Going in the Right Direction

Obesity is the most ominous harbinger of poor health that Western nations currently face.  Tens of millions of people will fall prey to disability, putting our health care systems under greater strain than has previously been seen.

There are many people and institutions working to reduce this problem, but their point of attack is often illogical and misinformed.  1st there are the many quick-fix promises and gimmicks.  Obesity is not a condition that can be fixed in a few weeks or even a few months, and you should be aware of diets, potions and pills that create rapid weight loss with no promise of good health in the future.  The diet that helps to reduce weight in the short run needs to be the same diet that creates and maintains health in the long run.

2nd, the tendency to focus on obesity as an independent, isolated disease is misplaced.  Considering obesity in this manner directs our attention to a search for specific cures while ignoring control of the other diseases to which obesity is strongly linked.  That is, we sacrifice context.

Also, I would urge that we ignore the suggestion that knowing its genetic basis might control obesity.  There was great publicity given to the discovery of the “obesity gene”.  Then there was the discovery of the 2nd, then the 3rd, the 4th and on and on.  The purpose behind the obesity gene search is to allow researchers to develop a drug capable of knocking out or inactivating the underlying cause of obesity.  This is extremely short-sighted, as well as unproductive.  Believing that specific identifiable genes are the basis of obesity (i.e., it’s all in the family) also allows us to fatalistically blame a cause that we cannot control.

We can control the cause.  It is right at the end of our fork.”

More China Study clips Here

 

Exercise

A clip from The China Study, by T.Colin Campbell

“….The slimming effect of physical activity is obvious.  Scientific evidence concurs.  A recent review of all the credible studies compared the relationship between body weight and exercise and showed that people who were more physically active had less body weight.  Another set of studies showed that exercising on a regular basis helped to keep off weight originally lost through exercise programs.

No surprise here either.

Starting and stopping an exercise program is not a good idea.  It is better to build it into your lifestyle so that you will become and continue to be more fit over all, not just burn off calories.  How much exercise is needed to keep the pounds off?  A rough estimate derived from a good review suggested that exercising a mere 15-40 mins/day, every day, will maintain a body weight that is 11-18 lbs lighter than it would otherwise be.

The advantages of combining diet and exercise to control body weight were brought home to me by a very simple study involving our experimental animals.  Recall that our experimental animals were fed diets containing either the traditional 20% casein (cow’s milk protein) or the much lower 5% casein.  The rats consuming the 5% casein diets had strikingly less cancer, lower blood cholesterol levels and live longer lives.  They also consumed slightly more calories but burned them off as body heat.

Some of us had noticed over the course of these experiments that the 5% casein animals seemed to be more active than the 20% casein animals.  To test this idea, we housed rats fed either 5% or 20% casein diets in cages equipped with exercise wheels outfitted with meters to record the number of turns of the wheel.  Within the very 1st day, the 5% casein-fed animals voluntarily “exercised” in the wheel about twice as much as the 20% casein-fed animals.  Exercise remained considerably higher for the 5% casein animals throughout the 2 wks of the study.

Now we can combine some really interesting observations on body weight.  A plant-based diet operates on calorie balance to keep body weight under control in 2 ways.  1st it discharges calories as body heat instead of storing them as body fat, and it doesn’t take many calories to make a big difference over the course of a year.  2nd, a plant-based diet encourages more physical activity.  And, as body weight goes down, it becomes easier to be physically active….”

More China Study clips Here

 

Why This Will Work For You

A clip from The China Study, T.Colin Campbell

“…So there is a solution to the weight-gain problem.  But how can you apply it in your own life?

First of all, throw away ideas of counting calories.  Generally speaking, you can eat as much as you want and still lose weight–as long as you eat the right type of food.

Secondly, stop expecting sacrifice, deprivation or blandness; there’s no need.  Feeling hungry is a sign that something is wrong, and prolonged hunger causes your body to slow the overall rate of metabolism in defense.  Moreover, there are mechanisms in our bodies that naturally allow the right kind of plant-based foods to nourish us, without our having to think about every morsel of food we put in our mouths.  It is a worry-free way to eat.  Give your body the right food and it will do the right thing….”

To Be Continued

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Obesity Continued – Part IV (& Final Part ;))

This is a bit of a lengthier post than normal,  I did not want to break up this information especially on a topic that is an ‘Achilles heel’ for a huge number of people.  Particularly addressing those that do not see weight come off, and why that is, so bare with and stick with me 😉

A Clip from The China Study, by T.Colin Campbell

“….Published results for still more intervention studies using a low-fat, whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet (10%, or less, of diet being non-plant-based)

• About 2-5 lbs lost after 12 days
• About 10 lbs lost in 3 weeks
• 16 lbs lost over 12 weeks
• 24 lbs lost after 1 year

All of these results show that consuming a whole foods, mostly plant-based diet will help you to lose weight and, furthermore, it can happen quickly.  The only question is how much weight can you lose.  In most of these studies, the people who shed the most pounds were those who started with the most excess weight.  After the initial weight loss, the weight can be kept off for the long-term by staying on a whole foods, primarily plant-based consumption, which most importantly losing weight this way is consistent with long-term optimum health.

Some people, of course, can be on a plant-based diet and still not lose weight.  There are a few very good reasons for this.  First and foremost, losing body weight on a plant-based diet is much less likely to occur if the diet includes too many refined carbohydrates.  Sweets, pastries, pastas and alcohol won’t do it.  These are high in readily digested sugars and starches and often times very high in fat as well.  These highly processed unnatural consumptions are not part of a plant-based diet that works to reduce body weight and promote health.

Notice that a strict vegetarian diet is not necessarily the same thing as a whole foods, plant-based diet.  Some people become vegetarian only to replace meat with dairy foods, added oils and refined carbohydrates, including pasta made with refined grains and sugars.  These are referred to as “junk-food vegetarians” because they are not consuming a nutritious diet.

The 2nd reason weight loss may be elusive is if a person never engages in consistent physical activity.  A reasonable amount of physical activity, sustained on a regular basis pays vital dividends.

Thirdly, certain people have a family predisposition for overweight bodies that make their challenge more difficult.  If you are one of these, I can only say that you need to be especially rigorous in your whole foods plant-based, “non-junk-foods”, diet and exercise.  In rural China, we noticed that obese people simply did not exist, even though Chinese immigrants in Western countries do succumb to obesity.  Now as the dietary and lifestyle practices of people in China are becoming more like ours, so too have their bodies become more like ours.  For those with genetic pre-dispositions, it doesn’t take much bad food before their change in diet starts to cause problems.

Keeping body weight off is a long-term lifestyle choice.  Gimmicks that produce impressively large, quick weight losses don’t work in the long-term.  Short-term gains should not come along with long-term pain, like kidney problems, heart disease, cancer, bone and joint ailments brought on with popular diet fads.  If the weight was gained slowly, over a period of months and years, why would you expect to take it off healthily in a matter of weeks?…”

More China Study clips Here

The Solution – Obesity Continued Part III

A Clip from The China Study, by T.Colin Campbell

“…The Solution to losing weight is a whole foods, plant-based diet, coupled with a reasonable amount of exercise.  It is a long-term lifestyle change, rather than a quick fix fad, and it can provide sustained weight loss while minimizing risk of chronic disease.

Have you ever known anyone who regularly consumes fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grain foods-and rarely, if ever, consumes meat or junk foods like chips, french fries and candy bars?  What is his or her weight like?  If you know many people like this, you have probably noticed that they tend to have a healthy weight.  Now think of traditional Asian cultures (Chinese, Japanese, Indian), where a couple of billion people have been eating a mostly plant-based diet for thousands of years.  It’s hard to imagine these people-at least until recently- as anything other than slender.

Now imagine a guy buying 2 hotdogs and ordering his 2nd beer at a baseball game, or a woman ordering a cheeseburger, fries and a beer.  The people in these images look different, don’t they?  Unfortunately the hotdog, cheeseburger, beer image is rapidly becoming the “all-American” image.  I have had visitors from other countries tell me that one of the first things they notice arriving in America is the exceptional number of fat people.

Solving this problem does not require magic tricks or complex equations involving blood types or carbohydrate counting or soul searching.  Simply trust your observations on who is slim, vigorous and healthy, and who is not.  Or trust the findings of some impressive research studies, large and small, showing time and time again that vegetarians and vegans are slimmer than their meat-eating counterparts.  People in these studies who are vegetarian or vegan are anywhere from 5-30lbs slimmer than their fellow citizens.

In a separate intervention study, overweight subjects were told to eat as much as they wanted of foods that were mostly low-fat, whole-food and plant-based.  In 3 weeks these people lost an average of 17 lbs.

At the Pritikin Center, 4500 people went thru their 3 week program got similar results.  By feeding a mostly plant based diet and promoting exercise, the Center found that its clients lost 5.5% of their body weight over 3 weeks.

To Be Continued

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Consequences for the Adult – Obesity Continued

A clip from ‘The China Study’ by T.Colin Campbell

“…If you are obese, you may not be able to do many things that could make your life more enjoyable.  You may find that you cannot play vigorously with your children or grandchildren, participate in sports, find a comfortable seat in a movie theatre or airplane, or have an active sex life.  In fact, even sitting still in a chair may be impossible without experiencing back or joint pain.  For many. standing is hard on the knees or hips.  Carrying around too much weight can dramatically affect physical mobility, work, mental health, self-perception and social life.  It isn’t completely about death, it’s also about missing many of the more enjoyable things in life.

No one desires to be overweight.  So why is it that 2 out of 3 adult Americans are overweight?  Why is 1/3 of the population obese?

Going on special weight-loss diet plans and popping pills to cut our appetites or rearrange our metabolism have become a national pastime.

This is an economic black hole that sucks our money away without offering anything in return.  Imagine paying $40 to a service man to fix your leaky kitchen sink, and then 2 weeks later, the sink pipes explode and flood the kitchen and it costs $500 to repair.  I bet you wouldn’t ask that guy to fix your sink again!  So then why do we endlessly try those weight-loss plans, books, drinks, energy bars and assorted gimmicks when they don’t deliver as promised.

I applaud people for trying to achieve healthy weight.  I don’t question the worthiness or dignity of overweight people anymore than I question cancer victims.  My criticism is of a societal system that allows and even encourages this problem.  I believe, for example, that we are drowning in an ocean of very bad information, too much of it intended to put money into someone else’s pockets.  What we really need, then, is a new solution comprised of good information for individual people to use at a price that they can afford….”

The China Study, by T.Colin Campbell – To Be Continued

This YouTube video (some of you have seen it before) goes through the top 16 killers of people and how 15 of the 16 are avoidable by eating plant based, an intelligent, comical, dry, factual delivery:

Uprooting The Leading Causes of Death 2012

More China Study Clips Here

The China Study Weighs In

A Clip From The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell

‘….What we found was astonishing.  The average calorie intake was 30% higher among the least active Chinese than among average Americans.  Yet, body weight was 20% lower.  How can it be that even the least active Chinese consume more calories yet have no overweight problems?

Consuming diets high in protein and fat transfers calories away from their conversion into body heat to their storage form-as body fat.  In contrast diets low in protein and fat cause calories to be “lost” as body heat.

This is what our China Study data show.  Chinese consume more calories both because they are more physically active and because their consumption of low-fat, low-protein diets shifts conversion of these calories away from body fat to body heat.  This is true even for the least physically active Chinese.  We saw the same phenomenon in our experimental animals fed the low-protein diets.  They routinely consumed slightly more calories, gained less weight, disposed of the extra calories as body heat and voluntarily exercised more while still having far less cancer than animals on standard diets.  We found that calories were “burned” at a faster rate and transformed into body heat as more oxygen was consumed.

Understanding that diet can cause small shifts in calorie metabolism that lead to big shifts in body weight is an important and useful concept.  It means that there is an orderly process of controlling body weight over time that does work, as opposed to the disorderly process of crash diets that don’t work.  It also accounts for the frequent observations that people who consume low-protein, low-fat diets composed of whole plant foods have far less difficulty with weight problems, even if they consume the same, or even slightly more, total calories.

More China Study Clips Here

 

The Truth About Carbohydrates

A Clip From The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell

‘…An unfortunate outcome of the recent popularity of diet books is that people are more confused than ever about the health value of carbohydrates.  As you will see in this book, there is a mountain of scientific evidence to show that the healthiest diet you can possibly consume is a high-carbohydrate diet.  It has been shown to reverse heart disease, reverse diabetes, prevent a plethora of chronic diseases, and yes, to cause significant weight loss.  But it’s not quite as simple as that.

At least 99% of the carbohydrates that we consume are derived from fruits, vegetables and grains. When these foods are in their unprocessed, unrefined, natural state, they are in their so-called ‘complex’ form.  This category of carbohydrates includes the many forms of dietary fiber, almost all of which remain undigested-but still provide substantial health benefits.  In addition, these complex carbohydrates from whole foods are packaged with generous amounts of vitamins, minerals and accessible energy.  Fruits, vegetables and whole grains are the healthiest foods you can consume, and they are primarily made of carbohydrates.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are highly processed, highly refined carbohydrates that have been stripped of their fiber, vitamins, and minerals.  Typical simple carbs are found in foods like white bread, processed snack items including crackers and chips made with white flour, sweets including pastries and candy bars and sugar-laden soft drinks.  These highly refined carbohydrates originate from grains or sugar plants, like sugar cane or the sugar beet, broken down during digestion to the simplest form, and absorbed in the body to blood sugar, glucose.

Eating this way is a bad idea.  You will not derive the health benefits of a plant-based diet eating these foods.  The health benefits of a high-carb diet come from eating the complex carbs found in whole grains, fruits and vegetables.  Eat an apple, a zucchini or a plate of brown rice topped with beans and other vegetables.’

To Be Continued…

More China Study Clips Here

The Atkins Crisis

A Clip from The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell

‘…In case you haven’t noticed, there is an elephant in the room.  It goes by the name “low-carb diet”, and it has become very popular.  Variations of this one theme: eat as much protein, meat and fat as you want, but stay away from those “fatty” carbs.  As you have seen already in this book, eating this way is perhaps the single greatest threat to American health we currently face.  So what is the story anyway?

It is difficult to know where to begin to refute the maze of misinformation and false promises commonly made by those untrained in nutrition, who have never conducted any peer-reviewed, professionally based experimental research.  And yet they are immensely popular.  Why?  Because people do lose weight initially.

One published study funded by the Atkins Center for Complimentary Medicine, found subjects lost an average of 20 pounds in 6 months and average blood cholesterol levels decreased slightly.  These subjects were restricted from the average American consumption of 2250 calories/day to 1450 calories/day.  That’s 35% fewer calories.  If you eat worms and cardboard, if you eat 35% less calories you will lose weight and your cholesterol levels will improve in the short run but this is not to say that worms and cardboard are a healthy diet.

The study also found subjects suffered from constipation, bad breath, headaches, noted hair loss, increase menstrual bleeding.  Adverse effects of this diet in children include calcium oxalate, urate kidney stones, vomiting, amenorrhea (losing one’s period), hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol) and vitamin deficiencies.  Subjects also had a stunning 53% increase in the amount of calcium they excreted in their urine.

An additional review of low-carb diet by researchers in Australia conclude “Complications such as heart arrhythmias, cardiac contractile function impairment, sudden death, osteoporosis, kidney damage, increased cancer risk, impairment of physical activity and lipid abnormalities are linked to long-term restriction of carbohydrates in the diet.”

One teenage girl recently died suddenly after being on a high-protein diet.  In short most people will be unable to maintain this diet for the rest of their lives, and even if anybody manages to do so, they may be asking for serious health problems down the road…’

The Truth about Carbohydrates is what we will talk about next.

More China Study Clips Here