Obesity – The Global Health Concern
Welcome to the obesity resource of A2ZedHealth. Read the information and watch these videos so that you are directed through to having the best understanding of the problem and the solution as it stands. By the end of these videos you’ll be given an action plan that you can follow.
To start you off, here’s Adam Zaks (Creator of A2ZedHealth) with an introduction to the subject…
Robert H. Lustig
* MD, UCSF Professor of Paediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology
* Author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar.
One of the world leaders in the study of why people gain weight.
In this video, he explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fibre (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.
Dr. Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, with basic and clinical training relative to hypothalamic development, anatomy, and function. Prior to coming to San Francisco in 2001, he worked at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. There, he was charged with the endocrine care of many children whose hypothalami had been damaged by brain tumors, or subsequent surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. Many patients who survived became massively obese. Dr. Lustig theorized that hypothalamic damage led to the inability to sense the hormone leptin, which in turn, led to the starvation response. Since repairing the hypothalamus was not an option, he looked downstream, and noted that these patients had increased activity of the vagus nerve (a manifestation of starvation) which increased insulin secretion. By administering the insulin suppressive agent octreotide, he was able to get them to lose weight; but more remarkably, they started to exercise spontaneously. He then demonstrated the same phenomenon in obese adults without CNS lesions. The universality of these findings has enabled Dr. Lustig to weave these threads together into a novel unifying hypothesis regarding the etiology, prevention, and treatment of the current obesity epidemic. This has led him to explore the specific role of fructose (half of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup) as a specific mediator of both chronic disease, and continued caloric consumption.
Gary Taubes
* Applied physics Harvard University
* Author of ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’ and ‘Why We Get Fat’
The law of thermodynamics obviously applies however Gary Taubes explains why it’s not as simple as ‘calories in, calories out’.
Taubes gained prominence in the low-carb diet debate following the publication of his 2002 New York Times Magazine piece “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”. The article, which questioned the efficacy and health benefits of low-fat diets, was seen as defending the Atkins diet against the medical establishment, and it became extremely controversial. Some scholars interviewed for this article complained that Mr. Taubes misinterpreted their words or treated them out of context. Taubes himself stated: Even though I knew the article would be the most controversial article the Times Magazine ran all year, the reaction still shocked me. The Center for Science in the Public Interest published a rebuttal to the Times article in its November 2002 newsletter. According to Taubes: The CSPI is an advocacy group that has been pushing low-fat diets since the 1970s
In 2007, Taubes published his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (published as The Diet Delusion in the UK). This book examines how a hypothesis — that dietary fat is the cause of obesity and heart disease — became dogma, and claims to show how the scientific method was circumvented so a contestable hypothesis could remain unchallenged. The book uses data and studies compiled from more than a century of dietary research to support what Taubes calls “the alternative hypothesis.”
Taubes’s hypothesis is that the medical community and the U.S. federal government have relied upon misinterpreted scientific data on nutrition to build the prevailing paradigm about what constitutes healthful eating. Taubes makes the case that — contrary to the conventional wisdom — it is refined carbohydrates that are responsible for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and many other “maladies of civilization”. In the Epilogue to Good Calories, Bad Calories on page 454, Taubes notes ten “inescapable” conclusions, the first of which is: Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
