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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