Fructose As Culprit In the Obesity Epidemic 821
drewtheman writes "According to an interview with Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology from the University of California, San Francisco, fructose, once touted as diabetic-friendly because it doesn't raise insulin levels directly, could be a major culprit for the obesity epidemic, high blood pressure, and elevated blood levels of LDL in Americans and others worldwide as they adopt American-style diets. Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn syrup, both ingredients found in copious quantity in most American prepared foods."
Not me (Score:5, Informative)
The Dietary and Nutritional Survey of British Adults, Gibson (1996, p. 405) concluded that "sugars
appear to have a weak negative [italics added] association with BMI that is not totally explained
by confounders such as dieting, under-reporting or the inverse correlation between energy from
sugars and fat."
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:2, Informative)
When you eat granulated sugar or glucose, when the sugar-low kicks in, you'll get hungry again to replenish you bloodsugarlevels, hence you'll search for that candy bar again. Fructose's effect to your bloodsugar is much less, thus will make you eat less.
Also, high fructose corn syrup, is for about half of it glucose syrup, so there you have it.
Not that I'm a skeptic... (Score:4, Informative)
On another note, there have been plenty of studies already demonstrating how nutritionally bad fructose is bad for an individual. Here's a compilation I found awhile back of the cons of using fructose so widely in consumables: http://curezone.com/art/read.asp?ID=32&db=6&C0=17 [curezone.com]
On the other hand... (Score:4, Informative)
The HFCS used in most soft drinks is (I believe) 50% fructose. It is metabolised almost identically to sucrose: there is an initial enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose at similar ratios to the contents of the corn syrup, after that the metabolism is identical. It seems unlikely therefore that there is any substantial difference in health effects, and most of the studies quoted in the wikipedia article linked from the main story tend to agree with that.
Re:Thank ADM, Cargill and their lobbyists. (Score:5, Informative)
Just check out this research study [64.233.179.104] that estimates that subtracting the benefits of the quotas/subsidies from the costs (i.e. consumer/producer benefits of lower costs minus "oh but the poor farming corporations!") leaves the American economy almost billion dollars per year better off.
Re:Fructose comprises of table sugar and corn syru (Score:4, Informative)
When A comprises B, it means A is within B, whether it is in whole or in part.
When A IS comprised OF B, it means B is within A, whether it is in whole or in part.
Consider another verb for a simpler example:
Baked dough makes cookies.
Cookies are made of baked dough.
Re:And in other news......... (Score:5, Informative)
Why? HFCS and Sugar breaks down to the same things in the body. Every study I've seen shows that HFCS is no more dangerous than Sugar. Studies that only look at the Fructose show that high amounts of Fructose is dangerous. The HFCS in soft drinks and sport drinks is not high in Fructose. The "High Fructose" part of "High Fructose Corn Syrup" means it has a high content of fructose compared to corn syrup itself (which has next to no fructose).
In fact, a happy paper [nih.gov] at the NIH says pretty much this.
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the contents are rather different. In most drink vending machines, most drinks are cold or hot green teas and coffee, with a smaller amount of juices, water and sports drinks. Actual carbonated soda is very rare; it's not that unusual to see even Coca Cola vending machines that don't actually sell cola.
Re:I gave up HFCS for new years... (Score:5, Informative)
I personally gave up HFCS and MSG to the best of my ability about 9 months ago. I'm still too fat (probably all the beer I still drink) but I do feel much much better. That near continuous run-down feeling is gone now. So is that all to frequent feeling after lunch like a bad flu was coming (buzzing in my head, hot flash, sweating, tightness in the chest, congested feeling).
I'm sure someone will respond saying there's no scientific proof that MSG and HFSC are bad for me and that I'm a fool for trying to not consume them. That's just fine... call me a fool. I feel better not eating them and that's reason enough - placebo effect or not.
Re:Nasty aftertaste (Score:2, Informative)
Nope
The sugar on British tables comes from either sugar cane or sugar beet. It's possible that some corn sugar is used in ready-made foods, but seems a bit unlikely as we don't grow a vast amount of sweetcorn.
Re:On the other hand... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
Corn syrup, or fructose used instead of sugar means that for most people, they are under fed as far as their body is concerned and telling them. This is why it is an issue. If regular sugar was used, the body's kill switch for eating would kick before a person ends up spending "every waking hour stuffing their faces with lard". Cause after all, what is lard but a form of sugar. Same with startches. Your body is good at sending signals to eat when it is deprived of something. And people are being deprived without knowing it.
Now lets look at some more effects of fructose, low insulin means low amounts of energy which means the bodies metabolism slows down which means more food gets stored as fat while the body is sending signals to eat more. Do you see a cycle here that is more then some fatass stuffing his face because he can? I hope so otherwise the entire idea of the article is waisted on the space between you eyes and ears.
And for the record, In america, you don't need to be eating donuts, candy, soda pop, and cakes to get the fructose. It is happily embeded in canned soups, frozen foods and all sorts of other things like the breakfast cereal that is supposed to be good for you. Chances are, if you don't make it from scratch, you will come into contact with it.
Summary of article (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly people aren't taking the time to read the article (I'm shocked), so here's a summary of the fructose info...
Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003.
high fructose corn syrup came on the market after it was invented in Japan in 1966, and started finding its way into American foods in 1975. In 1980 the soft drink companies started introducing it into soft drinks and you can actually trace the prevalence of childhood obesity, and the rise, to 1980 when this change was made.
it's not the calories that are different it's the fact that the only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver. Glucose, the standard sugar, can be taken up by every organ in the body, only 20% of glucose load ends up at your liver. So let's take 120 calories of glucose, that's two slices of white bread as an example, only 24 of those 120 calories will be metabolised by the liver, the rest of it will be metabolised by your muscles, by your brain, by your kidneys, by your heart etc.. Now let's take 120 calories of orange juice. Same 120 calories but now 60 of those calories are going to be fructose because fructose is half of sucrose and sucrose is what's in orange juice. So it's going to be all the fructose, that's 60 calories, plus 20% of the glucose, so that's another 12 out of 60 -- so in other words 72 out of the 120 calories will hit the liver, three times the substrate as when it was just glucose alone.
fructose [does] three things that are particularly bad in the liver. The first is this uric acid pathway that I just mentioned, the second is that fructose initiates what's known as de novo lipogenesis...Which is fat production...Excess fat production and so VLDL [the bad form of cholesterol], very low density lipoproteins end up being manufactured when you consume this large bolus of fructose in a way that glucose does not, and so that leads to dyslipidaemia.
And then the last thing that fructose does in the liver is it initiates an enzyme called Junk one, ...and when you initiate Junk one what happens is that your insulin receptor in your liver stops working...that means your insulin levels all over your body have to rise.
put all of this together and basically you've got a feed forward system of increased insulin, increased liver fat, liver deposition of fat, increased inflammation -- you end up with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. You end up with your inability to see your leptin [**leptin tells your brain you are full**] and so you consume more fructose and you've now got a viscious cycle out of control.
In fact fructose, because of the way it's metabolised, is actually damaging your liver the same way alcohol is. In fact it's the exact same pathway, in fact fructose is alcohol without the buzz.
Re:And in other news......... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is the corn sirup, that both contains high amounts of carbs, and will leave you hungry after drinking it.
Sadly (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway the argument is a bad one (and remind me of the argument of people saying "oh god they are adding chemicals in our food") If you took normal organic growing food and we told you the list of stuff inside it, you would not understand half of it, still that would not make it more or less dangerous. 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol is an example of it. Naturally I could call it L-ascorbate too. Or maybe vitamin C. The problem are not that people don't understand what the smallest ingredient part in ppm or milli% of their food composition is, the problem is that people ignore totally the composition of the main ingredient, like fat, and refuse to do sport, and eat a lot during the day way way more than is necessary for their activities, and not equilibrated. It is a LIFESTYLE problem. It ain't one signle factor but a combination of many. And no, the ingredient you can't pronunce without having being in university ain't the problem.
Re:Thank ADM, Cargill and their lobbyists. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, that was kind of the point. But thank you.
Is there any sound reason for having such high levels of fructose in soft drinks, other than to get rid of the fructose that you have too much off?
Yes, it's called 'Natural Selection'. We need *more* of it, not *less*.
Is there any sound reason for having such high levels of fructose in soft drinks, other than to get rid of the fructose that you have too much off?
I think you meant 'of', not 'off'. Assuming that, sure, of course there is. It's far, far cheaper than pure cane sugar, and not only that it's much sweeter, and people like their sweet stuff.
If the farmers grew oranges, for example, you could simply serve fresh orange juice which is a far healthier alternative to sodas.
Are you suggesting that farmers don't grow oranges? Look, if people wanted to drink orange juice in the quantity that they want to drink soda, then there would be a lot more oranges grown and a lot less soda produced. No one is holding a gun to the public's head and pouring the poison down their throat.
But if people are too stupid not to stop eating the wrong things when they are becoming patently obese what is your better suggestion?
Let them? Then let them deal with the consequences of their actions? Why is this such an unpalatable course of action?
all your government has to do is reduce or remove the subsidies for farmers, they will produce something else, and you will have less fructose to get rid of.
This is nonsensical. It isn't the government which is paying the farmers to grow fructose. It's the food manufacturers. Government subsidies are paid to farmers when they *aren't* growing something for the most part. You don't need to pay people to grow what they are going to sell anyway.
You can therefore reduce its use in foodstuffs.
The only reliable way to do this is to reduce demand for it. However, that doesn't appear likely.
You don't have to put people in a bubble, just stop making it so attractive to produce something you do not need and encourage everyone can eat far more healthily.
People do not WANT to eat healthily. They LOVE things that they don't need. They LOVE things that are bad for them. Why should you care if someone else is making poor decisions about their health? Just make better ones and you'll live longer and better than they do. They obviously don't care about making themselves healthier, why should you?
Look at it this way: would you appreciate a law forcing you to eat unhealthily? Of course not. Why not? Because you don't want someone else telling you what you have to eat. Yet that's exactly what YOU want to do to everyone else. Where do you get off making decisions for everyone else?
Passing on sugar is a very good start. (Score:4, Informative)
That's true to an extent, but our bodies are in fact designed to expel unneeded calories. The sensitivity of these triggers seems to differ from person to person, which is one reason some people can eat anything they want without gaining weight, while others can count calories and still become obese.
I was in the latter group. Exercising daily and eating quite well, yet ending up in my mid-twenties at an overweight 230 pounds. It turns out carbohydrates -- and especially sugars like fructose -- cause a rapid blood sugar spike and insulin production, which in turn triggers your body to conserve excess calories in fat cells. At last, I stopped eating less and started eating differently -- no sugars and starches, but plenty of protein and fat -- and dropped 75 pounds so quickly I astonished everyone I knew. Without the carb/insulin trigger, your body naturally uses only the calories it needs and eliminates the rest.
Re:Fructose comprises of table sugar and corn syru (Score:2, Informative)
Fear not, there are misunderstandings aplenty to share round -- on your part, and in the gpp, and in the sentence you quoted in your ggpp. "Comprise" is a notoriously difficult verb because it can mean either "include" or "be included", pretty much at the whim of the speaker. (Just as a sign of this, I note that the Oxford English Dictionary lists nine primary meanings of the verb, some of which contradict each other, and somewhere between 20 and 25 secondary meanings. Yikes.)
When the gpp said, "When A IS comprised OF B, it means B is within A, whether it is in whole or in part", that does conform to common usage; but the bit about "When A comprises B" can go either way depending on context. (The line you originally quoted, "Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar", does indeed strongly imply that "fructose" contains 50% of all table sugar in the universe. Whatever that could possibly mean, i.e. not much.)
Personally I try to avoid this verb ...
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sugar? (Score:2, Informative)
The frustose is from Corn Syrup, not sugar cane. Your rant against sugar farmers should be directed at the corn lobby. Why do you think soft drinks here use corn syrup instead of cane sugar?
Re:Nasty aftertaste (Score:3, Informative)
If your appetite is not out of whack, a small Pulled Pork Sandwich or medium portion of Onion Rings will fill you up. Then you're done. It may not be great for you, but it shouldn't be dangerous. On the other hand, if something (fructose or otherwise) has interfered with your ability to feel full after eating a healthy portion, then you might have extra helpings of both. Then there's a problem.
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:2, Informative)
Sucrose - table sugar - is composed of two molecules, one fructose and one glucose (also called dextrose) molecule, joined together as a disaccharide. As soon as this hits any of the enzymes in your mouth or stomach, the connecting bond is hydrolized and you get 42% furctose and 58% glucose (weight difference, fructose is a 5 carbon sugar, glucose a six)
High fructose corn syrup is sold in ratios of 42, 55, and 90% fructose, the remainder being glucose and trace higher saccharides. The bulk of the material used in foods is either 42 or 55, 42 being the ideal proportion to sucrose. 90 is used mostly for special applicaitons and not as a sweetener. Soft drinks use the 42, meaning it is exactly the same as sucrose as soon as it hits your mouth and stomach.
Finally, all health effects of fructose are compared to pure glucose, not sucrose, and they are using the pure fructose, not high fructose corn syrup. If you compared high fructose to sucrose, guess what, not a bit of difference. This is a charlatans comparison, and pretty effective in fooling intelligent people who know little or anything about food chemistry.
You want to ban fructose, try this, give up apples, pears, oranges, berries, every fruit has fructose in it, I don't see any doctors (sorry "cough" nutritionists) calling for a ban of fruit. Hell, look it up in a real source, or here's wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose_malabsorpti
You want to reduce obesity, reduce all sugars, reduce starchy foods low in fiber, increase unrefined (aka -non bleached) foods, fat under 30% of calories, less salt, and get off your goddamn computer chairs and take a freakin walk!
Now, Lustig may have credentials to study insulin hypersecretion, but his conclusions are clueless. He relates fructose intake of 1/2 lb a year in 1970 to 56lbs now, but fails to account for the bound fructose in sucrose, all he did was cheat the facts and sensationalize his main source of income, research on obesity.
Good news is, with the government stupidly touting the inefficient production of ehtanol from corn, the bulk of the corn crop in 2015 will be going to ethanol production, and most food makers will have to revert back to sucrose (and making ethanol from sugarcane is much more efficient than corn, ask Brazil) and of course all your food will triple in cost (as well meat, dairy, anything that was corn fed, so, look forward to being fat and broke in the future, food, gas, everything will skyrocket, everything but our salaries, as we will all be outsourced to China or Bolivia by then.
Re:Isn't that at obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
If you're having success with your diet, I imagine it's your common sense and restraint at work, not your choice of sugars.
Re:And in other news......... (Score:5, Informative)
Now, fruits have the exact same fructose in it. Why are fruits better? For one, they come with other nutrients. For another, to consume the amount of fructose in a glass of coke, you'd have to eat a whole bushel of apples. The logistics prevent you from overindulging in fruits, while soda's are all about overindulging.
That foodstamp challenge is BS (Score:5, Informative)
Using that as a staple, you find that you now have more to spend on other things. You also will discover that rice is quite healthy.
Now please don't think I'm arguing that people should have to live off of a couple bucks a day for food, but realise that these congress people aren't doing it right. When it comes to really cutting food budget, you don't go to White Castle. You concentrate on materials which are cheap and have good calorie content. Rice is essentially the unbeatable champ in that area and hence forms your staple (it is not such a coincidence that it often forms the staple of diets for people more poor than is even conceivable in the US). Beans also work well, especially when purchased bagged and not canned, and they supply protein. Beans and rice, though not glorious, are just about enough on their own to sustain you.
If they are serious about seeing how to live on an extremely low budget for food, they should at least make an honest effort.
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:4, Informative)
Robert Lustig: Well high fructose corn syrup, it should say that, now in Australia for instance the sodas don't have high fructose corn syrup they have sucrose. Well sucrose is half fructose. You know a lot has been made over this high fructose corn syrup being particularly evil. In fact high fructose corn syrup is either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest is glucose. Well sucrose is 50% fructose the rest is glucose. In fact high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are equally problematic.
Norman Swan: Basically table sugar.
Robert Lustig: Table sugar -- that's right. We were not designed to eat all of this sugar, we're supposed to be eating our carbohydrate, particularly our fructose, with high fibre. Well the fact is we have 100 pound bags of sugar that go into the cakes, and the donuts.
Norman Swan: So we don't need to get obsessed on fruit sugars, it's sugar itself, sucrose.
Robert Lustig: Absolutely, it's sugar in general.
---
So don't blame the article, blame the summarizer. I've read (but can't link) that the difference between the current American diet and the diet in the 50's is almost exclusively the amount of sugar eaten.
Re:Awesome report (Score:4, Informative)
The right way to eat wheat bread is the way that was traditional until the rise of the steam baked industrial rapid rise loaf. That is,first, a slow fermenting rise, usually overnight. This makes the bread both lower GI index, and also more digestible. Second, flour which is not whole wheat but is relatively high extraction. This the so called grey flour of traditional French bread. Until modern times, when people talked about 'white' bread, what they meant was bread without the bran, a greyish color, but containing the germ.
The extraction rate varies from 75% or less for conventional white flour to 85% for brown but not wholewheat flour. In countries where bread is the staple, the extraction rate is usually in the low eighties and this is probably the sensible level. The rate in the US during WWII was raised to 80% - similarly in the UK, or perhaps a little higher. It would be a dramatic step forward for modern diets if it could be placed at that level today.
The same points apply to rice bran, which also should be avoided. It is striking that traditional cultures with long histories of healthy eating invariably mill rice and refine wheat, but never try remove oat bran. Both wheat and rice bran are better used by feeding to poultry, when the conversion into high quality protein is a much better use for it than irritating the human bowel to no nutritional effect.
Oat bran is in a completely different category. It does not irritate the bowel, and its nutrients are available. I believe the same to be true of spelt.
Its worth remarking that probably one of the main causes of obesity is the obsession with the low fat diet. Without any real evidence, we have embarked on a gigantic nutritional experiment in the Anglo Saxon countries over the last 30-40 years. We have gone from diets which were reasonably balanced in terms of saturated fats and complex carbohydrates, to ones which attempted to eliminate all saturated fats. However, the natural and normal craving for some fats has led to the substitution of polyunsaturated fats for saturated. There is no evidence that this is healthy, and much that it is far worse. In addition, since the available high carb foods are highly refined, we have then substitued for potatoes, rice and pasta, much sugar, including fructose. The result is a diet far worse than what we started with, and one which our evolutionary history has never prepared us for.
It is not an accident that this has happened at a time that the health food movement has metamorphosed into the supplements industry.
So what should we eat? Liberal amounts of meat, fish eggs butter and full-fat, non-homogenized milk. Absolutely no refined vegetable oils. Moderate amounts of mono-unsaturated vegetable oils (olive and peanut). No corn oil, safflower oil, hydrogenated vegetable oil, margarine. Liberal amounts of vegetables of all sorts. Liberal amounts of sourdough bread made with coarse white flour. Similarly pasta. White, not brown, rice. Parboiled is OK. Fruits in season. And fruit juice, if at all, in great moderation.
Exercise well, and stay off the scales! Because the other great cause of obesity in Western society is the practice of dieting, which, as many studies have shown, simply leads to long term weight gain.
Glucose-fructose syrup is worse still. (Score:4, Informative)
In the end, greater stress on a body system results in it wearing out sooner, hence the epidemic of adult-onset diabetes.
High-fructose corn syrup is NOT the same as sucrose. People with sucrose intolerance [wikipedia.org] lack the enzyme and cannot properly digest sucrose.
Re:Learn to make you own beverages. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:1, Informative)
The fact is that the HFCS commonly used in sodas and such is an approximately 50/50 mixture of Fructose / Glucose(pure corn syrup), sometimes a little more fructose and sometimes a little less. Cane sugar is comprised of sucrose which is also made up of 1 fructose + 1 glucose. Some foods that purport to use cane sugar actually use inverted sugar which is sugar that has been processed to break the sucrose down into the fructose and glucose parts. What we end up with is essentially the same thing.
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:5, Informative)
Carbonated soda is not "very rare". And Coca Cola machines without soda only exist when other Coca Cola machines *with* soda sit right next to them.
Japanese vending machines almost always exist in multiple units - it's actually uncommon to see a single vending machine by itself. In the event that you *do*, that vending machine will *always* have at least one, and usually two or more flavors of carbonated soda. When vending machines are paired together, they have one particular kind of drink in each, so yes, of course you will only find carbonated drinks in one out of the four or five machines in any given spot. But they're always there.
This is a typical single-unit Suntory machine installation:
http://www.japonophile.com/wp-content/uploads/200
And the same for Coke:
http://z.about.com/d/gojapan/1/0/8/2/machine2.gif [about.com]
This is a more common multi-machine installation:
http://www.tjf.or.jp/deai_korea/contents/teacher/
(I know the url says "korea", but that's Japan. Here [tjf.or.jp] is the original page it's from.)
It is true that Japan has much more variety of drink types in their vending machines than we do. But I disagree that their drinks are all that much healthier. Their vending machines contain drinks of the following types:
a) Canned iced coffee - always sweetened
b) Soda
c) Beer
d) Sweetened, processed juice drinks (their equivalent to "Sunny Delight")
e) Iced tea (unsweetened)
Of those, only tea is even remotely healthy and calorie-free. And it's true that it's usually available for those who want it. But then, diet soda is always available at vending machines here too; not as healthy as tea, but at least calorie-free and non-obesity forming. Most people choose something else, in both countries.
Our problem is portion control. The standard bottle size in vending machines here is 20oz. A Japanese canned coffee is I think 7oz. Big difference. We're drinking almost three times the sugar in our sugar drinks as they are, just because we're drinking a lot more of it. (This extends beyond vending machines too; go to McDonald's there and the "large" drink is the same size as a "small" here.)
Combined with the rest of their diet, which is a lot less fatty and rich in calories, and with a lot smaller portions, and of course they're in better shape. Though with the rise of fast food there, they're fattening up now [guardian.co.uk] just like we already have. (Most articles on this are a bit alarmist, IMO - it's still obvious that they're in pretty good shape, but obesity rates are rising.)
It's really not rocket science why we're all getting fat. Too many calories, too big portions. It drives me crazy how people read stuff like "fructose makes you fat!" and think they can just cut out fructose and lose weight. Meanwhile, they're still eating double quarter pounders with cheese, a large fries and two apple pies for lunch and wondering why they're still getting fat. The culprit to gaining weight is calories. That's it. Simple laws of physics. All of these foods that supposedly "cause" obesity do so because they are high in calories and low in nutrients. That includes fructose. The bottom line is you need to control your calorie intake, which means both controlling the types of food you eat as well as the amounts.
Re:Isn't that at obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
Given that the human body is one of the most complex systems we have ever encountered, it's not surprising that in many instances the logical "X in = X out" doesn't apply. Anyone who has ever tried controlled, as scientific as possible dieting can tell that eating the same amount X calories per day every day for months produce wildly varying results in the same person, even if said person keeps constant environments and exercise regimes.
The dreaded "4 months after dieting" plateau is one of the most commonly observed effects the body regulation system has on calorie processing: assume a set amount of calories below the keep-weight limit is calculated and then properly accounted for during several months. The first week nothing happens, then weight loss begins as expected, increases in speed but pretty abruptly tapers off after about 4 months. It doesn't matter much from what weight this process started, how much below keep-weight level the calorie intake was (as long as it's above real starvation) - after about 4 months and/or 10 percent weight loss, the weight loss comes to a complete stop or progresses much much slower than before.
This happens no matter if the calorie intake is kept constant or decreased corresponding to the reduced calorie needs of a reduced-weight body.
This probably happens because the body cuts off all energy expenditures it regards as "unneeded in the current situation". Heart and brain functions probably remain constant, but muscle tension will lower, body temperature regulated lower, unneccessary activities subconsciusly reduced etc.. In effect, this will be observed as slower walking speed than before, higher preference for warm clothing or warmer environments, being more easily tired, needing more sleep, preferring to watch TV instead of going out clubbing, keeping one's hands still instead of fidgeting around with a pencil and many other things.
Imagine a person being fed by gastro-intestinal tube, but able to live an otherwise normal life. The food is administered electronically and contains everything the person needs, is adapted to varying body weight but nonetheless controlled to contain a constant amount of calories. No matter if that person gets 2000 calories per day for months, their weight or habits will change.
"Mindless Eating" (Score:5, Informative)
A book was published about a year ago, "Mindless Eating". It discussed the various factors that cause us to overeat and undereat. (The latter is a serious problem in combat situations in the military. It's one thing for a civilian to lose 20 pounds of fat, it's another thing for a fighting soldier to lose 20 pounds of muscle.)
It's easy to say "eat less/eat healthier", but that requires far more attention than you realize. Marketers are NOT trying to get you to eat poorly, they just want you to buy from them instead of the competitor. If everyone wanted broccoli, there would be broccoli stands on every corner.
Most people want something fast, cheap and filling. Chains have tried introducing healthier fare periodically (e.g., Taco Bell had 'lite' choices for awhile), but they weren't popular enough to be economically viable. But offer a larger standard drink or more fries and your sales climb, so you get a downward spiral that results in a pound of french fries and people drinking 64 ounces of soda.
Worse, this "renormalizes" what people expect. Did you know that coke bottles were originally 8 fl oz? Then pepsi introduced a standard 10 fl oz bottle as a marketing gimmick. Vending machines stabilized things at 12 oz for a while (since you had to stay at the standard size to be sold in the machine), but fast food restaurants competed with each other with larger and larger cups, free refills, etc. You could always buy a smaller size but that's psychologically hard when you get half as much drink but pay nearly the same price.
Ditto coffee. It used to be a cup or two in the morning, perhaps with a bit of cream. Then Starbucks came into the market and the sizes have not only increased, the amount of fat and sugar has exploded. People who would never consider drinking a milk shake every day (or even twice a day!) do this without thinking twice when it's a fancy Starbucks drink. If you want a cup (8 oz) of black coffee... good luck!
I think the most telling story was some guy at a yard sale(?) who asked if the seller had any more dinner plates in a set from the 40s. He was holding a serving platter. Historically dinner plates were around 8", but now they're usually 12" (iirc), or over twice as much area. People tend to fill their plates so we're eating a lot more food without thinking about it. Now look at sit-down restaurant chains (Chili's, Olive Garden, etc.) They're selling presentation so they use larger plates than you have at home, and they fill those plates. It's not an exaggeration to say that they serve 3 or 4 solid servings, nutritionally speaking.
This is gradual enough that most people aren't aware that it's happening, but we are eating a lot more food and finding it harder to eat the correct portions. How often have you seen a 6'+ adult order from the child's menu?
Does this excuse people from TRYING? No, of course not. But arrogant "people should know better" tirades don't help since changes requires us to be aware of the subtle changes that have lead us to the current selections and portion sizes.
Re:Don't blame fructose. (Score:3, Informative)
Regular sugar triggers insulin and makes you feel full. Fructose doesn't, but contains the same amounts of calories as regular sugar. We have a digestive system that is very good at telling us how much to eat to not gain weight, but if we feed it the wrong things, it will not tell us.
Re:from the "no shit" dept. (Score:3, Informative)
That's why I hate Korn! (Score:3, Informative)
And maybe you forgot to point out that lots of fructose is in that quarter pounder as well. And in that cheese that comes with it. And in the ketchup and whatever dressing there might be. Not to mention the bread it is sandwiched between.
Finally, I'm sure you'll have a hard time finding lots of HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) products inside any sample of those Japanese vending machines (Personally, I just love them and am positively addicted to Pocari Sweat, C.C.Lemon and one more, which I never can remember the name of, plus all those coffee and tea varieties, yum!). And people drink lots of those drinks as well. Some people say you wouldn't be able to even survive the Japanese summer if there weren't any vending machines around. They're an insane waste of electrical energy, though. But that's another discussion.