the 1850s forward, parents aren't shaped the same as their children. Adults are thicker bodied than children. The idea that we shouldn't change our body composition as we age, embodied in the BMI, is relatively new, but that isn't exclusive to the BMI values. That was also the message in the old Metlife Height/weight tables. There were no exceptions for age in those.<br />SiGraybeardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00280583031339062059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-49262897275022582122017-01-31T10:54:19.238-05:002017-01-31T10:54:19.238-05:00This all political and superstition based and has ...This all political and superstition based and has nothing to do with science or health. 100% of the carbs you consume must be converted to sugar before it can pass through your intestine walls into your blood stream. In other words your body doesn't know if you ate a spoon full of sugar or a bite of potato. Sugar is the most studied food in history and the only thing that science has found that is harmful about sugar is it causes dental carries.<br /><br />Obesity is genetic, pure and simple. You don't get it from sugar you get it from your parents. Ditto for being overweight. Your body wants to be a certain weight range and given an abundance of food and lacking the necessity of vigorous exercise it will reach that weight. But the two are NOT the same. Being overweight can (usually) be corrected easily with modest dieting. Correcting obesity is much more difficult and literally requires a starvation diet to reach a more normal weight and after that a near starvation diet to sustain a normal weight. <br /><br />In 1998 the world switched to BMI as a measure of weight health. Immediately the numbers of people who were obese and overweight doubled because of this change. So don't put too much value in national obesity and overweight stats. While today there may well be more people who are overweight or obese that is simply a result of ample food and the decrease in the necessity of vigorous exercise and has zippo to do with sugar. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-21100500239822656272017-01-31T10:19:55.448-05:002017-01-31T10:19:55.448-05:00I ran into that piece from Stu while chasing a sto...I ran into that piece from Stu while chasing a story down that went on the Blaze News site. I listen to Beck less than I used to, but still listen. <br /><br />But that story about him endorsing Hillary is false. Or, at least, he denied it from the time it first hit the web. Not that he wasn't Never Trump, but he said several times he couldn't vote for Hildebeest either, and implied he would either leave it blank and not vote or write in someone. <br />SiGraybeardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00280583031339062059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-91263890035404550052017-01-31T10:15:15.084-05:002017-01-31T10:15:15.084-05:00Yeah, the gut bacteria field is something that lot...Yeah, the gut bacteria field is something that lots of people suddenly seem to be important, but nobody seems to quite understand what it all means. It's a very new field. <br /><br />One of the doctors I follow on this is Dr. Adam Nally who's a bariatric physician. He treats his patients with a low carb, high fat keotgenic diet. He says he personally drinks diet sodas with aspartame, but goes out of his way to avoid acesulfame K. There aren't many of those. I only know one: A&W Diet Creme Soda. <br /><br />Another doc is Eric Westman, who runs the Duke University Lifestyle clinic. He's in the "don't care" category. Yes, it would be better to avoid them, but if the artificial sweeteners help someone avoid the carbohydrates, it's really the carbs that matter. <br /><br />Right now, I can't recall who it was that said that saccharin was better than the newer sweeteners like aspartame. (Need more coffee)<br /><br />Others, like Dr. Jason Fung, (the Canadian nephrologist who teaches fasting - lots of videos on YouTube) is in the avoid all sweeteners category. <br /><br />Personally, my takeaway is a little is probably way better for you than actual sugar, but drinking a tub of diet soda probably isn't tremendously better for you than drinking a tub of HFCS sweetened soda. <br /><br />In my first iteration of college, I was a biochem major. Got knocked out of college by some "life events" in my senior year. In many ways, this stuff is like "home turf". <br />SiGraybeardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00280583031339062059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-30621242454180856132017-01-31T09:35:06.521-05:002017-01-31T09:35:06.521-05:00It gets kind of dense, but the shape of the compou...It gets kind of dense, but the shape of the compounds is what's important and how they key into receptors rather than their chemical composition.<br /><br />Organics get weird, fast.<br /><br />Again, recollection from ages ago, the shape is why we think they're sweet, and that pre-loads the "sugar!" response and then when they start being processed those same shapes click into the right receptors to cause a release of insulin.<br /><br />The controversial part when I read this was if insulin was reacting with the non-sugar compounds in a nastier way than with everyday sugar.<br /><br />Plus there's the recent study that says aspartame might be blocking an enzyme that would otherwise be helping you shed weight.<br /><br />That got me thinking that while sugar isn't good for me, at least it's something I've evolved to deal with.<br /><br />I add in all the recent stuff talking about how important our gut bacteria mix turns out to be and it really makes me wonder if the non-sugars poison stuff there we wanted to keep. This is a fairly young field, so no solid conclusions from them yet, but it appears promising.Angus McThaghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09295013525738248801noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-32013678221015215732017-01-31T00:34:35.951-05:002017-01-31T00:34:35.951-05:00Glenn Beck? I'm surprised you would be listen...Glenn Beck? I'm surprised you would be listening to anything associated with the guy. He's the leader of the Never Trumpers and told us voting for Hillary was the "moral" choice. Something is wrong with Glenn Beck.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-72928847150155562982017-01-30T22:37:29.354-05:002017-01-30T22:37:29.354-05:00From my reading and researching, that's a conf...From my reading and researching, that's a confusing picture. In particular, different writers appear to have different ideas for the amount of reaction and which ones cause more reaction than others. It's quite a messy picture. <br /><br />Non-sugar sweeteners include all the sugar alcohols like sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, and erythritol, which are chemically rather different from aspartame, which is different from sucralose, different from saccharin and on and on. Chemically, things we call sweeteners can have almost nothing in common. <br /><br />I think some people say to avoid artificial sweeteners to break the habit of always having sweet-tasting foods. In general, that's not a bad idea. <br /><br />SiGraybeardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00280583031339062059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1592992209402300549.post-77764261723921722162017-01-30T22:16:36.566-05:002017-01-30T22:16:36.566-05:00Most of the non-sugar sweeteners trigger the same ...Most of the non-sugar sweeteners trigger the same responses as actual sugar, IIRC.<br /><br />The only difference is they don't have calories.Angus McThaghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09295013525738248801noreply@blogger.com