Why do we get fat

Chapter 26 Let's Eat!Get fat!And I'm watching you from the side (2)
In 1925, H. Gardiner-Hill (H. Gardiner-Hill) of St. Thomas' Medical College in London described his sugar-restricted weight-loss diet in the "Lancet" magazine: "No matter what kind of bread contains a lot of Sugar, ranging from 45% to 65%, is a very bad proportion.”

Between 1943 and 1952, physicians from major hospitals including Stanford University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Children's Memorial Hospital of Chicago, Cornell Medical College, and New York Hospital separately published dietary recommendations for treating obesity.We can take a look.

Here are the general rules of the Chicago edition:

1. Do not consume sugar, honey, syrup, jam, jelly or candy.

2. Do not eat canned fruit that contains sugar.

3. Do not eat cakes, cookies, pies, puddings, ice cream or ice cubes.

4. Do not eat foods containing cornstarch or added gravy and cream.

5. Do not eat potatoes, macaroni, pasta, noodles or peas.

6. Do not eat food fried in butter, lard, vegetable oil or margarine.

7. Do not consume beverages such as cola, soda or root beer.

8. Do not eat foods that are not recommended in the recipes, and try to only eat foods recommended in the recipes.

Published in England in 1951, Endocrinology in Practice is a classic read written by one of the greatest endocrinologists of the 20th century, Raymond Greene (brother of novelist Graham Greene), and seven other physicians , the following are recommended weight loss recipes.

Foods to avoid:

1. Bread and all flour products.

2. Cereal food, including breakfast cereal and milk pudding.

3. Potatoes and all other white root vegetables.

4. Foods rich in sugar.

5. All sweets.

Eat more of the following foods:

1. Meat, fish, poultry.

2. All green vegetables.

3. Eggs or dried eggs.

4. Cheese.

5. Fruits that are not overly sweet, except bananas and grapes.

In the closing stages of World War II, as the U.S. Navy sailed westward across the Pacific, unit officials even warned their soldiers that life on the Caroline Islands northeast of New Guinea could lead to "waistline trouble" because "natives The staple foods that humans eat are starchy foods—breadfruit, taro, yams, sweet potatoes, and arrowroot.”

In 1946, Dr. Spock's parenting bible "Nurture of Newborns and Young Children" was published, which stated: "Most of the time, the amount of starchy vegetables (grains, potatoes) eaten determines the weight gain or loss. .” Later, every time it was reprinted, this passage has been retained.The total circulation of the book so far is about 5000 million copies.

In 1963, Sir Stanly Davidson and Reginald Passmore co-published Human Nutrition and Dietetics.This book can be said to be an absolutely unavoidable masterpiece in the history of British nutrition."All popular diets recommend limiting sugar intake," the authors write. And, the authors further advise, "...the intake of foods rich in sugar must be greatly reduced, and an overindulgence in such foods is most common cause of obesity."

In the same year, Passmore published another article jointly with other scholars in the "British Journal of Nutrition" even more bluntly: "Every woman knows that sugar makes people fat. This is common sense, and few people Nutritionists take issue with that."

At this point, scientists slowly began experimenting with the effects of carbohydrate-restricted diets, and published reports of these experiments.The first report was published in 1936 by Per Hanssen, a doctor at the Steinor Memorial Hospital in Copenhagen. The conclusion is clear: the weight loss program that restricts carbohydrates can significantly reduce weight, and obese people do not need to suffer from hunger. starve.

In the late 20s, the DuPont Company in Delaware began research on weight loss.George Gehrmann, manager of the company's industrial medicine department, once explained: "We ask overweight workers to eat less, learn to count calories, limit fat and sugar intake in meals, and exercise more actively. It’s a pity that these measures have no effect in the end.” In desperation, Gehrman had to ask Alfred Pennington (Alfred Penington) to investigate the obesity problem of the company’s employees.Pennington prescribes a meat-based diet for 40 overweight workers.As a result, these employees lost an average of 20 kilogram of body weight within a week.And few of them ate less than 1 calories a day, but an average of 2400 calories—twice the amount prescribed by today's common semi-starvation diet.We still believe that we must starve to lose weight.But Pennington told us: "It is worth noting that such a weight loss method makes obese people feel no hunger between meals, and their energy and happiness are improved." Sugars with more than 3000 calories."In some cases, so much sugar is not good for weight loss," Pennington reported.

In the 20s, Margaret Ohlson, chair of Michigan State University's nutrition department, and her student Charlotte Young, who was working at Cornell University, repeated Pennington's experiments and Unanimous conclusions were obtained.They gave overweight students traditional semi-starvation diet diet recipes, and the result was that "they barely lost weight, and they had no energy, were always hungry, and were not in good spirits."And when they ate only a few hundred calories a day of sugar and plenty of protein and fat, they lost an average of 50kg in a week and "felt good and satisfied. Hunger between meals disappeared." Nothing exists".

Similar experiments continued into the 70s.Some doctors limit the amount of sugar, while fat and protein intake is relaxed from 600 calories to 2100 calories a day; You can eat as much meat as you want, protein and fat are unlimited, but sugar is strictly controlled; some doctors completely ban sugar, even green leafy vegetables.Such weight-loss studies are ongoing in hospitals and medical schools in the US, UK, Canada, Cuba, France, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland.The weight loss method of restricting carbohydrates and relaxing protein and fat intake has been used in various experiments, and the weight loss effects on men, women and children are almost the same.Obese people lose weight with little to no effort and experience little or no hunger.

In the mid-20s, the medical community began to hold regular obesity conferences, and each time it set up a special discussion on diet and weight loss.These kinds of discussions always revolve around sugar-restricted diets.The effects of calorie restriction for weight loss (dieting) are almost never discussed in meetings, since dieting is known to be almost never successful, but fasting is occasionally discussed.

Between 1967 and 1974, the meeting took place a total of five times in the United States and Europe, the largest being at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in October 1973.Charlotte Young of Cornell University gave a special speech on diet therapy at the meeting.She reviewed the century-old research history of sugar making people fat, including DuPont's Pennington experiment and the research results of her mentor Olson in Michigan.She also talked about her own research: She asked obese experimenters to eat 10 calories a day. All diets contained the same amount of protein, but some diets had almost no sugar and a lot of fat, and some had hundreds of calories of sugar and no fat. Not a lot of fat.And her conclusion is also very clear: "The experimenters lost weight and fat, and the percentage of weight loss was inversely proportional to the sugar content in the diet." That is to say, the less sugar you eat, the more weight you lose. The more body fat is lost.Going a step further, Yang pointed out a very important point: the so-called "effective" weight loss diet should be measured in this way-obese people should not feel hungry, should reduce fatigue, lose appropriate weight, and the diet should be suitable for long-term weight loss control and conditioning.

Now, you might think that with studies all over the world confirming these conclusions, and with the more advanced science of fat metabolism, the medical community and public health authorities might be on the same page.Maybe they'll start a campaign to convince those who are prone to obesity, at least not to eat the most fattening sugar-rich foods—refined, easily digestible sugars and sweets.But obviously, that's not the case.

By the 20s, the notion that obesity was due to "eating disorders" was on the rise, while the theory of true fat regulation was gradually neglected.Doctors are not willing to accept such a weight loss method, and they actually say that obese people can lose weight without dieting, and they can eat as much as they want.In contrast, the cause of obesity lies in eating too much, which is much easier to accept.

Subsequently, health officials promoted to the public that excess fat can cause heart disease, and sugar was identified as a "health care agent".The U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched the world-famous "Dietary Guidelines Pyramid", which puts fat at the top of the tower and warns everyone to eat less; meat is close to the top of the tower, because meat has relatively more saturated fatty acids; , which is at the bottom of the pyramid and is a staple of a healthy diet.

The "belief" of sugar as a heart-protecting agent began in the 20s, which is incompatible with the idea that sugar makes people fat.In short, if fat causes heart attacks, then replacing sugar with fatty foods will surely kill us.So, even if we lose weight successfully, what is the use?As a result, doctors and nutritionists began attacking sugar-restricted diets because they bought into the belief that fat causes heart disease.But at the time, there was only limited experimentation with heart disease, so we couldn't identify what actually caused it.We believe something because someone we respect believes it; likewise, respectable people believe it because someone else they respect believes that view.It's just false rumors.

In 1965, the American Physiological Society published an 800-page "Handbook of Physiology," which said: "Sugar drives insulin, which drives fat storage." The Times quoted Gene Mayer of Harvard University, Claiming to market sugar-restricted diets to the public amounts to "Holocaust."

massacre.

Is this Mel's logic?Well, first, the Times explains it this way: "The medical fact is that unless a dieter cuts excess calories—either eating fewer calories or burning them off—they cannot lose weight." Now, We know this is not a medical fact.But nutritionists in 1965 thought otherwise.Too bad most nutritionists still don't think so.Second, because these diets limit sugar intake, it tends to compensate by consuming more fat. The Times went on to explain that it was the fatty nature of the recipes that prompted Meyer to accuse them of "slaughter".

And this kind of propaganda is even more misleading: fat causes heart disease, so sugar can prevent heart disease. The most influential Times reporter on nutrition in the 20s, Jane Brody, told us: "We need to eat more sugar. Pasta is not only diet trendy, it will make you Lose weight." In 80, when the British nutrition authority compiled the "British Nutrition Guidelines", the following explanation was made: "In the past, the UK advocated restricting sugar intake as one of the methods of weight control. Now it seems that this is different from today's Thinking in the opposite direction."

In 1995, this emerging logic reached its absurd peak.The American Heart Association has published a handbook declaring that we can eat without scruples, even sweets and table sugars—as long as they are low in fat: "To control the amount of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol you eat and variety, you can choose snacks made from other foods such as... low fat desserts, low fat biscuits... pretzels without salt, hard candy, soft candy, table sugar, syrup, honey, jam, jelly, marmalade, And so on."

If it is true that fat causes heart disease, it seems reasonable to attack low-carb diets.But now, there's overwhelming evidence that we've been misled—that authorities fooled first themselves, and then us, who don't know.Because in fact, the causal relationship between fat and heart disease seems to have been vaguely known for a long time.In the next chapter, I'll get to the meat of it and tell you whether a diet that restricts only carbohydrates is actually healthy, even if it means allowing you to eat fat and meat instead for energy.

(End of this chapter)