obesity in America: who cares?

Marco Anglesio mpa at the-wire.com
Sun Jul 28 16:09:52 PDT 2002


On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Matthew Snyder wrote:
> I would disagree with the last part of your statement. Most major
> human civilizations in many parts of the world have had staple grains
> that were and are eaten as a major dietary component.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily a contradiction in terms. Most major human civilization have had carbohydrates as a major dietary component, but, unchecked by disease or famine, populations grow to meet the capacity of their environment to support them. That is to say that they may have been eating a diet with a lot of carbohydrates, but not many of them.

The modern industrial dilemma appears how to eat in a time of plenty. I can go to the grocery store and load up, incredibly cheaply, on a whole lot of densely packed calories. Carbs are easiest to process and produce cheaply, and so they're everywhere.


> was responding to initially was this IMO strange notion that
> carbohydrates are what's wrong with our diets, not the refining
> processes that strips the vitamin and mineral content out of just

I don't think that carbohydrates are what's wrong with our diets; the modern dietary recommendation is carb-heavy, after all. It's that we eat too much. Unfortunately, when we eat too much, it tends to be carbs, and since they're easily converted to glucose in the body one ends up wanting more, later, when blood sugar drops. As a lay observer, I'd tend to think that the battle isn't over nutrition but over the psychological effect of food on behaviour through hunger.

The Gary Taubes article (first published in Science and then revised for the NYT magazine) goes at this in some detail.

http://nasw.org/mem-maint/awards/01Taubesarticle1.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/07FAT.html

Marco

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