ThePriceOfFoodInShangriLa < Kitchen

17 Jul 2006 - 18:23

the price of food in Shangri-La

We’ve gotten into a counting-your-chickens-before-they’re-hatched mode around here. I wish we wouldn't do that, but we have.

Yesterday was Day Three on the Shangri-La diet, and nobody was eating anything.

Today is even more dramatic. For “lunch” I had a stalk of celery. Now I’m choking down a can of tuna fish because I feel like I ought to have some protein. It tastes like paper, and I feel like I’ve eaten a horse. Part of a horse, anyway.

I’ve developed my own way of understanding the diet, which I think probably meshes with Roberts’ ideas.

Here’s Roberts:

It’s no great puzzle why our weight-regulation system works this way. It is a system designed to stock up on energy (calories)—that is, make us fatter—when food is plentiful and to reduce the amount of energy stored—make us thinner—when food is scarce. This is the way any sensible commodity storage system works. I stock up on paper towels when they are cheap and use what I have when they are expensive. Grain elevators store grain when it is cheap. The stored grain is sold when it is more expensive.
source:
The Shangri-La Diet by Seth Roberts
page 48

That image works pretty well, but I think he should have explained it in terms of the cost to an animal (or a person) of finding food when food is scarce:

Scientific interest in the evolution of human nutritional requirements has a long history. But relevant investigations started gaining momentum after 1985, when S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin J. Konner of Emory University published a seminal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Paleolithic Nutrition.” They argued that the prevalence in modern societies of many chronic diseases—obesity, hypertension, coronary heart disease and diabetes, among them—is the consequence of a mismatch between modern dietary patterns and the type of diet that our species evolved to eat as prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Since then, however, understanding of the evolution of human nutritional needs has advanced considerably—thanks in large part to new comparative analyses of traditionally living human populations and other primates— and a more nuanced picture has emerged. We now know that humans have evolved not to subsist on a single, Paleolithic diet but to be flexible eaters, an insight that has important implications for the current debate over what people today should eat in order to be healthy.
source:
Food for Thought (pdf file)
by William R. Leonard
Scientific American December 2002

Please note: all the Paleolithic diet stuff is wrong. According to William Leonard.

To appreciate the role of diet in human evolution, we must remember that the search for food, its consumption and, ultimately, how it is used for biological processes are all critical aspects of an organism’s ecology. The energy dynamic between organisms and their environments— that is, energy expended in relation to energy acquired—has important adaptive consequences for survival and reproduction. These two components of Darwinian fitness are reflected in the way we divide up an animal’s energy budget. Maintenance energy is what keeps an animal alive on a day-to-day basis. Productive energy, on the other hand, is associated with producing and raising offspring for the next generation. For mammals like ourselves, this must cover the increased costs that mothers incur during pregnancy and lactation.
The type of environment a creature inhabits will influence the distribution of energy between these components, with harsher conditions creating higher maintenance demands. Nevertheless, the goal of all organisms is the same: to devote sufficient funds to reproduction to ensure the long-term success of the species. Thus, by looking at the way animals go about obtaining and then allocating food energy, we can better discern how natural selection produces evolutionary change.

The point: animals don't just eat to live.

They also eat to reproduce. All animals must take in enough calories, efficiently enough, to keep themselves and the species alive.

Leonard's argument has to do with the evolution of the human brain, a highly expensive organ to operate:

NO SOONER HAD humans perfected their stride than the next pivotal event in human evolution—the dramatic enlargement of the brain—began. According to the fossil record, the australopithecines never became much brainier than living apes, showing only a modest increase in brain size, from around 400 cubic centimeters four million years ago to 500 cubic centimeters two million years later. Homo brain sizes, in contrast, ballooned from 600 cubic centimeters in H. habilis some two million years ago up to 900 cubic centimeters in early H. erectus just 300,000 years later. The H. erectus brain did not attain modern human proportions (1,350 cubic centimeters on average), but it exceeded that of living nonhuman primates.
From a nutritional perspective, what is extraordinary about our large brain is how much energy it consumes—roughly 16 times as much as muscle tissue per unit weight. Yet although humans have much bigger brains relative to body weight than do other primates (three times larger than expected), the total resting energy requirements of the human body are no greater than those of any other mammal of the same size. We therefore use a much greater share of our daily energy budget to feed our voracious brains. In fact, at rest brain metabolism accounts for a whopping 20 to 25 percent of an adult human’s energy needs—far more than the 8 to 10 percent observed in nonhuman primates, and more still than the 3 to 5 percent allotted to the brain by other mammals.

Here is the section that jibes with Roberts' ideas:

[B]rain expansion almost certainly could not have occurred until hominids adopted a diet sufficiently rich in calories and nutrients to meet the associated costs.
Comparative studies of living animals support that assertion. Across all primates, species with bigger brains dine on richer foods, and humans are the extreme example of this correlation, boasting the largest relative brain size and the choicest diet [see “Diet and Primate Evolution,” by Katharine Milton; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, August 1993]. According to recent analyses by Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, contemporary hunter-gatherers derive, on average, 40 to 60 percent of their dietary energy from animal foods (meat, milk and other products). Modern chimps, in comparison, obtain only 5 to 7 percent of their calories from these comestibles. Animal foods are far denser in calories and nutrients than most plant foods. For example, 3.5 ounces of meat provides upward of 200 kilocalories. But the same amount of fruit provides only 50 to 100 kilocalories. And a comparable serving of foliage yields just 10 to 20 kilocalories. It stands to reason, then, that for early Homo, acquiring more gray matter meant seeking out more of the energy-dense fare.
Fossils, too, indicate that improvements to dietary quality accompanied evolutionary brain growth. All australopithecines had skeletal and dental features built for processing tough, low-quality plant foods. The later, robust australopithecines— a dead-end branch of the human family tree that lived alongside members of our own genus—had especially pronounced adaptations for grinding up fibrous plant foods, including massive, dish-shaped faces; heavily built mandibles; ridges, or sagittal crests, atop the skull for the attachment of powerful chewing muscles; and huge, thickly enameled molar teeth. (This is not to say that australopithecines never ate meat. They almost certainly did on occasion, just as chimps do today.) In contrast, early members of the genus Homo, which descended from the gracile australopithecines, had much smaller faces, more delicate jaws, smaller molars and no sagittal crests—despite being far larger in terms of overall body size than their predecessors. Together these features suggest that early Homo was consuming less plant material and more animal foods.
As to what prompted Homo’s initial shift toward the higher-quality diet necessary for brain growth, environmental change appears to have once more set the stage for evolutionary change. The continued desiccation of the African landscape limited the amount and variety of edible plant foods available to hominids. Those on the line leading to the robust australopithecines coped with this problem morphologically, evolving anatomical specializations that enabled them to subsist on more widely available, difficultto- chew foods. Homo took a different path. As it turns out, the spread of grasslands also led to an increase in the relative abundance of grazing mammals such as antelope and gazelle, creating opportunities for hominids capable of exploiting them. H. erectus did just that, developing the first hunting-and-gathering economy in which game animals became a significant part of the diet and resources were shared among members of the foraging groups. Signs of this behavioral revolution are visible in the archaeological record, which shows an increase in animal bones at hominid sites during this period, along with evidence that the beasts were butchered using stone tools.

Big people with big brains need to eat:

[N]ew discoveries indicate that H. erectus hit the ground running, so to speak. Rutgers University geochronologist Carl Swisher III and his colleagues have shown that the earliest H. erectus sites outside of Africa, which are in Indonesia and the Republic of Georgia, date to between 1.8 million and 1.7 million years ago. It seems that the first appearance of H. erectus and its initial spread from Africa were almost simultaneous. The impetus behind this newfound wanderlust again appears to be food. What an animal eats dictates to a large extent how much territory it needs to survive. Carnivorous animals generally require far bigger home ranges than do herbivores of comparable size because they have fewer total calories available to them per unit area.
Large-bodied and increasingly dependent on animal foods, H. erectus most likely needed much more turf than the smaller, more vegetarian australopithecines did. Using data on contemporary primates and human hunter-gatherers as a guide, Robertson, Susan C. Antón of Rutgers University and I have estimated that the larger body size of H. erectus, combined with a moderate increase in meat consumption, would have necessitated an eightfold to 10-fold increase in home range size compared with that of the late australopithecines—enough, in fact, to account for the abrupt expansion of the species out of Africa.

Big people with big brains need to eat a huge amount of food if they're living up north:

As humans moved into more northern latitudes, they encountered new dietary challenges. The Neandertals, who lived during the last ice ages of Europe, were among the first humans to inhabit arctic environments, and they almost certainly would have needed ample calories to endure under those circumstances. Hints at what their energy requirements might have been come from data on traditional human populations that live in northern settings today. The Siberian reindeer-herding populations known as the Evenki, which I have studied with Peter Katzmarzyk of Queen’s University in Ontario and Victoria A. Galloway of the University of Toronto, and the Inuit (Eskimo) populations of the Canadian Arctic have resting metabolic rates that are about 15 percent higher than those of people of similar size living in temperate environments. The energetically expensive activities associated with living in a northern climate ratchet their caloric cost of living up further still. Indeed, whereas a 160-pound American male with a typical urban way of life requires about 2,600 kilocalories a day, a diminutive, 125-pound Evenki man needs more than 3,000 kilocalories a day to sustain himself. Using these modern northern populations as benchmarks, Mark Sorensen of Northwestern University and I have estimated that Neandertals most likely would have required as many as 4,000 kilocalories a day to survive.

That's a lot of food, especially when you have to forage, hunt, kill, and cook it all yourself.

The prime directive:

With the advent of agriculture, humans began to manipulate marginal plant species to increase their productivity, digestibility and nutritional content— essentially making plants more like animal foods. This kind of tinkering continues today, with genetic modification of crop species to make “better” fruits, vegetables and grains. Similarly, the development of liquid nutritional supplements and meal replacement bars is a continuation of the trend that our ancient ancestors started: gaining as much nutritional return from our food in as little volume and with as little physical effort as possible.

In short, we evolved to:

a) recognize that a Big Mac is an incredibly efficient source of energy

and

b) prefer the richest, most calorie dense foods available in the environment to, say, a celery stalk:

Too often modern health problems are portrayed as the result of eating “bad” foods that are departures from the natural human diet—an oversimplification embodied by the current debate over the relative merits of a high-protein, high-fat Atkins type diet or a low-fat one that emphasizes complex carbohydrates. This is a fundamentally flawed approach to assessing human nutritional needs. Our species was not designed to subsist on a single, optimal diet. What is remarkable about human beings is the extraordinary variety of what we eat. We have been able to thrive in almost every ecosystem on the earth, consuming diets ranging from almost all animal foods among populations of the Arctic to primarily tubers and cereal grains among populations in the high Andes. Indeed, the hallmarks of human evolution have been the diversity of strategies that we have developed to create diets that meet our distinctive metabolic requirements and the ever increasing efficiency with which we extract energy and nutrients from the environment. The challenge our modern societies now face is balancing the calories we consume with the calories we burn.

back to Shangri-La

Leonard's overview of his research:

The characteristics that most distinguish humans from other primates are largely the results of natural selection acting to improve the quality of the human diet and the efficiency with which our ancestors obtained food.

I read Leonard's article a couple of years ago, and was riveted.

Big brains are expensive!

We evolved to dream up a thing like McDonald's in the first place and then binge on fries 'til we explode once we did — that's what we're supposed to do!

Rereading it in light of Shangri-La, I'm riveted all over again.

For the moment — until the diet flops & we all go back to counting calories and/or feeling guilty that we're not counting calories — the way I see hunger, appetite, & weight gain is this:

our bodies evolved a subtle and automatic means of meeting huge energy requirements

part of our evolutionarily designed strategy is to prefer high-energy-dense foods (McDonald's) to medium- or low-energy dense foods (celery)

our body's mechanism for telling us which is which is a learned association between flavor and calories - the more calories a food has, the better it tastes — or comes to taste

evolution also gave us a means to store food, in the form of fat, for a rainy day

AND — this is what I take from Roberts —

evolution also created a means by which our bodies could decide when to pursue food and when to stop pursuing food and consume body fat instead

the mechanism by which our bodies communicate with our brains & conscious minds is the set point, which we don't experience consciously, and hunger, which we do

when our bodies want us to find more food — to lay in a supply of body fat — we feel hunger, and hunger drives the behavior of finding, hunting, killing, preparing, and eating food

when our bodies want us to stop finding food, because finding food is now burning more energy than it's worth, hunger vanishes and we stop eating

Roberts' hypothesis: flavorless calories tell the brain that food is now "expensive" - time to stop eating & start burning fat

I've bypassed skepticism on Shangri-La because of what I think (or hope) is converging lines of evidence. Roberts' observations fit with what I know about animals (it's hard to make an animal overweight on purpose - farmers have struggled with this for years); with autistic eating disorders (more on that later); and with my own experience of losing appetite after losing a normal sense of taste.

As to this last.....I'm not the only person I know who's lost weight after losing her sense of taste. A couple of years ago one of the moms at Jimmy's autism school was struck by a car, leaving her with head injuries. (Life does pile it on. Four kids, autism, and now a head injury.)

I haven't talked to her since the accident, but a friend of hers told me that she'd made a tremendous recovery; everyone was incredibly relieved.

The one area of lasting damage appeared to be her sense of taste, which had basically been destroyed. She couldn't taste food.

Here's the interesting part in terms of Roberts: she had lost huge amounts of weight as a result. Before the accident she was a normal weight; now she was slim.

Like me, she told people that she missed food. She longed to eat a hamburger and have it taste like a hamburger.

But she wasn't hungry enough to eat a hamburger that didn't taste like a hamburger.

Well, I may be back here in a couple of weeks crossing everything out...... we'll probably eat celery and tuna for 3 days, then binge on Carvel.

I hope not.

UPDATE 7-27-06: nope, no bingeing on Carvel, & no desire to, either. So far, so good.

The Human Biology of Pastoral Populations
edited by William R. Leonard

The Shangri-La Diet at Amazon
Seth Roberts website

Shangri La diet in freakonomics
Shangri La diet part 2
early adopter
diet, evolution of the brain, & McDonalds
Marginal Revolution on Shangri La
your own lying eyes
progress report 7-23-06
Jimmy 7-24-06
mind hacks & Shangri-La 7-26-06
7-29-06 update
my life and welcome to it - 8-6-06 - success
compare and contrast photo op 8-12-06
9-12-06 update
9-17-06 Jimmy is melting
10-4-2006 Dr. Erika's olive oil diet works, too

huntgrunt

shangrila

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Jul 2006

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If you ever do start counting calories, try www.thedailyplate.com. It makes it much easier. I tried the Shangri La diet, and it worked really well, but after a couple days, I coulnd't even think about oil :P

I'll probably try it again if the calorie counting gets too hard on my appetite.

-- KtmGuest - 17 Jul 2006

It all makes a lot of sense -- until you get to the part where eating tasteless calories tells you that eating has become expensive. That just doesn't make sense to me.

I can see it working at first. But according to this theory, wouldn't you eventually start to crave olive oil because the experience of eating it would start to be associated with calories?

-- CarolynJohnston - 18 Jul 2006

It all makes a lot of sense -- until you get to the part where eating tasteless calories tells you that eating has become expensive. That just doesn't make sense to me.

I can see it working at first. But according to this theory, wouldn't you eventually start to crave olive oil because the experience of eating it would start to be associated with calories?

-- CarolynJohnston - 18 Jul 2006

I just had another idea about how consuming the tasteless calories might work.

If I'm understanding it properly, our bodies evolved so as store up fat when food is plentiful and then metabolize our own stored fat for energy when food is scarce. So perhaps consuming tasteless calories creates the same effect on the body as does burning its own fat. This effect might fool the body into thinking that it is time to [continue] burning its own fat. If the body is already getting enough calories that way, it wouldn't feel hungry.

-- SusanJ - 18 Jul 2006

If you're still around, could you tell me more about how it worked & why you switched?

I'm finding the oil quite a bit less disgusting.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

But according to this theory, wouldn't you eventually start to crave olive oil because the experience of eating it would start to be associated with calories

Yes!

You could!

In theory, at least.

Roberts says that if you notice the oil is starting to taste good, you have to switch to something else.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

I have another data point.

(I LOVE the way Roberts' hypothesis fits with the five gazillion anecdotes & factoids I've collected about diet over the years....)

I finished the book last night. He has a section on food addiction that's fabulous. He interviewed a clinician/researcher who specializes in addiction (possibly in food addiction per se - I don't remember).

The guy said that he had never seen a person addicted to a homemade or "natural" food apart from iced tea, which is so simple to make that you can have factory-level uniformity from one glass to the next.

I mentioned that to Ed this morning, and said something about how no one gets addicted to fruit.

He said he is slightly addicted to fruit!

Fruit is the only food he'll overeat.

Ed is very thin; he's a runner & he's obviously got some kind of weird nature-boy relationship to food & energy expenditure. He doesn't like junk food, doesn't overeat, etc.

BUT the one food he'll eat too much of is fruit - which I'm sure is due to the fact that he eats lots of fruit, and so has built up a strong association between calories & the taste of fruit.

As soon as he said that I could imagine our ancestors bingeing like crazy on fruit when it's in season.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

Let's see.....I think he ends up explaining the theory & research pretty well....

The missing piece of info is that our set points go up and down all day long.

Every time you eat food - any food at all - your set point spikes up.

Then it starts drifting back down again.

When it gets too low, you feel hungry, and you're driven to eat and thus push the set point back up where it "belongs."

OK, here's the math part for all you math brains.

Say your set point normally rises and falls by 1 pound. (I forget what units he used. I think it was pounds.)

High calorie, great-tasting food pushes your set point up much farther than "cardboard" ("why am I eating cardboard?") - so as to compel you to eat more and store fat.

When you drink flavorless olive oil, your setpoint also rises.

It's not that flavorless oil has no effect; it does. It registers as flavorless food, and your setpoint goes up.

However, your setpoint doesn't go up as much.

Maybe it goes up only .8 lbs, not 1 lb.

After that the math kicks in (I'm embarrassed to say I can't produce a clear description.....)

Your setpoint only goes up .8, then drifts back down and you get hungry.....and I'm forgetting the rest.

Somehow, you end up with a new setpoint that's .2 lbs lower than it was before.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

calorie count

Friday 7-14: 1500
Saturday 7-15: 2100
Sunday 7-16: around 1300
Monday 7-17: 1400
Tuesday 7-18: 1350

That is extremely low for me.

I lose weight on 1800/day.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

wow - "The Daily Plate" looks GREAT!

A couple of years ago I looked all over the place for a website like that!

I'm going to use it, I think.

THANK YOU!

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

I started reading Walter Willett's book last night.

sigh

He says your chance of becoming diabetic goes up at BMI of 22.

That's skinny - 130 pounds for 5'6".

And it looks like you're better off thinner than 22 BMI. Way thinner. They haven't found a too-thin so far.

The official govt designation for "underweight" (around 18 BMI) isn't based on research.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Jul 2006

Catherine, you might want to cheer yourself up by reading the reviews for Glen Glasser's "Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health" and Paul Campos' "The Obesity Myth."

-- SusanJ - 19 Jul 2006

FYI, BMI is a deeply flawed measure. BMI = body mass in kilograms/height in meters squared.

The problem is that mass varies as the cube of length when proportions stay the same. (Proportions don't quite stay the same when you're talking about humans, but it's pretty close.) The result is a systematic error for both tall and short people (in different directions).

-- DougSundseth - 19 Jul 2006

HI Susan!

You know, I thought about that last night.

It's a case of warring experts.

Walter Willett versus the debunkers of Walter Willett.

I'm going to have to go with Walter Willett.

Unfortunately.

Everything in my life experience tells me he's right.

Damn that Reverend Bayes!

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Doug thanks!

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Doug if you're around - where do you think the distortion would start?

At what heights, I mean?

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Another one of my data points is the fact that I've been diabetic myself.

I was taking blood sugar measurements all day long, and basically everything Willett & the nutrition researchers said was true.

If I ate potato chips my blood sugar spiked wildly.

If I ate non-fat yogurt my blood sugar spiked; if I ate full fat ice cream my blood sugar spiked, but not nearly as high.

If I got aerobic exercise (this is through brisk walking, nothing fancy) my blood sugar was low and even.

These guys aren't making this stuff up.

I've lived it.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

The other data point (I have a gazillion diet data points, it seems): I was hospitalized for the last month of the twin pregnancy.

I was diabetic and in labor — I was in labor for a month!

They were giving my cortisone shots to try to bring the labor down, and when they did my insulin went through the roof. It was so bad that my doctor said just not to measure my insulin anymore, because I had to have the cortisone.

Cortisone is functionally similar to stress hormones.....which tells me that high levels of stress hormones also spike blood sugar, just as doctors say.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Hi Doug.

I've thought a lot about the BMI formula which seemed odd to me at first also. I assume they tried a number of different formulas to correlate the data. The goal is to find when the ratio of your weight to your height is out of line.

My first thought would be weight/height as a method of putting everyone on an even footing. However, that probably doesn't work because of the human shape where most extra weight is in the middle.

Weight/(height cubed) isn't going to show as much spread since it is an approximation to density and fat people are probably less dense than thin ones.

Here's Wikipedia's take: "The reason height is squared rather than cubed or raised to some other power is simply that, taken over people of different height, the resulting index correlates reasonably well with degree of underweight or overweight. No law of physics or physiological growth is implied."

-- SusanJ - 19 Jul 2006

"Doug if you're around - where do you think the distortion would start?"

No idea, sorry. ("These are not the nutritionists you are looking for.")

Susan:

"... fat people are probably less dense than thin ones."

But this would mean that a higher BMI would be preferable to a lower BMI.

Assuming the same density (whether all muscle, or all fat, or somewhere in between), a person five feet tall with a BMI of 20 would have a BMI of 24 if six feet tall (maintaining the same shape). Note that this is pretty much the entire range of "normal" without a change in density or shape. When you start looking at kids, the problems get worse, because the minimum height drops and ideal shapes change so rapidly.

In addition to the systematic problem of height variability, there's a real problem when you start to consider density (as you noted). The measure fails pretty wildly when you look at athletes. This is a known problem in the military, for instance, which requires specific standards of weight per height and also strongly encourages physical fitness. There are many stories of people with body fat down below 10% having to prove that or be discharged for being overweight.

It also takes no account of different builds: an ectomorph is going to have a different ideal weight than an endomorph. (If you're built like a fireplug, you should not aim for the same weight as if you're built like a crane.)

When you combine these, you can see that the problem is exacerbated for tall, fit, heavily built people and short, unfit, skinny people. (FWIW, I'm a tall ectomorph, so the measure is reasonable for me. But it's still pretty much information-free.)

For a fixed height, BMI is just a constant times your weight. Since most people have an idea of a target weight, there's no new information to be gained from a target BMI. The only time it helps is if you aren't sure what "overweight" means for you. If that's the case, at least for average height people of average fitness and build, it probably works OK.

But I don't know that it's a better measure than just looking in a mirror.

-- DougSundseth - 19 Jul 2006

One thing I learned two years ago when I was dealing with Christopher's weight (dealing with same issue again this summer) is that what we see in the mirror is all wrong.

Parents - most adults, I assume - have no idea what overweight looks like in a child.

It turns out that normal weight for a child is VERY skinny (to our eyes).

Every once in awhile I'll come across old pictures of scrawny schoolchildren early in the 20th century - that's normal weight!

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Probably the same thing for adults.

We should all be skinny, not thin.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

"Parents - most adults, I assume - have no idea what overweight looks like in a child."

And BMI is useless to determine this. My son is about 4' 6" (1.37 m) tall and weighs about 52 # (23.6 kg). With these, his BMI would be 12.56.

(Lots of rounding going on here.)

12.56, by the usual BMI definitions, is pretty much anorexic, but he's fine.

I'm certainly not going to try to feed him up to a BMI of 20.

-- DougSundseth - 19 Jul 2006

You never want to feed a child, or any person short of someone undergoing chemotherapy, up to anything.

Basically, there isn't such a thing as "underweight."

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

That probably wouldn't be true "in the wild," where you undergo food shortages. In that situation, you'd need body fat to consume.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

BMI is actually useful in terms of health....people's chances of becoming sick rise at a BMI of 22 - it occurs to me that BMIs may be more accurate for middle-aged & older folks....since at that point even if you once were a football player, you've long since lost that training & degree of muscle mass.

In any case, for me - I'm 5'6" & thin, not skinny - BMI is the best predictor there is.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

oh!

This is interesting.

There's been a huge amount of research on reduced-calorie diets and life-extension. The results are pretty amazing, and the UCLA scientist who has been doing the experiments has put himself on a reduced-calorie diet. Wish to heck I could remember his name.

Now there's research showing that it's not the reduction in calories that's causing the life-extension.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Science News on life extension & reduced calorie diets

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Roy Walford!

that's the guy

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

And here's Walter Willett

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Walter Willett is part of my great unread.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

good grief

Here's Walford:

You advocate being 10-20% under "set-point" weight. Can you explain how you can determine what your "set-point" is? (Question asked by many viewers)

Your "set-point" is what you weigh or would weigh if you simply eat normally, whatever "normally" for you happens to be. Also, it is generally what you weighed when you were around 25 years old. For example, I weighed about 150 pounds when I was in that age-group, and had to watch my food intake and train "down" a few pounds to make my weight for the University of Chicago wrestling team. My "set-point" is therefore 150 pounds.

By that standard I would need to weigh 94 to 105 pounds.

I was extremely thin at age 25.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

94 to 105 pounds isn't going to work.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Labradors lived 2 years longer on restricted calorie diets.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

Syncrhonicity rules!

According to this you should eat up!

Our retirement newsletter came in the mail this afternoon. Reports that large-scale study in a retirement community "found that study participants in their 80s and 90s who were overweight by BMI standards (25 to 29.9 range) had lower mortality rates than those who were in the normal range...."

Details here:

http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1478

-- SusanJ - 20 Jul 2006

Susan hey, no kidding!

That IS synchronicity!

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

Can't wait to read - thanks!

I will say, as counter-anecdote, that my very thin friend D. became very ill with pneumonia a few years ago and was hospitalized. (I hadn't realized how dangerous pneumonia was until recently when a 40-year old friend of Temple's agent, a woman with 2 or 3 young children, died just a week after contracting pneumonia. Horrifying.)

My friend survived, but the doctors said she would have done much better if she'd had "more meat on her bones."

As I think about it.....it would almost have to be true that having some extra weight when you're in your 80s and trying to fight off viruses with a reduced immune system & whatnot might keep you alive. Obviously, nature gave us the ability to carry extra weight in the first place because there were going to be times when we need it.

Another thought: do people in their 80s absorb nutrients somewhat less well than younger people? I'm thinking I've read that.

If that were true, then extra weight on an 80 or 90-year old might be a sign of good health.

Interesting.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

(Counter-anecdote to my own anecdotes, I mean.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

btw, there seems to be a consensus (but don't trust me on this) that stomach weight is metabolically active and therefore problematic, while thigh weight does nothing.

Until someone tells me it's wrong, I buy that.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

Jimmy gained weight today: up to 119

He started at 118.

Sigh.

otoh, his appetite is way down, so I'm expecting him to lose - or at least not gain.

I'm melting, at least I'm melting if I'm reading the mirror right.

I'll have to start weighing tomorrow.

I made Christopher get on the scale this morning so I can start tracking his weight. His appetite is way down, but unless I see the scale either go down or not go up, I'm not going to trust my own lying eyes.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

I'm way too disposed to think, "He looks thinner!"

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

Until someone tells me it's wrong, I buy that.

It's the fast fat, slow fat thing. The fast fat (that comes and goes) is supposed to be more dangerous particularly when it's around major organs (belly). The slow fat (often women's thighs and other spots they want to get rid of) is thought of as the "safe" fat due to it being the last thing to go.

I have no idea where I learned that.

-- SusanS - 20 Jul 2006

You never want to feed a child, or any person short of someone undergoing chemotherapy, up to anything.

Basically, there isn't such a thing as "underweight."

You didn't see my brother after he'd lost 20% of his body weight while in his coma (he was training for the ironman when he had his accident, so if he had any fat before his accident it was a few grams on the back of his neck. I used to sit beside him those first few days and watch him breathe and note that the sternum, which I've been taught how to find in CPR classes, was neatly outlined).

More generally, extreme thinness is associated with higher mortality, eg You Can Be Too Thin, Researchers Say

"Researchers found that there were approximately 111,900 more deaths per year for obese people, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, than for people of normal weight.

Notably, they also found that those who were underweight were not out of the woods: There were nearly 33,700 excess deaths for people with BMIs below 18.5. BMI is a ratio based upon a person's weight and height. ... This new study adjusts for potentially confounding factors, such as smoking, age and gender, when calculating excess mortality related to weight. Moreover, the study uses data from more recent death reports and nationally representative surveys where height and weight are measured rather than self-reported. ... Surprisingly, being overweight -- defined as having a BMI between 25 and 30 -- was actually linked to fewer excess deaths than being of normal weight. "

Extreme thinness is also associated with reduced fertility.

-- TracyW - 20 Jul 2006

I have no idea where I learned that.

Probably from the same multiple places I learned it.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

More generally, extreme thinness is associated with higher mortality, eg You Can Be Too Thin, Researchers Say

definitely - that was my friend with pneumonia

she had NO "margin for error."

The doctors talked about that explicitly.

It isn't just that you use fat to consume during times of famine.

Apparently you also use it during times of illness.

Which makes sense.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

I should make clear what research I'm referring to....it's Walter Willett's work, which is highly critical of the U.S. food pyramid.

The govt decided, pretty much arbitrarily as far as I can see, to designate a certain weight category as underweight when in fact mortality goes up for that group.

What I was in theory trying to say is that we don't have a good visual sense of what normal weight is, and what overweight is - definitely not for kids.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

My point, though, was that BMI doesn't give a better sense than that imperfect visual sense you refer to. (See my son with his BMI 12.5)

For adults, your "weight at age 25" rubric is probably useful for most people. (Less so for people with health problems at that age, obviously.)

For kids, you probably need more information. My son is tall and thin for his age; the son of a friend is shorter and heavier, but in better condition. (His dad is a gymnast, and the boy is pretty much all muscle.)

I'm not saying that watching your weight and that of your kids is a bad idea; I think it's a really good idea. I am saying that BMI is only coincidentally useful.

-- DougSundseth - 21 Jul 2006

My point, though, was that BMI doesn't give a better sense than that imperfect visual sense you refer to

Yes it does!

For overweight kids, BMI is a real shocker.

Two years ago, I realized Christopher was too heavy.

But I thought he'd just crossed the line from "normal weight" to "chunky."

His BMI showed that he'd crossed the line from overweight to obese.

I could choose not to believe that, but when I looked at photos of healthy schoolchildren from early in the 20th century I realized that my visual sense of what's a normal weight for children was way off.

It was a case of "the bad gets normal."

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

My problem in life is TOO MUCH STUFF TO KEEP AN EYE ON.

While I was obsessing about math & the principal this year, I managed not to notice that major weight gain was happening.

The weird thing for us is that Ed is downright skinny, and I'm thin (BMI: 22).....and we've got two kids who need to lose weight.

Andrew, of course, looks Biafran.

Of course, he may actually be a normal weight. (I should check.)

But he looks Biafran to me. (He has an eating disorder.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

I found the picture!

LEAN LIVING. Four-year-old Baby (left) consumed only 75 percent as many calories during her life as her plumper littermate, Sporty (right), did. Nestlé Purina PetCare

Dogged Dieting: Low-cal canines enjoy longer life
by John Pickrell

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

The dog on the left doesn't even look like a Lab.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

WebLogForm
Title:	the price of food in Shangri-La
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	FromTheKitchenTable
LogDate:	200607171418

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