Newsweek, May 07, 2012
by Gary Taubes
fast food with hidden sugars and hfcs has corrupted the food supply
The nation’s most powerful anti-obesity groups are teaming up for a new HBO documentary—but it pushes the same tired advice. Gary Taubes on the research they’re ignoring.
Most of my favorite factoids about obesity are historical ones, and they don’t make it into the new, four-part HBO documentary on the subject, The Weight of the Nation. Absent, for instance, is the fact that the very first childhood-obesity clinic in the United States was founded in the late 1930s at Columbia University by a young German physician, Hilde Bruch. As Bruch later told it, her inspiration was simple: she arrived in New York in 1934 and was “startled” by the number of fat kids she saw—“really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.”
What makes Bruch’s story relevant to the obesity problem today is that this was New York in the worst year of the Great Depression, an era of bread lines and soup kitchens, when 6 in 10 Americans were living in poverty. The conventional wisdom these days—promoted by government, obesity researchers, physicians, and probably your personal trainer as well—is that we get fat because we have too much to eat and not enough reasons to be physically active. But then why were the PC- and Big Mac–-deprived Depression-era kids fat? How can we blame the obesity epidemic on gluttony and sloth if we easily find epidemics of obesity throughout the past century in populations that barely had food to survive and had to work hard to earn it?
Dr. Wilson comments:
Gary–thanks for an excellent article outlining the current state of affairs when it comes to obesity. I am a Family Physician and in my medical practice I measure the body composition on all of my patients and it is clear that some normal sized people and even some thin people have excessive body fat. Remember that obesity is defined as excessive body fat and weight and BMI tell you nothing about what is actually in your body. Thus our obesity is much worse than the calorie-counting experts believe it to be.
It is also clear that sucrose (sugar), HFCS and high glycemic carbohydrates are driving our current obesity epidemic. What’s even worse is these same food elements over time can have an adverse affect on brain function, triggering a condition we call “Sugar-Brain”. The medical term form sugar-brain is Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome.
People with CARB syndrome can develop us to 21 brain dysfunction symptoms and because the brain plays a key role in auto-regulating fat stores, people with the disease begin to store extra fat at any caloric intake even as they lose weight through calorie-restricted dieting.
to read the rest of the story: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-the-campaign-to-stop-america-s-obesity-crisis-keeps-failing