Your daily dose of Slashdot

[janestarz]

I just read a fascinating article that was linked from Slashdot today. You guys probably know I'm a fan of radio that really says stuff, like the BBC World channel. Slashdot had a story that linked to a transcript of a radio program of Australia's (?) ABC Radio. The program is called Health Report.
The program was about a new villain in the battle against obesity. I'm interested in this stuff, because of obvious reasons. When I weighed myself this morning I did notice I'm back to 95 kilo's and my America-gained pounds have disappeared again (huzzah!); however, I'm still nowhere near my 80 kilogrammes perfect weight.

The program spoke of, as Slashdot puts it, "Fructose As Culprit In the Obesity Epidemic". Now don't start screaming "fruit is good for you"...there's other stuff that fructose is used in. Most American foods have corn syrup added to them. Guess what that's mostly made of?

Anyway, if you've got a spare moment to read this, I can wholeheartily recommend it (link at bottom of blockquote). Here's some interesting bits.
(Leptin is a hormone that is being produced when insulin levels are high (more fat, more leptin) and prods the brain to eat less and exercise more. It's explained in the transcript, but I thought this was enough info to bore you with for the moment.)

Robert Lustig: We took these kids who developed massive obesity after brain tumours; these kids have a tumour in the area of the brain which controls energy balance, the most common of which is called a cranial pharyngioma, and once these kids are treated, that area of the brain is now dead, it cannot see leptin. When you can't see leptin your brain is starving, and so what it does is it increases your food intake because you need to eat more -- even though there's plenty of leptin, you can't see it, so it's like it wasn't there -- and it also reduces your sympathetic nervous system in order to actually make you feel lousy and to burn less energy.
[...] So we see these children with brain tumours who can't see their leptin and we asked the question -- could we somehow influence this disastrous feedback cycle? What we did is we gave a drug called Octreotide and we knocked down their insulin levels with this medicine and all of a sudden, not only did these kids stop eating, they started exercising spontaneously, they just did it. Two kids started lifting weights at home, one kid became a competitive swimmer, one kid became a manager of his high school basketball team, running around collecting all the basket balls.

Norman Swan: So you're postulating that insulin was having an influence on the brain itself.

Robert Lustig: Right, by getting the insulin down instead of the energy that they were eating being forced to fat, the energy that they were eating could now be burned by muscle, could now be burned by the rest of the body, made them feel better.

[...]

Norman Swan: One way of proving this would be to put you on a fructose free diet, has anybody done that?

Robert Lustig: Well no one's done it yet. In fact we're trying to do that, in fact we're actually going to be working with the Atkins Foundation here in America to actually do a fructose withdrawal experiment to try to actually answer that question directly.

[...]

Robert Lustig: If you look at the Atkins diet, the Atkins diet was no-carb, high-fat, no-carb and it worked. We look at the Japanese diet, high-carb, no-fat, it also worked. When you put them together you get something called McDonalds and clearly that doesn't work. So the question is what is it about the Japanese diet, even though they eat all of this white rice, that still allows this phenomenon to be OK? And the answer is very simple -- it's called fructose, because fructose is really not a carbohydrate. [...] So a Japanese diet yes, they're eating a lot of white rice but they are also eating a lot of fibre in all of their vegetables and they are not consuming any fructose. There is no fructose in the Japanese diet whatsoever, but there is now, and childhood obesity has doubled in Japan in the last ten years whereas adult obesity hasn't moved.

From: ABC's 'The Health Report' - presented by Norman Swan. Transcript here
Dr Robert Lustig is Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Comments

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

So the answer would be to eat less sugar?

It's never that simple in my opinion. Being overweight can have a multitude of different causes. I have a few friends who eat a lot more than I do, but who are positively scrawny and never gain an ounce. Something to do with genetics, I guess. I also have a friend who used to be rather big, and then suddenly decided she wanted to lose weight. She set down to eating half she normally eats and lost 12 kg. My father has tried every diet ever invented, he has been eating almost no sugar for at least ten years now and he's still obese.

And what's overweight anyway? Some people are skinny by nature, others are not. Girlfriends have asked me whether I've lost weight, because I look like I do recently, but I still weigh 82 kg, about 10 kg more than a woman my size should, just like I did a year ago. Who sets those standards? Who are they to tell you that you're fat?

I think the truth is that people are different. Yes, today's food industry makes it easy to become overweight. But there shouldn't be one standard; weight isn't a problem until you can't do all the things you'd like to do because of it. Too many people go through life thinking they're fat because they weigh more than average. Too many people think they're not beautiful because of that. Such a shame.

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

You're completely right of course. I guess in my scientific squee with glee I overlooked the entire fact that I'm normally very anti-society - for the same reasons you just mentioned in your comment. Who are they to set a standard and demand from me to abide by it?

The sole reason I plugged this is because it shines a different light on those things that we hardly hear about. Diets like Atkins say that carbs (or fat, or both, I can't really remember) are teh evil. I just thought this article/transcript gave an interesting new perspective. Not just that sugar is bad too, but how it's bad and what happened to the people that changed. For me, the sole reason TFA (the fucking article) was so interesting is the fact that the brain chemistry is made up in a way that people are more interested in exercise because there is a hormone that tells them so. And that (the production or reception of) that hormone is inhibited by eating large quantities of fructose.
So from a scientific point of view, I loved reading it.

Also, I've recently been to the Americas and the food there really is as bad as is portreyed. It's really hard to get un-modified or un-enhanced food.

I'd like to set the record straight though: I still abhor people that judge others on their looks. I am not 'standard'. I don't have a standard size, I don't have the standard looks, and I definitely don't have the standard hobbies. My breasts will never be in the 'right' place, my waist will always be a bit higher up than that of others, and my length will not diminish notably for a couple more years.

[muizenstaartje.livejournal.com]

Leptin has been a hot topic with the discovery of the ob/ob mouse, in fact obesity is a scientific hot topic for years now. Can't walk around the uni without reading posters for the next seminar or debate thing about obesity. However I don't believe fructose is the evil, though aditives in general are evil. If you don't know what you eat, you can't control your energy intake.

I'd say, grow part of your own fruits and vegetables (unles you live near a high way or other source of (air)polution). That way you get the exercise and know at least what you eat when you eat those. ;)

Obesity has many aspects, genetics, lifestyle, food intake, commensal bacteria, and sadly there is no "one evil" and no "wonder cure/diet".

Still it was an interesting read, though.

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

And just this morning there was an article about this in the free newspaper De Pers. It spoke of the leptin experiments and how it didn't seem to work on humans.
I ate a roll of (tiny) cookies yesterday. I'm having my period so it's justified - but it was filled with three different kinds of sugar. *shrug*

[muizenstaartje.livejournal.com]

Giving leptin as a treatment only works for those who can't make lepting themselves. It works for the ob/ob mouse and some rare cases of human mutations. For the general public, it's not the cure.

This reminds me of a kind of "ontbijtkoek" that says 0% fat on the wrapper in large, bold print, but when you turn the thing around and read the ingredients on the back, it turns out that 50% of the weight is sugar. :P