According to the recent editorial published in British Journal of Sports Medicine/BMJ:
A. Malhotra, T. Noakes, S. Phinney, "It is time to bust the myth of physical inactivity and obesity: you cannot outrun a bad diet", Br J Sports Med doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-094911
Quotes:
According to the Lancet global burden of disease reports, poor diet now generates more disease than physical inactivity, alcohol and smoking combined.
...
Instead, members of the public are drowned by an unhelpful message about maintaining a ‘healthy weight’ through calorie counting, and many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely due to lack of exercise. This false perception is rooted in the Food Industry's Public Relations machinery, which uses tactics chillingly similar to those of big tobacco. The tobacco industry successfully stalled government intervention for 50 years starting from when the first links between smoking and lung cancer were published. This sabotage was achieved using a ‘corporate playbook’ of denial, doubt, confusing the public and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists, at the cost of millions of lives. [4,5]
Coca Cola, who spent $3.3 billion on advertising in 2013, pushes a message that ‘all calories count’; they associate their products with sport, suggesting it is ok to consume their drinks as long as you exercise. However science tells us this is misleading and wrong. It is where the calories come from that is crucial. Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger. Fat calories induce fullness or ‘satiation’.
A large econometric analysis of worldwide sugar availability, revealed that for every excess 150 calories of sugar (say, one can of cola), there was an 11-fold increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, in comparison to an identical 150 calories obtained from fat or protein.
And this was independent of the person's weight and physical activity level; this study fulfils the Bradford Hill Criteria for causation.[6]
A recently published critical review in nutrition concluded that dietary carbohydrate restriction is the single most effective intervention for reducing all the features of the metabolic syndrome and should be the first approach in diabetes management, with benefits occurring even without weight loss.[7]
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References:
[4] Brownell KD, Warner KE . "The perils of ignoring history: big tobacco played dirty and millions died. How similar is big food?" Milbank Q 2009;87: 259–94. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0009.2009.00555.x
[5] Gornall J. "Sugar: spinning a web of influence." BMJ 2015;350:h231. doi:10.1136/bmj.h231
[6] Basu S, Yoffe P, Hills N, et al . "The relationship of sugar to population-level diabetes prevalence: an econometric analysis of repeated cross-sectional data." PLoS ONE 2013;8:e57873.
[7] Richard D. Feinman et al., "Dietary carbohydrate restriction as the first approach in diabetes
management: Critical review and evidence base", Nutrition 31 (2015) 1–13
See also:
"Exercise 'not key to obesity fight'" By Nick Triggle, BBC Health, 23 April 2015
(Note: highlights are mine)
4 comments :
Makes me think of the Snackwell snacks. "Oh, fat is bad for you, so we took it all out (and replaced it with oodles of sugar since without the fat things taste like crap)! Go us for being so health-conscious! You can thank us later."
Yes. I did this, and it is very obvious to all that I did this, and kept it off, yet nobody listens. I would prefer to be rich and have some place to put people, where they would only be fed appropriately for two weeks, and maybe they could lounge around at the beach or something- but actually talking to people about this seems to be a freaking waste of time.
Same experience. In the last 16 tears, all of my acquaintances to whom I did try talking into a high animal fat low carb diet, refused it or tried it and then promptly botched it, and all those that I did not try to "convert" did it and thrived!
No, I totally disagree about coercing anybody into anything for "their good", or especially NOT "for their good"! That's what the religious institutions and most political movements seem to be about. They fail of course. 8-:)
I am not interested in coercing people either. This is more along the lines of creating a proper environment in which they can get better. I suspect that, for a lot of people, an argument or discussion means little to nothing because of all the reinforcements in their life- especially if they are eating a lot of junk and watching mainstream media.
The creator of the Perfect Health diet started doing a retreat along these lines- I think he even went in to the hotel they reserved for the event and changed the light bulbs. How much better if it were built from the ground up with an eye toward evolutionary fitness.
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