Why so many more people are getting too fat....

Today's Post: Friday, 7-9-2010

There are 3 reasons.

They happened for understandable, even partially beneficial reasons. They happened gradually. But the pace and spread of these 3 things have gone up dramatically in the last 50 years and in the last 20. No surprise, so have the number and percentage of people who are too fat and in exactly that time period.

Most unfortunately, being too fat and the direct effects of these three causes also often cause heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, and other diseases that have helped cause the dramatic and increasingly unsustainable increases in medical care costs. These increases also happened at the same time as the increase in these 3 causes and in more people getting too fat.

1. Before 1905, even most rich people had to do so much walking and get other physical activity that very few were fat. Since 1960, in the United States and in other developed countries, people drive almost everywhere they want to go and they have so many labor saving devices that they also spend far less time doing other physical activities.

2. Before 1950, virtually no one watched television. Beginning in the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s virtually everyone watched television. That means that in less than 20 years people in the United States went from doing things like playing cards or reading or playing baseball themselves to all sitting and watching TV instead. Studies even show people began having sex less often because of TV. From the point of excess fat, this is very unfortunate. One study found that watching TV burns less calories than sleeping.

Today, the average person watches TV more than 2 hours a day, seven days a week. Some people even spend more time watching TV than they do working.

These two things combined mean that people today burn far fewer calories than they did not that long ago.

But our bodies are set to expect the food that would support the greater exercise and activities needed. In addition, the doctor who specialized in the effects of exercise, Kenneth Cooper, MD, quoted studies that found that in addition to burning more calories, exercising and being active allows our bodies to process carbs and fats without problems or causing illness. Before, people could get away with eating more and even eating more desserts and similar foods.

3. But before 1950, people tended to eat real foods and LESS sugar, desserts, snacks, and soft drinks. Few people ate foods made with omega 6 oils.

Since then, in part because these things are heavily advertised on the TV so many people spend hours watching and in part because they have become so cheap to provide, people eat far more sugar, desserts, snacks, and soft drinks.

Worse, the same changes in agriculture and the food industry, have degraded the quality of even real foods and added things to them our bodies do not process well and that cause disease.

It seems simple. If you can make things for people that taste good and keep driving down the cost to provide them, you make more money and people like your stuff.

Between government subsidies to farmers to help them grow more food for less money, the trend in farming towards industrial, mass production methods using these now cheaper foods, everyone had an incentive to do the things they did.

Then, since these foods were advertised heavily on the TV everyone was watching, people bought more of them and the food companies made and sold more.

So, since people saw them advertised on TV and on store shelves they bought them. Then they noticed most people were doing the same.

Gradually foods and drinks that didn’t even exist before 1905 became more than half the calories people took in.

People thought of them as normal and began to perceive people who did not as strange.

There were two huge problems with that. People were no longer active enough to burn off all the extra calories from these foods and drinks or process them safely. And, they still had bodies evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to eat the things people at before 1905.

What can be done now?

People who learn this and who want to be less fat and to stay healthy, can reverse each of these 3 things for themselves.

They can get vigorous exercise, walking, and other physical activity each week instead of none.

They can cut back on watching TV to 14 hours a week or less.

They can eat and drink foods that existed before 1905 and that were raised more in the ways those foods were raised and totally or close to totally stop ingesting the foods and drinks advertised on TV that did not.

They can eat organic produce. They can eat grass fed beef and pasture raised chicken and wild caught fish. (That only works if the grassland and pasture and water are unpolluted.) They can stop buying and stop eating and drinking pre-made, packaged desserts and snacks and regular and diet soft drinks. They can also stop eating almost anything made with refined grains.

Those changes prevent or help prevent heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, & cancer.

And, since they increase the calories people burn and drop the excess and unproductive calories that so many people have been getting, they will be far less fat as well.

What about getting less knowledgeable and self-directed people to be less fat and in better health to stop health care costs from going up so much it slows the economy?

There are two ways.

One has been proven to work.

The other has worked to some degree and may evolve to work even better.

Here’s the one that works for sure.:

The new nonfoods and the sugar and refined flour that are now consumed in amounts ten times what people’s bodies can process safely, must all be taxed.

Sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, all hydrogenated oils, refined grains, oils high in omega 6, MSG & related compounds, all should be taxed and taxed heavily.

This has been tested to work. Making real food cheaper just got shoppers to get more treat foods with the savings. But making junky foods and drinks cost more got the shoppers to buy less of them and more real foods.

Even better, it’s a way for governments to raise tax revenues without slowing the economy.

The one that has worked to some degree and may evolve to work even better is to have employers who pay health care costs or who want productive and healthy workers to support these three changes effectively.

That means things like making sure their employees learn these things.

It means removing vending machines or at least removing these kinds of foods and drinks from them. And, it means discontinuing the practices that provide these foods and drinks in the workplace such as buying donuts or fast food for employees or providing them with soft or having people bring treat foods to work to share.

Adding exercise facilities or buying memberships in local gyms for employees also works and the employees who use them like them and stay at that employer more than in companies that do not.

The bad news is that these things are NOT being done close to enough by governments and employers yet.

The good news is that you can do these things for yourself.

You can vote in favor of such taxes and support politicians who do.

And, you can make these changes in your company if you are the boss or the health and wellness director and get the boss to OK them.

How MSG fattens you....

Today's Post: Friday, 6-12-2009

Dr Russell Blaylock is one of the MD’s I get health information emails from. The free info varies as all his emails make an effort to sell his subscription service to access all his information.

However, on numerous occasions, he has claimed that getting MSG in food tends to make you fat.

(Others have said it may cause nerve damage. And the S in MSG is sodium, so since most people get too much sodium from salt and many are extra sensitive to blood pressure increases from too much sodium, it makes sense at the very least to not ingest MSG often.)

But as far as MSG being a fattening agent, I’d heard that nowhere else and have wondered if there was anything to it or not.

My knowledge is now upgraded. MSG DOES help make you fat. And, we even know how it does so.

I learned this in last Wednesday’s Early to Rise email.

Here’s the article:

"This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com ."

"MSG and Weight Gain

By James B. LaValle

Many people avoid monosodium glutamate (MSG) - the so-called "safe" flavor enhancer - because they get a headache or upset stomach after eating it. But here's another reason to avoid MSG: It might be causing you to gain weight.

MSG has been used for some time to "fatten up" lab rats for experimental purposes - but no one knew for sure if it had the same effect on people. So researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in China set out to study just that.

The researchers compared the MSG consumption of more than 750 Chinese men and women aged 40 to 59. (In China, MSG is commonly used in home cooking, as well as in restaurants and packaged foods.
And, in fact, the study found that approximately 82 percent of the subjects used MSG when they prepared food at home.) Those who consumed the most MSG were almost three times as likely to be overweight as compared to those who did not use MSG, even when adjustments were made for physical activity, caloric intake, and other variables that could be related to weight gain.

The researchers are now trying to determine why MSG causes weight gain. One theory is based on the observation that when lab rats are given MSG, they eat more, indicating that MSG somehow influences appetite signals from the brain.

Another concern is the way MSG affects blood sugar. In a 2000 study published in the journal Physiological Research, normal rats were turned into insulin resistant rats by feeding them MSG. The MSG-treated rats also stored glucose as fat more readily than normal rats.

Whatever the reason, it appears that one way to help control your weight is to reduce your intake of MSG.

In the U.S., most people do not use MSG in home cooking, though it is an ingredient in the flavor enhancer Accent. You are more likely to get MSG in restaurant food. You can't control the way food is prepared when you eat out, but you can at least make sure you read the labels when you shop at the grocery store. Foods to watch out for include soups (especially Asian-noodle type soups) and salad dressings. Many flavor-coated foods - like ranch or barbeque flavored chips and nuts - also contain a significant amount of MSG.

[Ed. Note: It truly is possible to improve your health just by making wise choices when it comes to diet and lifestyle. James B. LaValle, RPh, ND, CCN - founder of the LaValle Metabolic Institute and a nationally recognized expert on natural therapies - can give you easy-to-understand directions for living the healthy life you've always wanted. ....]"

X* X* X* X* X*

So, since MSG makes foods taste a bit better even if they are not very well made let alone if they are spiced by a master cook, it does tend to make you eat more total food. That’s not a crime exactly. But when it’s done to foods that are truly bad for you like potato chips, that’s really bad. So, using it in such foods clearly helps make and keep people fat.

But Dr Blaylock is right. The data show that MSG makes people who eat the same amount and exercise the same amount but ingest more MSG get fatter than those who get less MSG.

So, since people who use MSG often tend to eat more and have what they eat make them fatter, MSG is doubly effective as a fattening agent. This is particularly so if you ingest it often.

But MSG is even worse than that. It apparently helps cause insulin resistance and makes insulin and blood sugar more fattening. That in turn, if you keep ingesting MSG, increases the amount of excess insulin and blood sugar in your blood! So MSG becomes even more fattening the longer you consume it often.

Given the cost of treating diseases such as type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, high blood pressure, and higher levels of obesity and the heart disease they tend to cause or make worse, MSG begins to look as bad for you as smoking or trans fats.

Since it does make foods taste good -- and it is at least possible to use it but not use it often, I suspect it will always be a legal food additive.

But the health damaging effects of heavy use of MSG are so clear now, there is absolutely NO excuse for ever having it in foods or spices where that is not clearly and completely disclosed.

That means it should be a hefty fine if any menu item or sauce in a restaurant contains MSG that is not disclosed on the menu.

And, it means that every food sold that can have a label MUST disclose if it has MSG in it, call it MSG, and say how much is in the food per serving and per package.

Since using less MSG is clearly called for, it should also be assessed an increasing health penalty tax by both the federal government and by the individual states.

Today, MSG can be called autolized yeast and a whole list of other terms that hide that the real ingredient is MSG.

Also, most spices today that contain mixes of spices list the main spices and a term such as spices, other spices, or natural spices without disclosing what the term actually stands for. Since the company may have a proprietary set of spices they prefer not to disclose, using such a term is understandable.

But, today, to be sure that term doesn’t include MSG, you have to contact the company and ask them. Then you have to hope the person at the company you contacted knows if it does or not and will tell you the truth. Or you have to find an appropriate lab and pay out of pocket to have it tested.

That’s NOT OK for an ingredient that makes people fat when that has become such an expensive and growing problem.

The only good news is that surely some of the makers of spices and sauces and some restaurants will recognize that providing their stuff MSG free and advertising that will gain them health oriented and upscale customers. Some Chinese restaurants do that now.

And, as the fattening qualities of MSG become better and better known, these ways of helping you escape using it often will increase.

In the mean time, avoid ingesting MSG as much as you can. And hope that avoiding MSG will get easier soon.

Good news on fighting the obesity epidemic....

Today's post: Thursday, 4-9-2009

There are several things that tend to make you fat or keep you that way. And, many of those same things also tend to cause type 2 diabetes and heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases.

So, anytime I read something with important information on how to prevent this situation or help fix it, it really gets my attention.

For example, if you are sedentary and never active and never get any very vigorous exercise from competitive sports or strength training or interval cardio AND you eat lots of fast carbs (high glycemic foods) such as foods with high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains and very little fiber, you will get “insulin resistant” which means you get high levels of insulin in your blood that no longer lowers excess levels of blood sugar. And, if that becomes excessive or goes on too long, you get fat; you get high blood sugar to the point it begins destroying your capillaries and the parts of you that that depend on them; and your chance of getting a heart attack and becoming senile skyrocket.

Unfortunately, the number of people who are now seriously fat, what the medical profession calls obese, is going up dramatically world wide and even more dramatically here in the United States.

A recent news story reports that in the United States now one in five four year olds is fat.

And, those kids grow up to be fat kids and fat teens. That’s really bad news because an alarming number of those kids now have type 2 diabetes and even early heart disease.

That means huge increases in health care costs will soon come into a system that is almost collapsing from the increases in costs that have already happened.

And, it can be truly dreadful for the kids it happens to. A recent American Heart Association ad showed a picture the back of a woman at the beach. She looked to be a 50 year old woman who was about 70 to 100 pounds overfat.

The caption read.:

“I have high cholesterol.
I am at risk for heart disease.
I am 13 years old.”

OUCH!!

Even worse, there are now literally hundreds of thousands of kids all over the United States both boys and girls who look just like she does. Some of them have type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure too from the lifestyle they follow. We are already paying for their healthcare costs this causes too. Kids didn’t get those diseases in previous generations.

Many of them will grow up to face heart attacks and strokes before they are 45 years old. And, most frightening of all, many of them will need kidney dialysis -- or custodial care because they will develop early vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The implications of this are truly dire. If that many of our adults who should be at the prime of life and effective in their work cannot work & generate that much more in health care costs, our economy will be swamped by it all.

And, although two of the 3 main causes of this are lack of exercise and eating a lot of refined grain an sweetened foods plus NOT eating fruits and vegetables, the third cause, drinking regular soft drinks instead of water, may be the most effective of the 3 in causing this situation.

Studies show that people, adults and kids alike, who drink a lot of soft drinks wear those calories as fat. The researchers have found the cause of this is very simple.: Soft drinks add calories to your food intake but simply don’t register in a way that makes you less hungry even a little bit.

Refined grain foods and sweetened foods are almost as bad; and a strong cause of the increase in obesity as is being totally sedentary; but soft drinks and the increase in their consumption are so much more effective at fattening people, they are clearly a major cause of this problem and may well be the number one cause.

So, causing most kids to drink no soft drinks at all, would be extremely desirable. Even causing a 40 % drop in the average number of soft drinks kids drink per week would help.

But studies show over 70 of adults drink soft drinks and have so little knowledge of these effects that they see nothing at all wrong with kids drinking the soft drinks they do.

The truly frightening thing is that the problem is so severe and getting worse so fast, there simply isn’t time or money enough to educate everyone to what’s happening in time to fix it.

But today’s news is much more encouraging.

Reuters online health news today has a story they released late yesterday. They titled it.

“U.S. experts argue for tax on sweet drinks.”

Kelly Brownell of Yale University in Connecticut & New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden are quoted as saying some very promising things. They apparently originally wrote those things in a New England Journal of Medicine article or in an interview that happened on Wednesday this week.

They state that a penny ounce tax on soft drinks would cut consumption by as much as 10 % and raise “billions of dollars” to help state and local governments with health education programs and health care costs driven by soft drink consumption.

Given that soft drinks in fast food places and restaurants cost the fast food places and restaurants something like 5 to 10 cents per dollar instead of the 30 cents that the food they serve does, a penny per ounce is trivial.

Given this and the severity of the problems caused by massive soft drink consumption, I don’t think they thought big enough. Five to ten cents an ounce would be much more desirable.

But I still enthusiastically applaud them. Once we tax soft drinks at such a trivially low rate and establish that they are a health hazard that should be taxed in the public interest and to keep our economy from collapsing from the effects of that hazard, the taxes will be raised later.

Cigarette and tobacco taxes have been; and soft drink and related taxes on comparable foods will too. Of course, that’s also the real reason the soft drink industry is against such a tiny tax.

The two experts were quoted as saying that even the penny an ounce tax would cut consumption by about 10 % & then they said this.:

"It is difficult to imagine producing behavior change of this magnitude through education alone, even if government devoted massive resources to the task."

I agree with them. With the tax, the effect is virtually guaranteed. And, the governments who badly need the revenue now TAKE IN money.

Needless to say the soft drink companies do not favor this idea.

They point out that as an industry they employ over 220,000 people in the United States.

But if they make that many people a year virtually unemployable due to physical or mental disability their product causes and cost our economy over 10 times the combined salary of all 220,000 people in avoidable health care costs each year, so what?

People often have to change jobs when the economy changes and renders a product or service obsolete. Most of those 220,000 people could also. In fact so many of them are in marketing and sales which are transportable skills, they may find it easier than people in most industries to get new jobs.

The article pointed out that studies show that children and adolescents now take in 10 to 15 % of all their calories in soft drinks and other sweetened drinks. That quite literally means if they drank none at all, they would be 10 to 15 % lighter on the average; and virtually all those pounds would be fat they no longer gained


Brownell and Frieden said the tiny tax would raise $1.2 billion in New York state alone.

That would come to something like 12 billion a year for the country as a whole.

And here’s their take on the real cost of soft drinks.:


"The contribution of unhealthful diets to healthcare costs is already high and is increasing -- an estimated $79 billion is spent annually for overweight and obesity alone -- and approximately half of these costs are paid by Medicare and Medicaid, at taxpayers' expense," they wrote.

"Sugar-sweetened beverages may be the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic," they added.

"For each extra can or glass of sugared beverage consumed per day, the likelihood of a child's becoming obese increases by 60 percent."

So, if we want better healthcare in this country, far fewer fat and sick kids and adults, and a stronger economy instead of one that is staggering under such avoidable costs, we should tax soft drinks everywhere in the United States immediately.

However, even a penny an ounce in a single progressive and health oriented state such as Minnesota or Iowa or Vermont might get us started.

But it’s quite clear that a 5 to 10 cent an ounce tax on all soft drinks—including diet soft drinks, & on high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains is actually what’s needed.

Still we have to start somewhere. Now that recognized health professionals have proposed this tiny tax on soft drinks, the worst offender, and have done so in the influential New England Journal of Medicine, we might get there in time to do some good & prevent the massive harm we are experiencing and paying for now; AND begin to keep it from getting worse.