Diet pop will save you calories and dollars

A nice piece by Nicholas Kristof on the brilliance of New York Governor Patterson's plan to make ends meet by taxing sugared soda. 

An 18 percent sales tax on soft drinks and other nondiet sugary beverages 

Why is this so great?  Because taxing unhealthy behavior is one way that we can make money by improving health.

Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?

No, it was the cigarette tax. Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book “Prescription for a Healthy Nation.” Just the 1983 increase in the federal tax on cigarettes saved 40,000 lives per year.

And why are sugared drinks in particular so bad?

Evidence is accumulating that sugary drinks are a major contributor to obesity because of the evolutionary heritage I mentioned at the outset: Except for soups, liquid calories don’t register with the body, according to Professor Popkin and other specialists. [emphasis mine]

Tax the hell out of them.  

The "science" of obesity

This commentary on Slashdot discusses a new book on obesity. The conclusion? That the medical community doesn't use science in their prescriptions for solving the obesity epidemic.

Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy — that consuming fat makes you fat and exercise makes you thin — has no basis in research. In fact, all the available research points in quite another, and more traditional, direction.

Check out the podcast from the CBC show Quirks and Quarks.

P.S. Today is clear-out-my-bookmarks day. There are a lot of articles I've been meaning to blog on...

Cupcakes - the "deal breaker"

I tried to think of a clever way to re-cast this article on the cupcake, but I really can't. Here's a tidbit on the challenge of excising cupcakes and other sweets from our fat kids' schools:

When included on lists of treats that parents are discouraged or forbidden to send to school — and when those policies are, say, put to a vote at the P.T.A. — “cupcakes are deal breakers,” Professor Nestle said. “It sounds like a joke, but it’s a very serious problem on a number of levels. You have to control it.” (emphasis mine)

And then there's the newly fashionable cupcake an its aficionados, whose recently closed high-end cupcakery drew some venomous detractors:

“At last!” said a blogger posting on Eater.com. “We neighbors get relief from cupcakistas who don’t realize Duncan Hines makes better-tasting cupcakes.”

After a long debate thread, another blogger wrote, “You people need to go back to the suburbs ... Seriously, bunch of grown up New York City residents obsessing over a cupcake shop. I miss the gunfire and crackheads.” (emphasis mine)

Fat is a social thing?

A new long-term study released yesterday finds that if you have obese friends, it increases your change of being obese.

People were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent...On average, the investigators said, their rough calculations show that a person who became obese gained 17 pounds, and the newly obese person’s friend gained 5.

Other researchers cautioned that due to the unique data set, it may be impossible to replicate the study's findings, a key step in scientific verification. Other obesity researchers also warned against jumping to conclusions, since obesity has many environmental causes. However, any kind of exercise is good for your health...

Forget the diet, the genes will fight you every step?

Science is always on the prowl for genetic explanations for common social ills, whether it be obesity, misbehavior, or disease incidence. So it should come as no surprise that your expected body mass is largely determined by your genes. The conclusive study of adopted children (whose birth parents are idenitified in documents) was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986:

“The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees...and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees..."

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition...

Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications..."80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight."

The science behind the finding is fascinating. In the late 1950s, a scientist at Rockefeller University wanted to study the differences in fat cells between obese and normal-weight folks. He gathered overweight volunteers and enforced a strict weight loss (often up to 100 pounds). By the end, the volunteers' fat cells appeared normal and the hypothesis was that they would leave permanently thinner. Not so:

Instead, Dr. Hirsch says, “they all regained”...Maybe, he thought, they had some deep-seated psychological need to be fat. So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same....and that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

...when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet.

The study left the scientists with an interesting question. If obese individuals were unable to reduce their weight because of their body's natural regulation, would folks who became fat be subject to the same restriction?

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

In other words, not only is weight primarily genetically predetermined, but the body's natural metabolism fights to keep it within a that narrow, predetermined range. Fat people are literally starving themselves to remain thin, and thin people must literally gorge to gain weight.

However, given this evidence, how do explain this trend in weight gain in America?


What behavioral or environmental factors have overcome the natural mechanism for weight control? The best theory I've seen so far pegs sweetened beverages as the major factor, due to their low satiety (they don't make you feel full - link forthcoming). A cross-sectional review of clinical studies found that while additional study is merited, there's sufficient evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages contribute to obesity.

Consumption of [sugar-sweetened carbonated] beverages was shown to increase by 135% between 1977 and 2001. ¹⁵ It is estimated that, during this time, daily caloric sweetener consumption in the United States increased by 83 kcal per person, of which 54 kcal/d is from soda. ¹⁰

So find your body's optimal weight - kick the can!

Eat more, get big

I read a lot about agriculture for my job, since renewable energy production often involves conversion of biomass to fuel or electricity. One agricultural economist has become required reading for me, because he talks a lot about the price pressures things like corn (because of ethanol production). I just read a column he wrote in 2003, and this non-agriculture fact jumped out:

In 1976 China had a population of 948.6 million people and the per capita daily calorie consumption was 2,051. By 2000, China's population had grown to 1.282 billion people and the per capita calorie consumption had risen to 3,029. (emphasis added)

Whoa! It's not surprising that the obesity rate has doubled in the past 10 years. What's even more amazing is that while Americans get over 600 calories a day in sweeteners (read: sugar or HFCS), the Chinese only get about 65 calories from sugar. While calories are calories, the Chinese situation can only get worse as they adopt a more American diet with more meat and sugar.

Stigmatizing fat isn't burning it

In a broad (ahem) look at the social stigmatization of obesity, this article notes that making people feel bad for being fat doesn't make them thinner. In fact, it does the opposite. If social stigma fails, unlike with other social ills such as smoking, what's a society to do?

Why we eat (that much)

Given the vast scale (pardon the pun) of America's obesity epidemic, I find the kind of psychological analysis done by Professor Brian Wansink to be a fascinating insight into American culture - where we value food based on price per quantity and little else. He's a Cornell psychologists whose food lab tests to see what kind of social and physical cues people use to shape their eating habits. The discovery? That people frequently eat more than they think they did. The cause? Everything from larger dinnerware to the company at the table.