Why Are Poor People Getting Fat?

American science writer Gary Taubes is pissing off a lot of people in the nutrition industry.  He has written a few books, but his two bestsellers Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat have made him given him a nice bit of notoriety   I'd say there are a lot of nutrition professionals that really wish he would just go away.  He has theorized that the entire approach to fat loss and health that nutrition professionals have touted for the past fifty years is completely wrong.  The thing is, he makes a damn good case.  I'm going to write a few blog posts that summarize some of the main points from his books.  I highly recommend his books, and in particular Why We Get Fat.  Good Calories, Bad Calories is a little heady on the science, but Why We Get Fat is really an approachable and enjoyable read.

Just so you know, I am not claiming this to be the new gospel of fat loss and health.  This is just a different theory that seems to me to have some valid points.  There are some things that aren't explained by the standard nutritional norms.  I want to look at these questions from all the different angles. The first point I want to cover is the idea we have that being fat is related to wealth.  Poor people should be thin right?  If there isn't much food, how could you possible get fat?

Taubes has a huge list of examples of groups of people that went from being wealthy (as in abundance of good food) to being dirt poor, and got fat in the process.  Here are some of the examples he gives.

Pima Indians

The Pima are a group of Native Americans living in Southern Arizona.  In 1846 American soldiers travelling through the area wrote about the abundance of food. They had so much food, that they were able to supply the military with provisions during the Mexican-American War.  The soldiers also remarked about the strong physiques, and vibrant health of the people.

Fast forward to the early 1900's and things were quite different.  The US claimed the land that the Pima's lived on, and confined the Pima to reservations to ease tensions between the Natives, and Euroamerican settlers.  They were no longer able to maintain their own food supply, and were forced to begin relying on government rations.  They went from food abundance to severe food scarcity within fifty years.  And guess what happened.  They got super fat.  The years of famine made them obese.  Today the Pima have the highest incidence of Type II diabetes in the world.

Sioux Indians

In the 1920's, economics researchers from the University of Chicago visited a group of Sioux Indians living on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota.  They found that the people were "poor beyond imagination" and that they were living on bread and coffee.  The researchers observed the following about the body composition of the people on the reservation.

                                         Women                  Men               Children                  

Distinctly Fat                     40%                   25%                   10%

Extremely Thin                  20%                   25%                   25%

How can there be so many fat people, when they were obviously extremely poor?  The other weird phenomenon is having so many fat people and so many extremely thin people in a community where everyone is living on rations.

Trinidadians

In the 1960's Trinidad was suffering from widespread malnutrition.  The US sent a group of nutritionists to the country in an attempt to help out.  The nutritionists found that even though people were dying from malnutrition and deficiency related diseases, over one-third of women older than twenty five were obese.  Obviously confused by this conflicting scenario, MIT got involved and went down to quantify the diet of these obese women.  The number they got was around 2000 kcal a day, with fat making up around 20% of the diet.  Not the sort of caloric intake that should result in obesity.

Slums of Sao Paulo Brazil

Benjamin Caballero is a public health professor from John Hopkins University.  In 2005 he published an article titled "A Nutrition Paradox - Underweight and Obesity in Developing Countries", in which he describes his findings from a visit to public health clinics in the slums of Sao Paolo Brazil. What he found was that the majority of the families with one overweight family member also had one underweight family member.  They called these families "dual burden families".  From a public health perspective, some members of the family need to go on a diet, and some members of the family need to eat more.  This is definitely a paradox.  So, their question was "How can we make more food available to these undernourished children, without making their parents fatter?"

What is Going On Here?

There are many other examples of poverty and obesity coexisting.  In his book, Taubes has a list of about a dozen communities that were studied in an attempt to make sense of this strange phenomenon.  You can probably think of examples of this from your own life.  I used to work at a grocery store, and I clearly remember that the people who looked the poorest, were typically the fattest, and they would come to the checkout with piles of crap food.  The reason being that, unfortunately, junk food is cheaper than healthy nutrient rich food. In Why We Get Fat, the majority of the examples given have one thing in common, the presence of obesity and malnutrition in the same communities, and often in the same families.  It doesn't make much sense.

In Why We Get Fat, Taubes has an interesting point. "The co-existence of thin, stunted children...with mothers who are themselves overweight, doesn't pose a challenge to the public health system, it poses a challenge to our beliefs" he says. Think about this for a second.  Fat mom, skinny little undernourished kid.  Is Mom really taking food away from her own child, so that she can get fatter?  We know enough about maternal instincts to know that this is an impossibility.  So, why are there so many instances of fat parents with malnourished children?

The question I'm stuck with is this.  How is it possible for some people to get fat in the midst of famine and malnutrition?  Is it really as simple as calories in vs calories out?  How big a factor does food type and quality play?  

 Speaking from my own experience, I've found that lately I'm losing fat by eating more calories...a lot more calories.  The key for me has been removing all processed foods, and keeping carbs really low.  The most important thing is that I feel much healthier.  This is exactly the same conclusion that Taubes arrives at through the course of his research.  He does a good job explaining it too.  I am going to share more about  this soon, as well as more about my personal experimentation.  

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Bulletproof Deliciousness

So there is this phenomenon called "bulletproof living" that is incredibly popular in certain circles on the internet.  It all started with a guy named Dave Asprey, who is a self proclaimed "bio-hacker" and a very successful entrepreneur living in Silicon Valley.  What the hell is "bio-hacking", right?  Well according to him, it is finding tricks to "optimize and upgrade your biology".  He lost over 100 lbs, and apparently increased his IQ by over 20 points through hacking his own biology.

It all sounds slightly ridiculous, and I fully understand the doubt.  When I first read about it I thought he was off his rocker too.  One of his most popular bio-hacks is something called bulletproof coffee (I know it still sounds ridiculous).  Bulletproof coffee is coffee with lots of healthy fats added in.  I heard about this and thought it sounded interesting, but because I was doing my 12 Week Challenge, I was hesitant to add in all the extra fat calories.  But, those days are gone.  Bring on the fats!

Now, every morning I make a nice big cup of bulletproof coffee.  I make the coffee, then throw in a couple

tablespoons of butter, a few tablespoons of coconut oil, and fire the whole mix in the blender.  The end result is a creamy, delicious, coconutty masterpiece.  The flavor alone is reason enough for you to go and try this immediately.

But, what about all this bio-hacking business?  Well the science, in a very simplified explanation is this.

1.  Coconut oil and good quality grass-fed butter have lots of healthy fats.
2. The brain is composed mainly of fats, and needs healthy fats to function.
3. Caffeine helps the fats get into the brain.
4. The fats slow the absorption of caffeine.


You end up with lots of excellent brain fuel getting into the brain more easily, as well as the mental focus and energy of caffeine but without the huge energy spike.  When I drink a regular coffee I get a ton of energy, sometimes too much, for a couple of hours and then it's done.  With the bulletproof coffee I feel calm, focused, and energized for five or six hours, and never crash afterwards.  And it's just so damn tasty.
The other benefit of bullet proof coffee is that it is very filling. It is actually a sneaky way to do intermittent fasting. Fat doesn't affect insulin, so you can eat fat, fuel your brain, and still get the fat burning effects of intermittent fasting.

Give it a shot. Get some coffee, grass fed butter (Anchor if you live in Asia, Kerrygold in North America), coconut oil (or MCT oil if you can find it), and blend them together.  I'd love to hear if it works for you like it does for me.  Let's try to stay away from calling ourselves bio-hackers though, that's just weird.

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Hey, your gut is leaking!

Leaky gut syndrome.  Sounds gross right? Well it is, but probably not in the way you are thinking. It's leaky gut syndrome, not leaky butt. No poop in this post.

Leaky gut syndrome is a medical condition where undigested bits of food, and toxins are able to pass through the lining of your stomach and intestines and get into your blood. In a healthy gut, there are lots of bacteria that allow us to digest food properly. When there aren't enough of these little guys, food and toxins are able to leak through and get into your blood.  The thing is, almost all of us have this problem to some degree.

What happens when you get the gut leaks? A lot of bad things. Research into this subject is still somewhat new, but it has been suggested that conditions ranging from food allergies and rashes, all the way to autism and ADD/ADHD may be the result of a leaky gut.

Why are our guts so messed up? It pretty much boils down to how badly our food supply has been screwed with, and our over reliance on antibiotics. The bacteria in our guts are the "biotics" that the drugs we take are "anti-ing". Antibiotics work by indiscriminately wiping out all the bacteria in your gut, and in fact it's usually the good bacteria that get killed first. So after taking antibiotics, or eating them from hormone loaded meats, your gut has no protection. Throw some pesticides and herbicides into the mix, and all of a sudden you have a sieve instead of a stomach lining, and a laundry list of toxins having a pool party in your blood.

What can we do? This can be reversed with a sensible diet that is full of good bacteria. You may want to supplement with probiotics too. I've started trying to heal my own gut, after noticing a mild allergy to eggs. Just recently I've been getting groggy after eating eggs, and from everything I've read, it's probably a sign of some gut health issues. I'm taking a probiotic now, eating more fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut, and staying away from anything processed. After just over a week with these probiotic foods, my egg issues are gone.

For people interested in learning more, check out Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. She runs a clinic set up to treat people with Gut and Psychology syndrome or Gut and Physiology syndrome (both are called GAPs). There are some miraculous stories of people, children in particular, recovering from diseases that would normally have them throwing back bottles of pills to manage their symptoms without treating the causes. The ones that interest me the most are the children recovering from learning disorders, and mental health problems.  The rise of autism over the past thirty years coincides so perfectly with the advice from nutritional agencies to eat low fat, high carb diets that it is hard to believe there is no relationship between the two.  This research into GAPs seems to be hinting at refined carbs as having a direct influence on the rise of mental health disorders. In any case, kids recovering from learning disorders, and mental health problems is something we all want to see more of! The best part is that it is being done with nothing but real food. No doping the kid into la-la-land and sticking him in the corner of the classroom.

This stuff is a little different from what I usually talk about, but it all boils down to eating healthy food.  We don't pay enough attention to the quality of the food we eat, and we are paying the price.  We all remember a handful of classmates who were the "ADD kids". They needed all kinds of special attention, and worst of all, piles of medicine, but never seemed to get any better. What if all they needed was a better diet?

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