Imagine this scene – a personal trainer barking at his flabby pen-pushing charges to push themselves through the pain barrier and climb those steps because “the human body wasn’t designed to sit at a computer all day”. It’s easy to imagine because of the common perception that the root cause of the current obesity epidemic is a radical shift in human behaviour – from the hunter-gatherer ways of our ancient ancestors to our current sedentary lifestyles with diets high in energy-dense and highly-processed foods.
But, in a paper just published in PLoS One researchers from the United States, Tanzania and England have shown that there’s actually no difference in the energy expenditure of the modern American in comparison to the closest modern comparator we have to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the Hadza foragers of Northern Tanzania.
According to the authors, although the hunter-gatherers do indeed walk far more than your average American, they actually expend the same amount of total energy. Based on these findings, the authors challenge the view that obesity in Western populations results from decreased energy expenditure, placing the blame squarely on our high-energy diets.
If you eat too much, you will get fat. All else is intrigue.
You’ll like this…
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
There’s a great case to be made for the governments misguided efforts to make us eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet leading to our obesity and diabetes epidemic. Great compare and contrast with the climate war and a wonderful example of “why we fight!”
My informed opinion is that obesity exists little, and people get slightly fatter as the food becomes more digestible. A cursory glance at newspaper ads 100-120 years ago will show what I mean.
I’d like to see that study, if there is one…please.
Save for those very few nutrients which are water-soluble, and therefore capable of being absorbed directly into the bloodstream through the lining of the stomach, all of our food passes the duodenum into the intestines, where it is processed by a little bile (in people who retain their gall bladders) and by a LOT of microbes – bacteria, fungi, yeast, etc.
In other words, our nutrients include water, salt, soluble sugars, and the metabolic waste products of the trillions of cells living inside our bowels.
For some unknown reason, nutritionists and the FDA have yet to fully characterize the 1000+ species of commensal organisms within us, and the potential of each to influence our balance of nutrients.
We know what we eat, but we don’t know what our guts are producing from what we eat, and we absorb a LOT of that.
We will never know why we are obese until we know what is making us obese.
Excess carbohydrates, which turn into sugar, which is stored as fat if not utilized by the body for energy in the form of work.
The human body takes in oxygen and uses it to “burn” organic compounds for energy. This chemical process is called “Oxidation.”
The hypothesized conversion of carbohydrates into fats requires *removal* of oxygen from organic compounds. This chemical process is called Reduction.”
This process is the exact *opposite* of how the human body works.
Nobody has yet demonstrated how the living human body can break down carbohydrates and *release* oxygen.
It would appear that the conversion of sugar into fat is a myth.
Unused sugars are converted into glycogens and stored in the liver until needed.
I researched this via da net, and found little. The world loves to talk about fat to glucose, but no one talks about glucose to fat.
To summarize what I found, glucose can be converted to triglycerides, but it is very inefficient.
Hence, I conclude, that the conversion of glucose to fat is insignificant, but possible.
More research needed; send me money.
Tad and GC, I’m going to assume you aren’t being sarcastic for the remainder of this post. You don’t convert the molecules themselves. The molecules are digested, and the resulting energy converts ADP to ATP. This ATP then releases energy into a separate fat-making process.
Seriously, this got old a long time ago. You are saying “it’s imposisble” by looking at the wrong reaction.
The hunter/gatherers did not know the chemical composition of their food and yet they were not fat.
How do we know there were no “fat hunter-gatherers”. Fat, in whose terminology?
So we had a study a week or so ago saying that test subjects were obese regardless of diet, this week it says it’s not because of calorie-burn. To many, this will simply prove “It takes diet AND exercise to lose weight! Duh!”
My question is: since longevity and health are directly, positively related to increasing BMI, WHY ARE WE TRYING IN THE FIRST PLACE??