Edit: you might also want to be a little more up-front about your apparent involvement with alternative avenues of research.
What I find annoying about this reporting is that it is being spun as a success when by all measures it is a failure. It is a failure in exactly the same way sirtuin research was a failure, in that it only appears to produce benefits in metabolically abnormal individuals, and even then they are not high quality benefits. Meaning it isn't at all what was aimed for: the researchers have failed in even their original modest goals of slightly slowing aging by recapitulating the broad effects of exercise.
Of course you can still make a profit selling very marginal treatments for type 2 diabetes to people who have that condition because they are obese and thus metabolically abnormal. This is a condition that can actually be reversed right up until very late stages by dietary restriction ( http://dx.doi.org/10.2337/db11-1835, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-13887909 ), for all that few people appear to either know or be willing to act on that knowledge. The sort of therapies that might result from AMPK manipulation would be terrible in comparison to the outcome of just eating less. But that has nothing to do with making real progress in medicine.
Medical research in general is so very vulnerable to disruption: you have entrenched groups producing terrible products at massive cost under heavy regulation in the midst of a revolution in the underlying technologies and plummeting costs of creating new knowledge and therapies. Something has to give.
It's also not certain that obesity is self-inflicted 100% of the time. Google 'obesity microbiome' and you will find research showing particular gut flora which triggers obesity in mice. Consider that e.g. gut flora are often transferred from mother to child, and that in general the bacteria in your gut have to come from somewhere.
Regardless, there's no reason to deny an avenue of assistance to an obese person who wants to lose weight. Simply asserting that they need to stop eating so much is very similar to asserting that an an addict (which is what this actually is, IMO) should just consume less. It usually doesn't work, we know it usually doesn't work, and continuing to just assert that it's that simple is, at best, ignorant.
I'm 6 foot tall, I used to weigh, at peak, 340 pounds. After exactly one year of diet modification alone (I chronically under-exercise), I weighed 214 pounds, and now weigh about 190.
I did not reduce my caloric intake, instead I removed all foods that are known to screw with human biology, and decided to follow the Paleo diet: no grains (pasta, bread, cereal, corn, etc), no legumes (peanuts, peas, beans, soy, etc), no seed oils (vegetable oil, corn, canola, soy), no refined sugars, no dairy (to reduce hormone and lactose intake; I limit myself to small amounts cheese and full fat greek yogurt only).
What I do eat? Meat, vegetables, fruits, the aforementioned limited fermented dairy, mushrooms, and if I weren't allergic to them, I could add nuts to that list as well. I use healthy fats like bacon fat, coconut oil, and olive oil instead of seed oils. I also limit myself to one cup of coffee a day, and sometimes even then I don't feel like one, I don't really need it anymore.
My caloric intake has not really changed (it has always been between 1500 and 2000 a day), yet the fat just melted right off. The whole obsession with caloric intake (unless you're clearing 3000 calories with low physical activity) doesn't fix obesity: chronically low caloric intake (below 1500 calories for an extended period) makes your body think it's starving to death, and it will refuse to release energy from your fat cells and start hoarding it instead.
In other words, unsafe caloric reduction for long periods may cause weight gain in some individuals already suffering from some form of metabolic disorder (including prediabetes and diabetes and just being morbidly obese).
Yes, I agree there is nothing to really treat: eat foods that promote the proper functioning of your body, drop the ones that are known to cause chronic inflammation, metabolic disorders, and with grains in particular, the fact they contain phytates and protease inhibitors in very unsafe amounts (both cause malabsorption of nutrients).
You lost weight, therefore you either reduced calorie intake, or you burned more calories. If you somehow broke the laws regarding energy, you have discovered some magic formula that will make you rich.I am going to assume that you did not discover the magic formula as there is none as per now.
No wonder people have issues figuring out how to loose weight when they find claims like:
- "foods that are known to screw with human biology"
- "My caloric intake has not really changed, yet the fat just melted right off."
-"... caloric intake doesn't fix obesity"
- "chronically low caloric intake .. makes your body think it's starving to death"
" unsafe caloric reduction for long periods may cause weight gain in some individuals ..."
" ...foods that promote the proper functioning of your body"
".. drop the ones that are known to cause chronic inflammation, metabolic disorders"
Parenthetically, the banana will not generate a considerable spike in blood sugar, something that, as I understand it, is very unhealthy.
While it's not an awful rough guide, nutrition is not as simple as calories in vs. calories out. Better perhaps if you're counting the calories in your stool, but who's going to do that? (And besides, that still wouldn't be a complete solution).
Also, in case you're reading this DiabloD3, congratulations. A drastic and I'm sure extremely challenging lifestyle change. I'm happy to hear about such a success story.
Intake really hasn't changed, I ate 1500-2000 calories a day then, I eat 1500-2000 calories a day now. I didn't log it, but I did a lot of rough estimates based on things I regularly ate then, and regularly ate now. The only difference I've found is I feel like I'm eating more food now than I did then; but it's because carb-rich food is rather energy compact.
Also, thanks. I only tell my story when someone has gone off the rails quoting the FDA party line of "caloric intake is 100% why you're fat", when it's a massively complex issue; and even with my lengthy reply, I feel I did a disservice in how complex the issue is.
I tried reducing caloric intake, eating lots of "whole grains", limiting meat intake, all the stuff the FDA has recommended for decades: I only kept getting fatter. Caloric intake alone cannot explain why the world is getting fatter: what we're eating clearly does when my diet has worked for so many people, me included.
- Why is this restaurant always full of people ?
- Because there are more people entering the exiting.
Really ? Maybe it has to do with the food quality, price, customer care, the location of the place, etc, etc.
See, explaining obesity with the simple calories-in, calories-out argument tell nothing about the root cause of this disease.
Take a look at Dr. Guyenet blog[1] for a fascinating view of this issue.
Let me decide when I stop calling things.
>>>> It gives obese people an excuse.
Over-simplification of a complex issue.
I have never been obese. I am 45 years old in a couple of days and I can see my abs. Unfortunately, I have a genetic defect that affects my metabolism, giving me a intermittent and profound fatigue every now and then. After reading, thinking and talking to dozens of doctors about the whole metabolic process, I have come to the conclusion that obesity is indeed a disease.
In the same way, when fatigue kicks-in, I just cannot avoid being tired: I am not lazy, I exercise every day, I eat clean and sleep 7-8 hours every single night but I just cannot avoid being tired. For casual observers, they will think that I am a lazy, but the truth is quite different. This same analogy applies to obesity.
There's only so many hours in the day. If a pill could perfectly mimic sleep, would you not take some?
That would still be a monumental achievement (probably in the billions of dollars range) if a practical treatment came out of it. Most health costs don't come from healthy people, after all. A lot of people don't exercise and very few people practice calorie restriction.
But if there is other research that would work better, then the opportunity cost is high too.
Ever study I've read about has shown that while calorie restriction works in mice, it has no effect in humans.
Also there was a recent article that made it to the front page of HN talking about a positive study of intermittent fasting's longetivity-related benefits - which is probably a closely related or identical phenomenon (my guess).
[1] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140401/ncomms4557/full/nco...
To our knowledge, only one study investigated the effects of long-term CR (with a diet of reasonable quality) on health and longevity in nonobese humans and a control group (24). This study was conducted in 120 men, of whom 60 were randomly assigned to the control group and 60 to the calorie-restricted group. The control group was fed ≈9600 kJ/d. Calorie-restricted subjects received 1 L milk and 500 g fruit every other day, which led to an overall mean energy intake of ≈6300 kJ/d (or a 35% restriction from the intake of the control group). This regimen was implemented for 3 y. Stunkard (25) reanalyzed these data and reported less time in the infirmary (123 compared with 219 d) and a nonsignificant difference in the death rate (6 compared with 13 deaths) in calorie-restricted subjects than in control subjects, respectively, which suggests that chronic CR may prolong life span in humans.
It certainly has documented effects on weight, blood pressure, insulin, etc. What you mean to say is that while it's been amply proven in lower species to extend lifespan, lifespan extension has not been proven in humans as of now.
Other strategies that end up showing altered AMPK levels along the way have been shown to extend life and improve health in laboratory species. It is very complex, and researchers are very far from understanding how even very reliable and straightforward ways of slowing aging work. E.g. calorie restriction. Studied for a century, no comprehensive explanation of how it works yet.
This, along with tiny beneficial effects, is the reason we should largely ignore all of these efforts to throw drugs at metabolism in the hopes of lengthening healthspan. It is a grand waste of time, because even if wondrously successful the best you could hope for in the next few decades is something that is outperformed by actually exercising or practicing calorie restriction.
What a waste of billions of dollars that will be. Yet that's what is going to happen, judging by the willingness to fund this sort of work. It is like the research and development community has learned nothing from the outcome of fifteen years of sirtuin research.
If we want to see radical life extension in our lifetimes, it is going to come from SENS and the like, deliberate targeted efforts to repair specific aspects of biochemical damage that cause cell and tissue dysfunction. Not random drugs mined from the natural world, but elegantly engineered biotechnologies that do exactly what they are intended to do. You might look at allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA for example, as developed by Gensight at the moment ( http://www.gensight-biologics.com/ ). The problem is identified, and a precise fix applied to cells via gene therapy to make exactly the problem and only the problem go away.
That is the future of medicine. Yet the regulations and inertia behind the old drug development pipeline is very resistant to change. We'd better hope that the disruption represented by Gensight and other similar efforts takes hold, because we're going to age and suffer just like our parents and on pretty much the same schedule if it doesn't.