Stanford study suggests sitting more is making us fat too....

Tuesday, 7-29-2014

1.  Since the end of World War II in 1945 people drink for more soft drinks and eat far more fast food and eat out more often.  Between then and now, we have clearly added far more of the components of those foods compared to what people ate then.

Food components such as refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, and other fattening, health harming, and nutrition and fiber poor ingredients are now 25% of the calorie intake of many Americans. 

No surprise, people who stop it all and eat vegetables and health OK protein foods and some health OK oils that add up to 10% of their previous intake usually lose 15% of their previous body weight as fat.  This has proven to have massive health benefits cutting the risk of heart disease, stroke, some cancers, and even mental decline.

(People who do this also stop ingesting MSG which is a proven fattener and stop most of their previous intake of hydrogenated oils which is a proven heart attack starter that’s unusually effective – close to as bad as smoking.)

Even better once you get used to the new way of eating, you are LESS hungry more often than before.

Until recently, most writing about the trends in rising obesity for Americans since that time have focused on those trends in added fatteners in the diet of the average American.

Clearly this has been an accurate focus.

 Stanford researchers thought that this trend may have already peaked but Americans were still getting fatter every year during the last 20 years or so.

 The data they found suggest that more recently it’s also the increase in sedentary time and lower amount of physical activity that is driving the obesity increase.

Clearly the increase in obesity in the last 30 years IS still caused by what the calorie intake is made up of.

And the increase in calories from 40 and 50 years ago is also made up mostly of the harmful and fattening foods and drinks that increased so much in most people's diet.

High fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, real sugar, refined hybrid GMO wheat, MSG, and hydrogenated oils --

all went up in average intake during that time and are clearly part of the cause. 

(Each of them has been found to help cause chronic diseases and increased obesity and visceral fat.)

For individuals, cutting the intake of each of these to zero and cutting way back on real sugar, will help remove obesity. 

And, successfully working up to eating 6 servings a day of vegetables would help cut obesity AND has proven health benefits and longevity.  (Of course, adding them without cutting out the fattening foods and drinks is much less effective for health and much less effective for fat loss.)

2.  It seems a recent study at Stanford also found that being completely sedentary DOES cause obesity and is a cause of the more recent rise in obesity.

Their data indicate that getting half of the people who are completely sedentary now into exercise at least 10 minutes in three or four sessions a week would cut down on obesity.

So would having a way to exercise at your desk at work or at your computer at home or both that at least half the people used every day for at least an hour or two.

The write up of their study was in several media outlets.  This one is from Medical News Today

“Rise in obesity 'due to decline in exercise, not over-eating'   Tuesday 8 July 2014

A study from Stanford University reported in The American Journal of Medicine suggests the rise in obesity in the US is likely due to increased sedentary lifestyles across the nation, and not eating too many calories.

The researchers came to this conclusion after studying data for the last 20 years from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) that shows there has been a sharp decline in levels of leisure time physical activity among Americans - especially among young women - accompanied by an increase in average body mass index (BMI), while calorie consumption has remained somewhat steady.

Lead author Uri Ladabaum, Associate Professor of Medicine in Stanford University School of Medicine, and colleagues analyzed trends in obesity, waistline obesity, physical activity and calorie intake in American adults up to 2010.

In 2010 over half of American women reported no leisure-time exercise

More than half (51.7%) of female adults in the US reported no leisure-time physical activity in 2010. This proportion is nearly treble what it was in 1994, when 19.1% of adult American women reported doing no exercise.

For men, while the proportion who reported no leisure-time physical activity in 2010 was lower than for women, at 43.5%, this is nearly four times the 11.4% of men who said they did not exercise in 1994.

When they analyzed the data by subgroups, the team found women, and black and Mexican-American women in particular, showed the greatest decreases in reported exercise.

BMI and average waist size have also climbed steadily

Meanwhile, across the same period, the US saw average body mass index rise by an average of 0.37% per year, with the most dramatic increase being in young women.

The team also looked at changes in abdominal obesity, which some consider an independent risk factor for death, even among people with normal BMIs - thus being "apple-shaped" is considered riskier than "pear-shaped" for the same height and weight.

A person is considered abdominally obese if their waist circumference is 88 cm (34.65 in) or more for a woman, and 102 cm (40.15 in) or more for a man.

The researchers found that average waist size went up by 0.37% per year for women and 0.27% for men.

They found that abdominal obesity has gone up in both normal-weight and overweight women, while for men it only went up in overweight men.

Prof. Ladabaum says these changes have occurred in the absence of significant changes in calorie consumption:

"At the population level, we found a significant association between the level of leisure-time physical activity, but not daily caloric intake, and the increases in both BMI and waist circumference."

Although he and his colleagues did not investigate the types of food consumed, they were able to calculate the total daily calorie, fat, carbohydrate, and protein consumption over the period. They found these have not changed significantly over the last 20 years.

"It remains controversial whether overweight alone increases mortality risk," says Prof. Ladabaum, "but the trends in abdominal obesity among the overweight are concerning in light of the risks associated with increased waist circumference independent of BMI."

'Troublesome trends in younger adults'

While increased calorie intake is often blamed for the current obesity epidemic in the US, the researchers say they found no evidence of this in their study, as Prof. Ladabaum concludes:

"Our findings do not support the popular notion that the increase of obesity in the United States can be attributed primarily to sustained increase over time in the average daily caloric intake of Americans."

He also warns that that while it looks like obesity rates appear to be leveling out in the US, their "analyses highlight troublesome trends in younger adults, in women, and in abdominal obesity prevalence, as well as persistent racial/ethnic disparities."

In January 2014, Medical News Today reported how a study from Kansas State University suggests less sitting and more moving improves health and quality of life. The researchers showed people who do this have a lower risk for chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, breast cancer, colon cancer and others.

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD

Here’s the link to the original article.

Rise in obesity 'due to decline in exercise, not over-eating'

http://mnt.to/l/4pkD

In the last 20 years, while calorie intake has not changed much, obesity among

Americans has continued to rise, in line with a decline in exercise, especially

among young women.

3.  Meanwhile three things are true about diet, exercise, and fat loss:

a) You can do a good or even better job with exercise and eat enough of the wrong things and you will stay fatter than you would like.  People do.  I even did this once.

b)  You can lose fat with diet alone:

You can use a total conversion to an eating format such as Dr Joel Fuhrman’s all vegan style or the more recent Wahls Protocol by Dr Terry Wahls that includes fish and liver but contains as much or even more vegetables than Dr Fuhrman’s work.  (Neither include grains.)

If you do that and are fat now and eat or drink nothing else, you can lose fat down to a level you stop being overweight by BMI.

c) If you want to lose fat and lose fat you keep off, you are more likely to succeed and will be less fat while able to eat more if you do the right exercises most days of every week – in addition to upgrading what you eat:

Helping people succeed right away on very small and doable exercise has been shown to empower people to take the food advice better and have more of a self image as being someone who is health oriented and can take action to cause it effectively.  And, that helps them start to eat right & continue eating right.

Eating more which the exercise allows you to do and still lose fat protects you from getting too hungry.  People who get too hungry tend to quit and gain the fat back.

Doing effective strength training and interval or variable cardio with short, intense bursts causes more calories to be burned for hours after the exercise and has proven to speed fat loss when done well.

People who fail to strength train, lose muscle every year.  They don’t get less hungry and the excess they add over time makes them gain fat. 

(In addition you get huge health benefits from doing regular exercise of these two kinds.  It slows aging, helps prevent mental decline, helps prevent osteoporosis, and even improves the sex life for both sexes.)

So, if you want to succeed in losing fat you KEEP off and speed the process, adding the right exercises does help and is important to add.