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10 Reasons To Eat Real Food
Uncategorized10. The rate of obesity has MORE THAN DOUBLED since 1980.
9. There are as many overweight people alive as there were TOTAL PEOPLE ALIVE ~100 years ago.
8. More than 40 million children UNDER 5 are overweight.
7. Obesity is now the #1 health concern among U.S. parents, TOPPING DRUGS & SMOKING.
6. The rate of diabetes and pre-diabetes has INCREASED ABOUT 100,000% in the last 100 years.
5. Diet related diseases have OVERTAKEN TOBACCO AS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH in the U.S..
4. Obesity is shortening average life spans more than accidents, homicides and suicides COMBINED.
3. About ONE IN THREE American kids are overweight or obese.
2. Overweight kids have a 70% chance of struggling with excess fat FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.
1. Thanks to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, for the first time in U.S. history, TODAY’S CHILDREN ARE EXPECTED TO DIE AT A YOUNGER AGE THAN THEIR PARENTS.
I believe we have a moral obligation to stop this…and I promise you, two-thirds of us did not spontaneously become lazy gluttons. There’s a lot more going on here politically, economically, and biologically than we’re led to believe. This is about so much more than weight loss. It’s definitely not about starving ourselves and spending hours on stair-steppers. It’s not about pills, powders, or potions. It’s about simple science, proven biology, and common sense. It’s about empowering others as we heal ourselves. It’s about eating more and exercising less—but smarter.
We don’t use the same computers we used decades ago. We don’t fly in the same planes we flew in decades ago. So, why are we being taught the same disproven nutrition and exercise theories we were taught decades ago?
If you are tired of myths and marketing, then please don’t starve yourself or spend your life on a treadmill. Eat more. Exercise less. Just do it smarter. Together, we can save lives while simplifying slim and making “healthy” healthy again.
– Jonathan Bailor
Study Shows Up To 70% of Weight Lost by Dieting Comes from Burning Muscle
UncategorizedAs we touched on last week, eating less does not create the need to burn body fat. It creates the need for the body to slow down. Contrary to popular opinion, the body hangs on to body fat. Instead, it burns muscle tissue, and that worsens the metabolic issue causing weight gain. Only as a last resort, if the body has no other option, it may also burn a bit of body fat.
Why does the body hang on to body fat and burn muscle? To answer that question, let’s look at it another way. What does our body want more of when it thinks we are starving? Stored energy. What is a great source of stored energy? Body fat. So when our body thinks we are starving, does it want to get rid of or hold on to body fat? It wants to hold on.
Next, what does our body want less of when we are starving? It wants less tissue which burns a lot of calories. What type of tissue burns a lot of calories? Muscle tissue. So when our body thinks we are starving, it gets rid of calorie-hungry muscle tissue. Studies show that up to 70% of the weight lost while eating less comes from burning muscle—not body fat.
Burning all this muscle means that starving ourselves leads to more body fat—not less—over the long term. As soon as we stop starving ourselves, we have all the calories we used to have but need less of them, thanks to all that missing muscle and our slowed-down metabolism. Now our body sees eating a normal amount as overeating and creates new body fat.
In the Journal of the American Medical Association, researcher G.L. Thorpe tells us that eating less does not make us lose weight, “…by selective reduction of adipose deposits [body fat], but by wasting of all body tissues…therefore, any success obtained must be maintained by chronic under-nourishment.” It is not practical or healthy to keep ourselves “chronically under-nourished,” so we don’t. Instead, we yo-yo diet. That is why eating less of a traditional diet is not an effective long-term fat loss approach. And that is why eating more–but smarter–is an effective long-term fat loss approach.
Sweeteners: More Profitable and Common than Ever
UncategorizedThe most common and powerful weapon in the food industry’s arsenal is added sweeteners. Researcher Michael F. Jacobson, with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said, “Carbonated soft drinks are the single most-consumed food in the American diet.”
The problem has gotten so bad that at the turn of the millennium the average American ate over 150 pounds of sweeteners per year because food companies add them to at least the following products:
Thanks to this sweet saturation, the average American is eating a little under a half-pound of added sweeteners per day. That is a cup of clog every day. Two centuries ago, people ate about one-tenth of that. During the previous 99.8% of our evolution, our ancestors ate none.
Sweeteners vs. Obesity
Note: The first year obesity data is available is 1900
Why is this such a problem? Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pointed out that as early as the 1950s, research “showed that the link between sugar consumption and coronary heart disease…was stronger than the link between heart disease and the consumption of saturated fats from animal foods.” This work, however, was ignored.
How did this inSANEity happen? Food that has all of its fat processed out tastes bad. It is hard to sell bad-tasting food. So food companies add sweeteners when they remove fat. Combine thegovernment’s “food containing fat is evil” guidelines with $36 billion of “we have yummy low-fat food” marketing, and the result is that nearly a fifth of the average American’s total calories come from sweeteners.
The worst part is that we have no practical choice under the Dietary Guidelines regime. If foods that contain fat are off the table, then almost everything else has been stuffed with sweeteners. As a general rule, if it is not coming directly from a plant or an animal, then it has been sweetened. Even if it does not taste sweet, it has been altered with at least one of the following:
Memorizing this list isn’t necessary. However, it is important to know that any form of caloric sweetener causes hormonal havoc. Put differently, our metabolism does not care where caloric sweeteners come from. To our metabolism, apple juice is basically the same as soda, since they both contain about thirty grams of sugar. A “weight loss” bar with thirty grams of sweeteners in it causes the same clog as a candy bar with thirty grams of sugar in it. “Heart smart” cereal is worse than breakfast pastries because they are both full of sweeteners, but folks feel bad eating more than two pastries while they will happily fill bowl after bowl with “enriched” sweetened cereal for breakfast.
It’s also important to understand that the sweetener high-fructose corn syrup is especially common and fattening. And that’s what we’ll cover in the next post.
Study Shows Starved Overweight People Burn Less Fat Than Starved Thin People
UncategorizedIn previous posts we reviewed research showing that eating less of a traditional diet and doing more traditional exercise does not effectively burn fat. Rather, it is effective at causing our metabolism to slow down and our muscles to be burned. In this post we’ll explore a study done at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, which shows that this “slow down, burn muscle, then burn fat” dynamic is intensified in heavy individuals.
In the study, researchers examined both heavy and thin people to see how their metabolisms behaved when they were given no calories. As expected, everyone slowed down. Because these people were on zero-calorie diets, everyone also burned some body fat, but here’s the kicker. Thin people burned off nearly 50% more body fat than heavy people.
Think about that for a second. Despite having more body fat, the heavy people burned less body fat. In the words of the researchers:
That finding is depressing. The heavy people burned what relatively little muscle they had rather than burning the excess body fat they were drowning in. They needed to burn body fat, but did not burn body fat effectively.
But why?
Creating the need to burn body fat isn’t enough to burn body fat effectively. Our body must also have the ability to burn fat. The requirement for both the need and the ability to burn body fat is a very important point to understand, because at the root of chronic weight gain is our body’s inability to burn body fat effectively. This is why research J.M. Friedman at the Rockefeller University noted that there is “something metabolically different about [overweight] individuals results in obesity independent of their caloric intake.” He is referring to their inability to effectively burn fat despite how little they eat and how much they exercise.
In SANE I call the inability to burn fat a “clog” in our metabolism. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School call it “metabolic dysregulation.” And whether we call it being clogged or experiencing metabolic dysregulation, science shows that until we restore our ability to burn body fat, eating less of our existing diet and doing more of our existing exercise routine will primarily slow us down and burn muscle. Fiddling with the quantity of calories in or out does not create the ability to burn body fat. To do that we need to shift our focus to eating more—but higher-quality—food and doing less—but higher-quality—exercise.
Eating more high-quality food provides more nutrition while preventing overeating. This creates the need to burn body fat. Add less, but higher-quality exercise, and we activate clog-clearing hormones which restore our ability to burn body. And since we will eat as much high-quality food as we want while doing only ten to twenty minutes of high-quality exercise per week, we can keep this up permanently. That permanent need and ability to burn body fat is our proven path to long-term fat loss.
Is SANE Eating a Low-Carb Diet?
UncategorizedThe brilliant MooseGeorge from the Support Group asked a wonderful question the other day:
Love this! Thanks George. My 2-cents:
George’s reply:
Thanks to George for the great question. I hope this is helpful. Have a great week!
Researchers Conclude That “Calories In” and “Calories Out” Are Automatically Regulated
UncategorizedDespite being proven wrong, eating less and exercising more is still the most common approach to weight loss. We are led to believe that our body sits back while we consciously regulate our weight. That is not how our body works. After W.C. Miller of Indiana University ran a clinical test of this principle, he concluded: “This study examined the relationships among body fat…energy intake, and exercise…There was norelationship between energy intake [calories in] and adiposity [body fat]”
Think about any other system in our body—our respiratory system, our immune system, etc. We do not manually control our bodily systems. We can try to hold our breath. We can try to avoid colds. But the respiratory and immune systems are in control and will do what they want. Our “fat metabolism system” works the same way. Researcher J.M. Friedman from the Rockefeller University explains, “The average human consumes one million…calories a year, yet weight changes very little…These facts lead to the conclusion that energy balance is regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously monitored.”
When you think about how hard our body systems work to make sure we stay on an even keel health-wise, this point makes perfect sense. Yet here is what the American Heart Association advises: “How can you manage your weight in a healthful way? The answer is simple: balance the calories you take in with the calories you burn.” Which seems odd considering they also said: “Few reliable data are available on the relative contributions to this obesity epidemic by energy intake and energy expenditure.” I might be missing something, but if “few reliable data are available,” then how did they come up with this answer?
We don’t have to worry about beating our hearts thanks to our circulatory system, and we also don’t have to worry about balancing our calories thanks to our fat metabolism system. The key to long-term fat loss and health in general is keeping all of our body’s systems functioning properly by eating more high-quality food, and doing less, but higher-quality, exercise. In the case of our fat metabolism system, this lowers our “set-point” weight and keeps us slim as reliably as our elevated set-point currently keeps us heavy.
In the next post we’ll start to explore the science of our set-point weight…and how we can lower it.
What??? Too Much Fruit can be BAD for me? (Fructose: Nature’s “Energy Payroll Deduction Plan”)
UncategorizedFor most of our lives we have been told that “eating more fruits and vegetables” will make us healthier and leaner. Who hasn’t heard the adage, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away?”
Yet, now we learn that fructose, the “fruit sugar”, is really not very good for us. As a matter of fact, increased fructose intake in the form of high fructose corn syrup is being blamed in large part for the skyrocketing incidence of obesity and diabetes.
In order to understand why this is the case, it’s useful to think about the availability of energy over the many thousands of years during which our ancestors evolved. They “lived off the land”, and the living wasn’t easy; but in the summertime there was fruit. The fruit of old was, of course, nothing like the sweet cultivars of today. The sugar content was much lower, but the amazing thing about fruit then as now was fructose. What was so useful about fructose for our ancestors and problematic for us was/is that it cannot be metabolized by any cells other than those in the liver.
Fructose doesn’t require insulin in order to be absorbed into the liver cells, and it is converted there to triglycerides, which can then be easily stored as fat in the liver and adipose tissues. Furthermore it doesn’t cause an increase in insulin, doesn’t stimulate leptin(satiety hormone)production, , and actually increases ghrelin (hunger hormone), so you can eat lots of fructose without feeling full, and indeed, ingesting fructose will make you feel even hungrier. This was a great advantage to our ancestors, leading to automatic fat storage without blunting the appetite, causing sleepiness, or decreasing alertness. And of course, those who were best at storing fat during the summertime survived the winter and were thus more successful at reproduction. So, every molecule of fructose was “metabolic and genetic money in the bank” for our ancestors.
But obviously, we’re different. We do not lack enough fat to get through the winter – for most of us, the opposite is true. Furthermore, fructose in the form of very sweet fruits and more significantly when added to processed foods in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, is available in huge quantities year-round. That’s a recipe for increased serum triglycerides, heart disease, obesity, fatty liver, and a number of other “modern” health issues.
So, if fructose can be bad for us, why eat any fruit at all? Why indeed? Well, for one thing, it really tastes good. More importantly, many fruits are highly NUTRITIOUS. For example, here are some wonderfully nutritious fruits:
Blueberries
Strawberries
Guava
Grapefruit
Apricots
Casaba Melon
So, how should we consider fruit? Highly edible, for the most part. For those of us who are naturally thin and healthy, we should be able to eat as much of our favorite fruits as we wish. For those whose goal, however, is to decrease our body fat, we may wish to limit our fruit intake to one or fewer servings per day, and concentrate on those fruits that have a lower total sugar and particularly lower fructose content.
Here below is a list that I compiled from a number of online sources showing the various sugar content in selected fresh and dried fruits. By comparison, I’ve include Coke Classic® in the list. It’s important to remember that all values are per 100 mg. (Nobody ever stops at 100 mg – 100 cc – of Coke)
Cathy (craving some blueberries right now)
DrCathy’s Big Fruit List – Sugars in Fresh and Dried Fruits
( grams sugar per 100 grams of fruit)
Fresh Fruit
Fructose
Dried Fruit
Comparison with High-Fructose soft drink
***Note: All values are per 100 g. (Nobody ever stops at 100 g – 100 cc – of Coke)
Doesn’t the “Law of Thermodynamics” Prove Eating Less Burns Body Fat?
UncategorizedWe know the traditional approach to fat loss fails 95% of the time, yet common sense seems to tell us: “If you eat less and exercise more, you must burn body fat. Anything else violates the law of thermodynamics.”
There are four laws of thermodynamics. The two that apply to burning body fat do not prove that reducing the number of calories eaten makes the body burn fat. They tell us energy cannot be created nor destroyed; energy can only change forms. When people eat less, the body must do something. That’s it. The laws of thermodynamics prove nothingabout what the fat metabolism system must do.
Remember how it is easier for your body to slow down than to burn fat? And remember how it makes more sense to burn calorie-hungry muscle than it does to burn protective body fat? Put those two facts together, and instead of proving that eating less equals long-term fat loss, the applicable laws of thermodynamics prove that eating less makes the body slow down and burn muscle, which leads to long-term fat gain—not fat loss.
Q&A: Is SANE Eating the Same for Children and Adults?
UncategorizedSANE Eating the Same for Children and Adults?
Yes and no. Yes, in that the same foods are SANE and inSANE for children and adults. No, in that SANE eating is more important for children because:
Children require more nutrition than adults
Most expectant mothers are especially careful about what they put into their bodies while they are pregnant. Why? Because they know optimal nutrition is critical for a developing fetus. Similarly, optimal nutrition is critical for a developing child.
SANE foods contain more nutrition per calorie than any other foods (The “N” in SANE stands for “Nutrition.”) When a child eats a SANE diet, that child is eating the most nutritious diet possible.
Children are more susceptible to food-related behavior problems
InSANE foods such as starches and sweets are dramatically more Aggressive (the “A” in SANE) than SANE foods. They release a significant and short burst of energy into the body. This causes a short energy high followed by longer-lasting lethargy. Still developing mentally and emotionally, children are doubly impacted by these “highs” and “lows,” which is why children start “bouncing off of the walls” and have a hard time concentrating after eating inSANE starches and sweets. It is also why children then become sluggish and have a hard time concentrating. SANE eating has long been “prescribed” to aid children said to be suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
A SANE diet ensures a slow and steady supply of energy to the body and enables optimal mood and behavior.
Fat cells never go away
A SANE diet has been proven to enable the body to burn rather than to store fat. Once fat cells are made, we cannot get rid of them; we can only shrink them. This is why helping our children avoid excess body fat is so important and why childhood obesity is so heartbreaking. Once a child develops new fat cells, that youngster will have a harder time staying slim for the rest of his or her life because those fat cells will never go away. At best, they will shrink, but still predispose that child to storing excess body fat.
The habits children form affect them for the rest of their lives
The habits we learn as children stick with us. When we teach our children SANE habits, we make it dramatically easier for them to keep themselves fit and healthy for the rest of their lives.
In summary, if it’s SANE or inSANE for an adult, it’s even more SANE or inSANE for a child. Everything that makes SANE eating important for adults makes it even more important for children.
Exercising More Does Not Equal Long-Term Fat Loss
UncategorizedIn the same way that people drink more fluids when they exercise more, they also eat more when they exercise more. Researcher Hugo R. Rony found: “Consistently high or low energy expenditures result in consistently high or low levels of appetite. Thus men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations.” J.M. Friedman at Rockefeller University makes a similar point: “Exercise by itself has not been shown to be highly effective in treating obesity because the increased energy use from exercise is generally offset by increased caloric intake.”
Compounding the problem, many people who exercise more do not eat high-quality food. The majority of people get most of their calories from low-quality starches and sweeteners.Therefore, exercising more triggers the consumption of more low-quality food. More low-quality food means less need to burn body fat, more clogging, and a higher set-point. Far from burning body fat, we burn time and build-up clogs.
Here is one scenario for exercising more: Michelle goes for a 30-minute jog and burns 170 more calories than she would have burned by sitting at home and reading this book. She is trying hard to cut calories, so she does not drink any sugary sports drinks and fights through the hunger pangs after her jog. At dinner Michelle unconsciously drinks an extra glass of reduced-fat milk thanks to her increased thirst and hunger. The net result of her jog is thirteen more calories than if she had not exercised.
Much more commonly, people will have sweetened “power juice” while pounding it out on the treadmill. Afterward, they overeat low-quality food. The net result is more low-quality food and more clogging.
The food industry is very well aware that exercising more encourages eating more low-quality food. That’s why the following corporations serve on the executive board of the American Council on Fitness and Nutrition:
Are we told to exercise more because it is good for fat loss or because it is good for business? The National Soft Drink Association advises us to “consume at least eight glasses of fluids daily, even more when you exercise. A variety of beverages, including soft drinks, can contribute to proper hydration.”
But wait. If you exercise less, won’t you gain body fat? As you’ll see in future posts that depends on the type of exercise you do. In the next two posts we’ll cover how exercising less doesnot cause long-term fat gain and eating more doesnot cause long-term fat gain.