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Science

Eat Lots; Digest Little 19

varp writes: "Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine have figured out a way to reduce body fat even though you keep pumping yourself with all the grease you can lay your hands on while sitting on the couch and doing nothing. Next wish: Please, please identify the gene which can cause my arteries to choke."
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Eat Lots; Digest Little

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  • Last time I got pumped full of grease, I put on 25 pounds.

    Then the doctor told me I was pregnant.

  • by Kotetsu ( 135021 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @05:18AM (#327817) Homepage
    The researchers employed a novel technique that used a virus tagged with a green-glowing jellyfish protein to visualize the feeding circuit in the brain of a mouse.

    The nutritional results are interesting, although practical application in humans is years away. The interesting thing is the use of more stuff from those green-glowing jellyfish. They've used it in plants and monkeys, and now viruses. Who would have thought that glowing jellyfish could end up being so useful?

  • If jellyfish are used in this process, don't you think most people will be freaked? Though it must work because when I have jellyfish on the brain I can't stomach food either. I wish I knew how the virus thing worked, though.
  • by Shotgun ( 30919 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @08:20AM (#327819)
    ``If we find a drug that can be used to regulate ACC2 without having some other side effects, I think we've achieved our goal,'' he said.

    Stop to consider this for a moment. The western world is rich, with little need for the average human to have to do strenuous work for a living. They can afford to eat all they want, without having to do anything to work that food off. They keep adding fuel, without ever reving their engine. Digestion is a simple system really.

    The human body is designed through years of evolutionary development to want to store up fuel as fat. Cyclical weather patterns with the accompanying cyles of feast and famine, insured that those who could store up more energy during the feast periods would fare better during the famine. The problem is, you can't continually add food without burning it off. You can't keep storing up for ever. The western world sees a continuous feast, without ever seeing the famine.

    Enter these guys who have a goal of putting a hole in the fuel tank. Instead of stopping the pump, or driving the car for a while, their goal is to let the fuel pour out on the ground. This is ludicrous in its simple-minded short sightedness.

    This may be a good technique for some troubling cases, but a much better solution for the majority of people is to push back from the table and get off their fat asses. I say this as a person who has lost 50lbs in the past year, and went from barely being able to run a mile in 12 minutes to running a 6:30 mile and winning a wrestling tournament this past weekend.

    Westerners need to drop the idea of loosing weight, and start concentrating on making the body burn the fuel it takes in. This type of solution may make you tip the scales at a lower point, but it won't make you any healthier. There is a lot of evidence that increase flow rate of the blood does a lot of the work of cleaning arteries. How will sitting on the couch eating '0-calory' chips increase blood flow.

    In summary, this type of drug is the type of 'no-pain' cure-all that my fellow American like. It hides the current, annoying symptoms, while totally ignoring the overall systemic problems. For those who doubt this, here are other examples of simple, cure-alls for systemic problems:

    • gun control to cure violence crime
    • censoring of video games to cure school violence
    • imprisonment of drug abusers

  • Last time I got pumped full of grease, I put on 25 pounds.

    Then the doctor told me I was pregnant.



    Well, it'd have been even funnier if you were male...

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • If you're interested in losing fat, the simple answer is to stop putting on fat. The slightly longer answer is that your body adds fat when insulin is secreted by the pancreas, and to stop that secretion you can stop eating carbs (the trigger for insulin secretion).

    See Sugar Busters, Atkins diet, or Protein Power at your local bookstore for more info.

    Dancin Santa
  • Last time I got pumped full of grease, I put on 25 pounds. Then the doctor told me I was pregnant.

    Ummm... I don't think it was grease you got pumped full of!
  • The answer is to stop listening to major media outlets. When scientists announced links between high consumption of saturated fat and obesity, the media basically announced "Fat is Bad!". Now we have all these "low-fat" products, which contain engineered fats or weirdo carbs. The problem is that evolution is slow and the human body doesn't know what to do with these chemicals. Hang out for a few minutes in the snack food aisle of a grocery store and you'll see that the people who buy the low-fat stuff are quite obese.

    Fad diets like Atkins, the Zone, and Sugar Busters have a fundamental problem--they can't be maintained for life. At some point, you have to stop the diet (with Atkins, it's when you are hospitalized with kidney failure, diabetes, or gout). You will immediately start to put on weight, possibly more than you took off while on the diet.

    If you are overweight and trying to lose the extra weight, you need to modify your lifestyle. Follow an eating habit that you can maintain for the rest of your life, such as Dr. D'Adamo's Eat Right 4 Your Type [dadamo.com], which is a meal plan designed around your genetic makeup.

    What Dr. D'Adamo has found is that blood types emerged in different phases of human evolution, when humans lived in markedly different regions and ate indigineous foods. You may be unaware, but blood type is relevant outside of the bloodstream. Consumption of certain foods will cause immune system reactions, much like getting a transfusion from an imcompatible blood type! In America, we consume a large quantity of wheat, which most people have problems digesting. We also eat way too much dairy, another source of digestive troubles. And of course, we eat too much meat.

    Give it an honest try. Chances are you will have to give up some of the foods you love. The benefits: you will reach the ideal weight for your frame, you will have a lessened risk of heart disease and cancer (the major killers in the West...), and you will have a higher level of physical comfort due to an efficient digestive tract.



    If you love God, burn a church!
  • Sounds like wasted food to me...

    Effects.
    We produce extra food to not be used ...
    This costs us labor and fuel that could be applied to other more usefull projects.
    This requires us to use land and fisheries that would not be needed and could otherwise be used or left wild.
    For every X hours of farm work, X2 people are injured and X3 people are killed...

    I once saw an article [usda.gov] that indicated ~27% of the food produced in the US is wasted, think about it, we use a third more land, a third more fuel, maime and kill a third more people than needed to keep ourselves fed.

    This has nothing to do with tree hugging, and everything to do with wasted lives and opportunity. And yes I do not stockpile food to let it go bad.

    My fridge is usually empty at the end of the week, and I have a policy of not letting food sit unused for more than two weeks... It's called JIT (Just in Time) for the home.

    TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
  • I have a body-builder friend who has studied hard up on biochemistry. Anyway, he put me on a protein diet that works brilliantly. I lost 18kgs (40lbs or so) over about 12 months without being very strict. I work too much to exercise too, so I could have done an even better job.

    The basics of this low-carb diet is that carbs are used for energy (running, etc) so if you eat carbs and don't use the energy then you store it as fat.

    Cut out carbs and eat more fat because what you eat most of is used for your energy.

    Without carbs your body will go into ketosis but you shouldn't stay in ketosis for too long. Lay off carbs for say 7-10 days then pig out on pizza and anything you want for 2 days. Then do it all over again. Some similar protein diets won't tell you to pig out once a week and that can get dangerous to yout body coz ketosis shuts down your organs.

    I'm a bit of a workaholic (wake up, sit at computer for about 14-16hrs, do it again next day) and cutting out carbs makes you think much clearer and you don't feel tired after eating coz there are no carbs. You just want to sleep all day when you're on carb-days tho.

  • Beefcake: (7:54 AM) interesting story but they forgot to mention that yu are going to sweat like Fat Bastard from Austin powers when you short circuit the krebs cycle and omit acetlylCoA
    Beefcake: (7:57 AM) but mice don't sweat so they probably don't know
    they should look at the research on dinitrophenol - bodybuilders ( crazy ones ) use it for fat loss. It short circuitts the krebs cycle in the same way but you sweat ( yellow ) under a fan in winter, all day every day while you take it and for a few days after
  • The high protein diets may certainly have effects in immediate weight loss but long term they are horrendous. Also, eating all of that meat really doesn't help you feel any better. I have cut out all land animals from my diet and subsisted on seafood and vegetarian foods for the last year and I feel great. When you stop eating things like chicken and beef you avoid a lot of saturated fats that you really shouldn't consume. You do need some saturated fats, but that is what sunflower seeds and the like are for. A largely vegetarian diet, or a diet eliminating fatty luxury foods (like steak), may not have the immediate results of the current fad diets but it sets you up for a long and enjoyable life, free of heart disease and all sorts of other nasty things.
  • you OD on DNP and you die because it inhibits aerobic respiration. Manner of cellular death is similar to cyanide poisoning.
  • "Consumption of certain foods will cause immune system reactions, much like getting a transfusion from an imcompatible blood type"

    huh?

    The digestive tract is known as "immunologically priviledged" which basically means the immune system ignores what you are putting in your stomach. It is when the food is digested and absorbed into the bloodstream that immunologic reaction can occur, but this is rare, as most things are so digested that they are one of 3 things: oligosaccharides, lipids, or peptides (or short amino acid chains), and these particles are quite non-antigenic (does not induce an immunological response).

    The only reason people develop allergic reactions to foods like nuts, is because they are fed it when very young (PBJ sandwiches, etc), and before immunological priveledged areas have been defined in the course of the development of the kid's immune system. This doesn't happen in the majority of people including Americans.

    Blood type has NOTHING to do with food. Blood type is a cell-marker protein expressed by the cell because of genetics. Just because people are segregated by ethnicity (different blood types) and eat different foods, doesn't mean that the two are related. Get your scientific method down correctly please: correlation does not mean causation.

    Furthermore, dairy is a source of digestive troubles merely because many people have lost the ability to digest lactose, commonly known as lactose intolerance. So people treat milk with beta-galactosidase to make "lactaid" milk, which is milk that has galactose and glucose in it.

    Peter C. Lai
    Undergraduate Research Assistant
    Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology
    Univ. of Connecticut
    Storrs CT USA
  • There is a herbal extract that causes the body to over-metabolize fatty acids, as well as stimulate the premature release of fatty acids from fat cells (this is good). They are these honking gelcaps and you take 2-3 of them a day usually before you eat.

    Controlled studies showed on average that subjects lost 1 pound of body fat per month without a change in diet or excercise.

    A search on google will find you a bazillion hits, most of them trying to sell you stuff.
    A jar of 60 gelcaps costs around 10-15 canadian dollars, price may vary where you live.

    link [innx.com]
    another link [whyfiles.org]
  • You, sir, are obviously and either an idiot or illiterate.

    The things you rant against as if I support them were described as simple solutions to complex problems that do nothing to heal the underlying issues but only disquise the symptoms.

  • Thank you for sharing. Please follow up about six months after you finish your modified Atkins Diet. I bet 10USD you will have gained back all of your weight. Better yet, let's wait about ten years, so you can describe in detail your colon cancer.



    If you love God, burn a church!
  • Thank you for your explanation. I'm not sure we have been discussing the same thing. Within the digestive tract, mucus[sic] is formed to encapsulate certain foods--probably to protect the human host from them. This slows down digestion significantly. As a result, a person who eats foods that produce excessive mucus may have up to a week's worth of food putrefying in his intestines! The hormones, biocides, and novel proteins (from GM foods) are in your body up to five times longer than they would be in a digestive tract not taxed my excess mucus (seven days vs. one and a half). I'm sure you are aware of the potential effects, as matter from the intestines is still passed into the bloodstream. A slow colon causes problems for the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas. The relationship between mucus production, the food ingested, and the individual's blood type has been clearly established by Dr. D'Adamo, the Naturopath who developed this methodology. He has over twenty years of quantitative/qualitative data to back up his assertions.

    I can imagine that our ancient ancestors were probably quite body-aware, since they didn't spend all their time chasing after material possessions 24/7 as does modern man. The foods they chose to eat defined the foods we ate until the end of regionalism. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for ethnic diversity and mixing. I will say that we now have to stop blindly accepting outdated dining traditions and start listening to our bodies. Dr. D'Adamo's literature is an excellent guide for anyone wishing to reach stasis.

    I admire your educational aspirations (I'm a grad student in another field), but must caution you about the dangers of indoctrination--you will be taught what the disease care industry wants you to "know". Blood type has everything to do with food.



    If you love God, burn a church!
  • Actually, it was about 6 months ago that I started being lazy about it - and still haven't put on any more weight.

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