Taubes' Ten Inescapable Conclusions

On Oct 23, 3:28 am, "Roger Zoul" wrote:
wrote:


And why do they do this? Because white rice is so very good for them? Or,
might it be because they don't have a lot else to eat? Or, is it more
affordable or what? I have Asian friends here who eat rice but they do so
because that's what they have eaten from childhood.
They are slender but I'm not so certain they are particularly fit or robust.

I never said everyone is Asia was fit or robust, but as you have
observed in your Asian friends, they tend to be slender, and yes, they
have eaten rice since childhood....of course.

:: A couple points..
:: 1. They tend to walk more.

More than what? More than Americans? How much more?

Well, if you travel to Asia...all over.....you will see lots more
walking for everything in both rural and many urban areas. Just go
to the neighborhoods. People are on the streets going here and
there.....shopping, etc. Their neighborhoods are active.
I remember Jane Fonda (not my favorite person) made a obervation
decades ago after she returned from Asia. She wondered aloud about
where she was in America, something to the effect..."Where are all the
people, have they died?" Now I do think she is a dimwit but I have
noticed the same thing when I return to the typical American
neighborhood. Its like a ghost town compared to most of Asia.
People are in their homes and when they go out they drive. The
portion walking around is only a fraction of what you find all over
Asia.
So I can't give you a number. I can only suggest you visit several
countries in Asia..urban as well as rural and observe. Its a no
brainer to say........they walk more. Double, Triple, Quintuple the
amount.... I'm not sure, but lots lots lots more than in the USA.

:: 2. They tend to NOT eat lots of other sugars and processed carbs or
:: sodas or desserts.

Why don't they eat these things?

They just don't. You go to the "sweets" selection...and you just
don't find the ice creams, the pies, the rich cakes, the
chocolates.......To me, their selection of desserts is boring and
worse, but that is their taste. Thats what they have done over their
history.
Now, I'm sure they can and probably will develope tastes more like
ours given time, but over the past 30 years and before, they just
don't eat the amount or degree of sweets, espeically rich sweets.
Cultural tastes are not entirely driven by income levels.
Now, they are drinking more sodas, but the consumption is still low by
our modern standards. Part of that is income driven, but hey, its
taken the USA decades to ramp up their consumption of soda.
I don't know your age but if you go back 40 to 50 years.....1957 to
1967, the American consumption of sodas was only a fraction of what
you see today.
I remember when a 12 ounce soda at the hamburger stand was the extra
large. In 1960 Cokes from the machine were 7 or 8 ounce bottles. At
that time the HUGE HUGE serving from RC Cola was a enormous 16 ounce
bottle which seemed absurd.
So in that category Taubes is correct depending on how you deal with
the "zero calorie" sodas versus the regular Cokes.
Back to Asia...


::
:: They don't eat what would be termed "subsistence" rations. They eat
:: until full but they don't pack it in.

I'm curious as to how you know this? Because they are slender, perhaps?
I'm pretty sure you didn't walk around taking notes on how people have eaten
over the past 30 years. But unless you've bothered to accurately track by
some means how much they eat you can't say for sure that you know - and I
see no reason to believe you.

Goodness man.........you go to Asia.....and you travel around for
years. I don't just sit in the Hilton hotel all day long. I stay in
more obscure places and I travel in towns, villages and cities far
off the beaten track that most tourists and business men travel. I go
into and out of small markets and small stores where the regular
people shop. I love to ask questions about all sort of "non-tourist"
information. I travel to new shrimp farms, tomato paste factories.
I've worked "helped a bit" in terraced rice fields of the northern
Philippines. Stayed in family homes and villages for weeks at a
time. I've traveled to remote islands such as in south east
Indonesia as well as stayed down crowded alleys of China.

If you aren't just there to see the Great Wall of China or the Temple
O'the-day in Yogyakarta then you can learn lots about people and their
normal daily activities.
No, I don't have intricate data to tell you the precise caloric intake
or the percent of fat, but in that I come home and eat in a fairly
similar manner at times, I can give a good estimate and compare it
with what I see in shopping carts in American or at our many many
restaurants, both fast food and otherwise.
Whether looking at food consumption or activity levels it doesn't take
a rocket scientist to see massive differences as well as massive
differences in population outcomes.
You'd have to be blind to not make some connections.


:: I think my biggest problem with Taubes is that he makes carbs, just
:: like the ones eaten in Asia, as the culprit.

Carbs, just like the ones eaten in Asia, are the problem when the are
overconsumed.

:: Had he just stuck with processed carbs, and sugars, I'd be a bit
:: more inclined to agree with him.

There are lots of people even here who have gotten fat without eating a lot
of junk food. Some just eat rice and/or pasta and/or other starchy foods.

Oh I agree, and there are some people in Asia, who when eating excess
rice are also getting fat.
Obviously you can eat too much white rice


::
:: I would say this. If......and its a big IF...... If you put 100
:: typical Americans on a typical diet from Indonesia or the Philipines,
:: they would on average, over a year or two, probably lose at least
:: 50% of their "excess" body weight.

Why is that such a big IF if you think this is the reason Asians are
slender?

Because as a practical matter both YOU and I know you aren't going to
get typical Americans to stick with such a diet when both their
history and foods all around them are NOT whats part of the plan.
However, IF.....and yes, its a big IF.......If they were in a small
village on the coast of some Indonesian island for a couple years, I
think the transformation would be remarkable and achieved with very
little deprivation in the form of hunger.
Hey, if I was 25 to 30 and had suffered from an excess 50 pounds for
the prior 10 years, I think I might give it a shot. Live cheaply in
some remote Asian area and see what happens as I experience the
culture. A whole new world. I'd find that a real adventure as well
as a possible insight into a future course for my health. A grand
experiment if you will.
Just watch the water you drink, or you might find yourself dropping 25
pounds in a few weeks and narrowly avoiding death. But other than
that pesky problem, it would be fascinating.
Probably impractical for most who don't have 3 to 6 months to be away.

:: But one has to remember, that this is not the diet you typically see
:: in the average Asian restaurant you find either in America or in
:: Asia, and that is where most people get their ideas about Asian
:: eating.

So what you're saying here is that Asians really eat fewer carbs than what
you'd see in the typical restaurant in Asia or America, right?

NO.........actually they eat MORE carbs than you see in a typical
restaurant both in Asia and America. That the point. They typically
eat a much larger percentage of their calories in rice and veggies
compared to what you see in a restaurant.

Since they
are slender, they are more than likely eating a diet whose carb content is
appropriated matched to their activity level. That's what the Atkins
Controlled Carb nutritional program is about, and that's also where Taubes
ends his book. It's not a blanket "carb are bad" mantra, it's about
out-of-control carb consumption due to them being a cheap food source and
being able to make them taste good through processing.

Well, all I can say is that billions of people get most of their carbs
from white rice. For some reason, they are not "out of control".
Even those with adequate financial resources seem to be able to
maintain their weight while eating white rice.
So you have to ask yourself, what are those people doing that
overweight Americans are not doing?
You want some precise data from John Hopkins or some other official
"study"...
No unbiased person could visit across Asia and not come to some clear
understanding about the differences in lifestyle. You'd have to be
blind to not see the stark contrast between those areas rural and
urban.
If you could not observe he difference in diet and activity then you'd
be in denial.

So in conclusion, I'd say if you live more like they do, you end up
with a body closer to theirs in terms of excess weight. Not saying
their aren't other paths. Just saying there is a path followed by
billions that leads to a different outcome than that which seems to
trouble so many Americans. And that Asian path tends to use white
rice as its main source of calories.
And not just because its all they can afford. They enjoy it.

I'm not going to believe you until you have presented something that's more
than just off-the-cuff opinion. Taubes has.

OK, don't believe me. Go to Asia......see it with your own eyes. Its
everywhere, just as the evidence of our American obesity is
everywhere.
In both cases, you don't need some new science to see what is in
front of your own eyes.
To go to Asia and to deny what is around every corner is like standing
in a rain storm and demanding proof its really wet.
But in the end, I'm sure you find the "facts" you want to believe.
Thats the wonder of the internet. Everyone now has enough facts to
prove whatever they want to believe.

Book after book will offer proof.......and Americans will get fatter
and fatter.
I've never believed all the low fat or low carb authors unless I can
see a nation or region where millions of people are proving them
true. Not some obscure polar Inuit tribe living in sub-zero
conditions, nor some impoverished region with inadequate food (of all
types).
But entire regions where hundreds of millions live decade after decade
in harmony with their diet, activity, and weight. But that kind of
books doesn't sell well, unless you make it extreme and dogmatic like
the China Study......where the agenda is the primary driving force....
All meat is evil! Or the opposite guys like Atkins.
New magic.......if thats what you demand, then the American media
will serve it piping hot, along with a endless assortment of science
to "back it up".
New books and methods to blind the common sense that one can arrive at
by just looking around the globe and seeing what other massive
populations do while remaining in harmony with their bodies.

And today from the BBC....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7057951.stm

Hmmm.....a hint?

wrote
On Oct 23, 3:28 am, "Roger Zoul" wrote:
wrote:


And why do they do this? Because white rice is so very good for them?
Or,
might it be because they don't have a lot else to eat? Or, is it more
affordable or what? I have Asian friends here who eat rice but they do
so
because that's what they have eaten from childhood.
They are slender but I'm not so certain they are particularly fit or
robust.

I never said everyone is Asia was fit or robust, but as you have
observed in your Asian friends, they tend to be slender, and yes, they
have eaten rice since childhood....of course.


Well, slenderness should not be the only goal....it's certainly not the only
thing that's important in quality of life or for health.

:: A couple points..
:: 1. They tend to walk more.

More than what? More than Americans? How much more?

Well, if you travel to Asia...all over.....you will see lots more
walking for everything in both rural and many urban areas. Just go
to the neighborhoods. People are on the streets going here and
there.....shopping, etc. Their neighborhoods are active.
I remember Jane Fonda (not my favorite person) made a obervation
decades ago after she returned from Asia. She wondered aloud about
where she was in America, something to the effect..."Where are all the
people, have they died?" Now I do think she is a dimwit but I have
noticed the same thing when I return to the typical American
neighborhood. Its like a ghost town compared to most of Asia.
People are in their homes and when they go out they drive. The
portion walking around is only a fraction of what you find all over
Asia.
So I can't give you a number. I can only suggest you visit several
countries in Asia..urban as well as rural and observe. Its a no
brainer to say........they walk more. Double, Triple, Quintuple the
amount.... I'm not sure, but lots lots lots more than in the USA.

Actrually, I was fully aware that you couldn't state a number, but the fact
is that exercise is a BIG part of the equation.
Active people will simply burn more calories and it will be harder (not
impossible, though) to eat in excess. This is a HUGE difference between
what's going on over there and what goes on here. We're shut-ins,
essentially. I see it every weekend on my bike while riding through the
countryside. People here are not outside doing much, but they're in cars
and eating carbs.


:: 2. They tend to NOT eat lots of other sugars and processed carbs or
:: sodas or desserts.

Why don't they eat these things?

They just don't. You go to the "sweets" selection...and you just
don't find the ice creams, the pies, the rich cakes, the
chocolates.......To me, their selection of desserts is boring and
worse, but that is their taste. Thats what they have done over their
history.

So, they don't have the option. These sweets and carby items are not there
in front of them being passed off as healthy food (ie, carby lot fat items).
Obviously, the richer items (carbs & fat) aren't there either. It's likely
that if they were, the Asians would be getting fat too.

Now, I'm sure they can and probably will develope tastes more like
ours given time, but over the past 30 years and before, they just
don't eat the amount or degree of sweets, espeically rich sweets.
Cultural tastes are not entirely driven by income levels.

Ok.

Now, they are drinking more sodas, but the consumption is still low by
our modern standards. Part of that is income driven, but hey, its
taken the USA decades to ramp up their consumption of soda.
I don't know your age but if you go back 40 to 50 years.....1957 to
1967, the American consumption of sodas was only a fraction of what
you see today.

I would tend to agree.

I remember when a 12 ounce soda at the hamburger stand was the extra
large. In 1960 Cokes from the machine were 7 or 8 ounce bottles. At
that time the HUGE HUGE serving from RC Cola was a enormous 16 ounce
bottle which seemed absurd.
So in that category Taubes is correct depending on how you deal with
the "zero calorie" sodas versus the regular Cokes.

Well, "zero calorie" also means zero carbs and zero fat. Hence, they don't
contribute to the "fat" equation.

Back to Asia...


::
:: They don't eat what would be termed "subsistence" rations. They eat
:: until full but they don't pack it in.

I'm curious as to how you know this? Because they are slender, perhaps?
I'm pretty sure you didn't walk around taking notes on how people have
eaten
over the past 30 years. But unless you've bothered to accurately track
by
some means how much they eat you can't say for sure that you know - and
I
see no reason to believe you.

Goodness man.........you go to Asia.....and you travel around for
years. I don't just sit in the Hilton hotel all day long. I stay in
more obscure places and I travel in towns, villages and cities far
off the beaten track that most tourists and business men travel. I go
into and out of small markets and small stores where the regular
people shop. I love to ask questions about all sort of "non-tourist"
information. I travel to new shrimp farms, tomato paste factories.
I've worked "helped a bit" in terraced rice fields of the northern
Philippines. Stayed in family homes and villages for weeks at a
time. I've traveled to remote islands such as in south east
Indonesia as well as stayed down crowded alleys of China.

If you aren't just there to see the Great Wall of China or the Temple
O'the-day in Yogyakarta then you can learn lots about people and their
normal daily activities.
No, I don't have intricate data to tell you the precise caloric intake
or the percent of fat, but in that I come home and eat in a fairly
similar manner at times, I can give a good estimate and compare it
with what I see in shopping carts in American or at our many many
restaurants, both fast food and otherwise.
Whether looking at food consumption or activity levels it doesn't take
a rocket scientist to see massive differences as well as massive
differences in population outcomes.
You'd have to be blind to not make some connections.

You can make all the connections you want, but if you don't actually take
data you could be very wrong. People are known to be terrible at estimating
calories eaten. Also, not all people in this country who are fat got that
way by "packing it in". They got fat slowly over time, a few pounds every
year while becoming more inactive as their responsibilities grow due to
job/family issues. Sure, you do have those super obese types who do eat vast
amounts of chow, but that's not everyone.

But I still see no reason to assume they aren't eating near subsistance
rations or that they aren't eating a low-calorie diet. It sounds as if they
don't have many choices outside of veggies and rice. Meat must not be
plentiful. These people walk as a primary means of transportation (from
what I gather from your tales). Again, when you do these things you can
easily withstand more carbs without deleterious outcomes.



:: I think my biggest problem with Taubes is that he makes carbs, just
:: like the ones eaten in Asia, as the culprit.

Carbs, just like the ones eaten in Asia, are the problem when the are
overconsumed.

:: Had he just stuck with processed carbs, and sugars, I'd be a bit
:: more inclined to agree with him.

There are lots of people even here who have gotten fat without eating a
lot
of junk food. Some just eat rice and/or pasta and/or other starchy foods.

Oh I agree, and there are some people in Asia, who when eating excess
rice are also getting fat.
Obviously you can eat too much white rice


::
:: I would say this. If......and its a big IF...... If you put 100
:: typical Americans on a typical diet from Indonesia or the Philipines,
:: they would on average, over a year or two, probably lose at least
:: 50% of their "excess" body weight.

Why is that such a big IF if you think this is the reason Asians are
slender?

Because as a practical matter both YOU and I know you aren't going to
get typical Americans to stick with such a diet when both their
history and foods all around them are NOT whats part of the plan.

Ok. In my world a "big IF" would be when the stuff that comes after the IF
is questionable. In my world, based on how strongly you seem to believe what
you're saying, it's not such a big if. Whether you could make it happen is
questionable, indeed, I admit. But the question of what happens IF it gets
done should not be.


However, IF.....and yes, its a big IF.......If they were in a small
village on the coast of some Indonesian island for a couple years, I
think the transformation would be remarkable and achieved with very
little deprivation in the form of hunger.

But as others have pointed out, if you take your typical American who is
well on the path of Syndrome X (MetSynX), then eating rice will drive that
person crazy and make him/her ill unless the calorie content is well below
what it takes to maintain weight. In short, it only would work on a
low-calorie diet. And that American would very definitely be hungry.

Hey, if I was 25 to 30 and had suffered from an excess 50 pounds for
the prior 10 years, I think I might give it a shot. Live cheaply in
some remote Asian area and see what happens as I experience the
culture.

So, once again I hear you saying they don't eat much food.

A whole new world. I'd find that a real adventure as well
as a possible insight into a future course for my health. A grand
experiment if you will.

Not such a bad idea, actually...

Just watch the water you drink, or you might find yourself dropping 25
pounds in a few weeks and narrowly avoiding death.


I hear ya.

But other than
that pesky problem, it would be fascinating.
Probably impractical for most who don't have 3 to 6 months to be away.


Of course.

:: But one has to remember, that this is not the diet you typically see
:: in the average Asian restaurant you find either in America or in
:: Asia, and that is where most people get their ideas about Asian
:: eating.

So what you're saying here is that Asians really eat fewer carbs than
what
you'd see in the typical restaurant in Asia or America, right?

NO.........actually they eat MORE carbs than you see in a typical
restaurant both in Asia and America. That the point. They typically
eat a much larger percentage of their calories in rice and veggies
compared to what you see in a restaurant.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy this. This is why I was pressing you before. Have
you seen the carbs in your typical all-you-can-eat American-style Chinese
restaurant? Most of the meat is coated with a thick layer of
breading...there is a sweet sauce to go over everything...rice and noddles
abound, egg rolls, wraps, smallish cakes, pies, and
cookies....sodas.....just a full-on carb fest. People who go to these eat
way more in a meal then they need in a day. I'm not buying what you're
saying here at all. And since you aren't keeping track of total carbs, and
since you eat like the Asians do, I don't find you credible on this account.
BTW, perhaps you're not a math whiz...a larger % of calories from rice
doesn't mean more carbs, espeically if the calories are low, as they are
likely to be for the "120 lb Asian men" that you mention in another post.


Since they
are slender, they are more than likely eating a diet whose carb content
is
appropriated matched to their activity level. That's what the Atkins
Controlled Carb nutritional program is about, and that's also where
Taubes
ends his book. It's not a blanket "carb are bad" mantra, it's about
out-of-control carb consumption due to them being a cheap food source and
being able to make them taste good through processing.

Well, all I can say is that billions of people get most of their carbs
from white rice.

So? The question is about many carbs are they getting relative to their
activity levels. Your statements definitely don't support your claim that
the eat more total carbs than Americans.

For some reason, they are not "out of control".

Yeah, because they are typically only eating rice and veggies, so the total
calories are low and they are an active people out of necessity. This makes
a huge difference.

Even those with adequate financial resources seem to be able to
maintain their weight while eating white rice.

How much white rice and how active are they? It's not that you can't eat
white rice....any low-carber here could choose to work white rice in...if
you're eating 80 g of carbs per day on a maintenance plan, then if could
choose to get most of them from white rice...not a very good idea, but you
could do it.

So you have to ask yourself, what are those people doing that
overweight Americans are not doing?

They are eating fewer total carbs and getting a lot more exercise. Waw!
When you factor in all of the various and sundry sources we have for carbs
here.....compared to what seems like a very limited sources there (with
exception of veggies - which Americans generally don't eat much of)..there
is an obvious problem.

You want some precise data from John Hopkins or some other official
"study"...

Yes.

No unbiased person could visit across Asia and not come to some clear
understanding about the differences in lifestyle.

I'm not at all convinced of that.

You'd have to be
blind to not see the stark contrast between those areas rural and
urban.

I think you can observe some stark contrast, but unless you pay attention to
the details, you might miss the main deal. I think you have.

If you could not observe he difference in diet and activity then you'd
be in denial.

I don't dispute there is are differences in diet and activity...but I'm not
sure you've pegged the diet part quite right. And you have no data
whatsoever.


So in conclusion, I'd say if you live more like they do, you end up
with a body closer to theirs in terms of excess weight. Not saying
their aren't other paths. Just saying there is a path followed by
billions that leads to a different outcome than that which seems to
trouble so many Americans. And that Asian path tends to use white
rice as its main source of calories.
And not just because its all they can afford. They enjoy it.

Again, I'm not convinced.


I'm not going to believe you until you have presented something that's
more
than just off-the-cuff opinion. Taubes has.

OK, don't believe me. Go to Asia......see it with your own eyes. Its
everywhere, just as the evidence of our American obesity is
everywhere.
In both cases, you don't need some new science to see what is in
front of your own eyes.

New science? Which part is that?

To go to Asia and to deny what is around every corner is like standing
in a rain storm and demanding proof its really wet.
But in the end, I'm sure you find the "facts" you want to believe.
Thats the wonder of the internet. Everyone now has enough facts to
prove whatever they want to believe.

The fact is, though, Dax, you don't have any facts. You just have casaul
observations that aren't well documented. So while I don't doubt some
aspects of your statements, I do think you've largely summed things up
incorrectly. This is exactly why we have a scientific method, so we can
make tests and experiements that are repeatable.


Book after book will offer proof.......and Americans will get fatter
and fatter.
I've never believed all the low fat or low carb authors unless I can
see a nation or region where millions of people are proving them
true.

We have one right here....

Not some obscure polar Inuit tribe living in sub-zero
conditions, nor some impoverished region with inadequate food (of all
types).
But entire regions where hundreds of millions live decade after decade
in harmony with their diet, activity, and weight. But that kind of
books doesn't sell well, unless you make it extreme and dogmatic like
the China Study......where the agenda is the primary driving force....
All meat is evil! Or the opposite guys like Atkins.
New magic.......if thats what you demand, then the American media
will serve it piping hot, along with a endless assortment of science
to "back it up".
New books and methods to blind the common sense that one can arrive at
by just looking around the globe and seeing what other massive
populations do while remaining in harmony with their bodies.

Frankly, this sounds like you putting the spin on your own story....


And today from the BBC....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7057951.stm

Hmmm.....a hint?

What's new there? Nothing. Too damn many carbs and too little activity.

On Oct 23, 1:37 pm, "Roger Zoul" wrote:
wrote

Too many repeated issues to respond to each.

BTW, biking has to be one of the most enjoyable exercises available.
Working calories while enjoying the outdoors. When I'm out their I
have to observe the size of the average rider.
I've seen some remarkable success stories for people who have very
very gradually lost lots of weight while having fun.
You throw biking in with a Asian dietary lifestyle and my gosh, how
ya gonna keep the weight from gradually dropping off?

I'm also a huge advocate of the "one ounce per day plan".... That
being that losing just one ounce per day is a tremendous success.
Even further I am for doing that half from intake and half from
output. 100 to 125 calories less from food substitution rather than
denial or less volume.
And 110 to 125 more calories burned. ON the assumption most are doing
little currently, that only adding in a minor amount of extra
walking. Other than for those who are disabled, that calls for very
little effort.
That one ounce per day is about 22 pounds per year. Oh I know, its
easy to do it on a calculator but in REAL life it don't work... I
say, give it a 5 year trial then tell me it doesn't work.
Again, biking is really a benefit while being plain fun. But I guess
you know that.
I've seen some near miracles in guys who have biked for 4 or 5 years.
One friend, dropped from 240 to 155. I used to kick his b-tt up all
the climbs and now at 115 pounds and 20 years younger he kicks my
rear. I'm still lighter but I can't make up for 20 years.

Back to Asia. OK.........I'll still stick with the Asian diet model
as one of the very best, however I will concede if you look at total
calories from carbs rather than "percent of calories as carbs" or
"percent of food volume as carbs", then some of your questioning is
valid.
But anyone, even in America, can essentially follow the Asian model
and probably benefit, in spite of eating a large "percent of calories"
from carbs such as white rice.
It would however call for the rest of their diet to follow the Asian
model.
And that would entail less, but not zero, meat, dairy yada yada.
Essentially copying the Asian model.
Heres the thing. The people I observe aren't counting calories. They
are just eating until they've had enough. They're eating lots of
white rice. They may not be consuming lots of calories but guess
what, they are even thinking about it. They eat till they are
satisfied and they aren't going to bed hungry. Tomorrow, next week,
next month and 10 years from now, they'll be doing the same thing.
They just eat the way they do, they don't diet or think about it.
If most obese and overweight Americans ate the same diet, a large
percentage of them would find their weight much lower 60 months later
and they'd have not experienced hunger in the 60 month journey.
Its not a fad, its not a diet, its not all about calculations or
studies. Its just about hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

Do I expect millions of overweight Americans to suddenly eat like
Asians? NO... But if they gradually over a couple years adapted to
that way of eating and then gave it another 5 years to work, then
those who did so would naturally drop much of their excess weight.
Not everyone and not all their weight, but a vast improvement
compared to any of the current diet fads we see in practice.

Oh well, I'm off topic. Carbs. OK make em bad, but keep in mind,
that carbs are what most slender folks in Asian are getting most of
their calories from. Perhaps their total caloric intake is still
low, but it ain't white rice thats ruining their diet. They don't
have to resort to some weird Atkins thing to stay slender.

I wish it weren't so far away(Asia). I'd just say, go there. Look
at them, eat like them, then come home and repeat the process for 60
months. See what happens.
Chances are huge you'll find more success in that, than from anything
else being presented to the legions of obese Americans.
Instead of doing the kind of traveling I suggest, we see just the
opposite.
Crusise lines offering NON-STOP gourging for 7 days/6 nights...
Endless food...
Or going to other countries but staying in the same hotels that are
found in every city of the world...offering the same foods.
Goodness I was so lucky to have seen the world initially with a small
backpack... eventually ending up with a even smaller bag in one hand.
Streets, small roads, villages, paths, remote islands and mountain
villages, and farms. Seeing how people really live and why they
don't get fat. Eating in a pre-McDonalds era and staying healthy.
Interestingly I was in Singapore in October, 1979 when they opened the
first McDonalds. Prior to that Hong Kong had some and of course
Japan, but the rest of Asia was virgin territory. Now they're
everywhere. Since that first one opened up, Singapore alone has
added 121 more. My goodness, and if you know Singapore you know its
not very big either in population or size.

Now, in contrast, when in those days in Singapore back in 1979, I
used to wake up from my nice but very inexpensive room (I dare not
call it a hotel so as not to confuse what is most people's ideas about
what a hotel is)....anyways I would get up...go down to the street,
and for breakfast, I'd get chicken with rice and veggi. Very
simple, boiled chicken. small portion ( no bones) and some rice with a
few veggies on top. Loved it and it was very cheap......I'm thinking
about a dollar to $1.50 back then. Very low fat, fairly high carb,
white rice you know.

Oh well, I'm way off the subject now and into nostalgia. Seems the
room was $11 dollars per night (singapore dollars, then about 60
cents to the USD) so about $6.60 per night and very nice except the
shower was down the hall and only a fan in the room, no aircond.....
All the better for drying your t-shirts and underware....dry by the
next morning with the overhead fan on... Then out for the day and
walk walk walk....People eating everywhere in the open market
stalls.... You could see what and how much everyone was eating as you
wandered from stall area to stall area. Or over to the Indian
restaurant where you had to eat with your hands from a banana leaf.
Carbs......? who knows, it was all manner of mushy veggies on that
leaf.
All I know is there wasn't any meat at that place.
And so it went from city-states like Singapore accross the straits to
Sumatra or down to Jakarta and seeing more people eating in the
stalls, tiny restaurants and in the stores buying their daily foods.
You wander the streets, food markets, stalls, and allys. You see what
they eat aside from the Western Hotels, and you see what their bodies
look like. NO one counting carbs down there.
Heck they didn't even know what a carb was. But somehow they manage
to stay slender, even if they had enough money to eat to excess.
So I don't know, perhaps I just got crazy ideas about their diet over
several decades, but I'm pretty confident about what I saw. No study
in the New England Journal of Medicine, but a good sense of why they
remained thin.

How wonderful it would be if obese Americans really knew and
experienced seeing vast populations of humans living in harmony with
their food and bodies.
There is another way to live folks. It is possible to do it even in
America.
Its not some myth or secret. Its real, its still present in much of
the world, and its there for the taking.
How strange it is to be telling people about something that is so real
and yet they find it impossible to believe or believe while it works
for "those" people it couldn't possibly work for me (obese American).

You know what would be fun. Instead of booking folks for 12 day
cruises costing $3,000 you could fly them to smaller Asian towns and
let them tour a region, eating at the local stalls etc.
A culinary tour of regions where the population mostly stays slender.
And for that same $3,000 they could easily get the airfare roundtrip
plus a month or more of food and small hotels.
Gosh, why in the world go on a boring cruise when you could really see
the world and learn so much about eating properly.

OK.......I'm done.....off on a tangent that I'm sure few will
appreciate or accept.
Just the deranged rantings of some quirky traveler :-)

In my next installment I'll discuss goat ribs vs dog ribs and how you
can't ever be sure which is which by measurement alone. Oh my! Well,
there is always plenty of (white) rice if you don't want to test the
ribs. Hey, where did Sparky go?

On Oct 24, 3:13 am, wrote:
On Oct 23, 1:37 pm, "Roger Zoul" wrote:

wrote

Too many repeated issues to respond to each.

So, to boil it down to the core, your argument is essentially
this.

1- Asians were universally slim, rurally, back in the 60's and 70's.
2- They eat until sated, not stuffed
2a- They do so out of natural habit, not economic status.
3- These slim Asians walk everywhere.
3a- The urban slim ones bike everywhere (not mentioned but hard
to ignore considering the flocks of bikes in urban China)
4- They eat a lot of white rice and a lot of veggies.
4a- They don't eat much meat.
4a1- The meat they eat is generally fish or fowl.
5- Americans can drop 22 lbs a year by adopting this style of eating.
5a- To summarize, we're talking lower calories, low fat, lowish
protein
and therefore high carbs as a percentage of the diet.

I don't want to suggest that this is any particular large diet in the
US,
but it feels a lot like, well, pretty much everything not low carb or
Mediterranean since Ancel Keys. If we want to extreme it, fat wise,
it's
Dean Ornish - whole grains - car use.

I don't want to suggest that you're wrong, because whatever it is, it
works for most of 2.5 billion Asians (never mind the diabetic Indians
of northern India where they shun meat entirely). But in studies, on
Westerners, it's darned hard to follow, and generally doesn't work for
a
lot of them.

Look at the Stamford Study in JAMA. And that's looking at people who
need to lose weight, not who are trying to maintain slim physiques.
The
diet most similar to the Asian diet was the worst failure in terms of
compliance and results.

Now, you can do it. Great. Congrats. You're 1 in 10. But it doesn't
change that people can and do lose on low carb, and even enjoy doing
so.
Or that they can eat more and still lose. And still maintain. It's
possible
to have two separate models for weight loss that work differently for
various
people, with varying levels of efficiency and compliance ability.

It's also possible that, since you didn't keep data, only
observations, you
haven't teased out the real reason for Asian slimness at all, you've
only
put your spin on your observations. That's something that Taubes talks
about at length in the book and it's one of the big problems in the
science
of obesity and diet for the last 40 years.

In the less than brilliant coverage of Taubes book on Larry King Live,
Dr. Mehmet of Oz, Oprah's diet guru, came to the concept of
complementarity,
that two models can both be right and work together. Taubes says yes,
but
it's also possible to have two ideas and one of them be wrong. It was
the best
moment in a generally messy interview, imho. (That and Andrew Weil
talking
about the value of GCBC and recommending it to students and
practitioners)

"Hollywood" wrote

about the value of GCBC and recommending it to students and
practitioners)

GCBC? Don't recognize that.

wrote in message
oups.com...
On Oct 23, 1:37 pm, "Roger Zoul" wrote:
wrote

Too many repeated issues to respond to each.

BTW, biking has to be one of the most enjoyable exercises available.
Working calories while enjoying the outdoors. When I'm out their I
have to observe the size of the average rider.
I've seen some remarkable success stories for people who have very
very gradually lost lots of weight while having fun.
You throw biking in with a Asian dietary lifestyle and my gosh, how
ya gonna keep the weight from gradually dropping off?

It's certainly a lot of fun and great exercise. I can spend hours at it on
weekends since I don't have the typical family responsibities that others
do.


I'm also a huge advocate of the "one ounce per day plan".... That
being that losing just one ounce per day is a tremendous success.
Even further I am for doing that half from intake and half from
output. 100 to 125 calories less from food substitution rather than
denial or less volume.
And 110 to 125 more calories burned. ON the assumption most are doing
little currently, that only adding in a minor amount of extra
walking. Other than for those who are disabled, that calls for very
little effort.
That one ounce per day is about 22 pounds per year. Oh I know, its
easy to do it on a calculator but in REAL life it don't work... I
say, give it a 5 year trial then tell me it doesn't work.

Well, the concept is great, but the practical implementation doesn't work so
well with human beings, especially in the US as we have far too many
inticing foods to enjoy. Losing at a snails pace would drive many mad (we
get that here a lot even for a reasonable 1 lb a week loss) and they simply
would not follow it for any where near 5 years.

Again, biking is really a benefit while being plain fun. But I guess
you know that.

Yes. Biking for fun, weight lifting for looking good and staying/gettting
strong & robust (very important, IMO). Swimming, hiking, etc work well too,
so it really just depends on the person and what they like. I'm over the
opinion that lifting (some form of resistance training, actually)) should be
combined with at least one "fun" exercise activity. All of this helps keep
the focus alive on maintaining weight loss, IMO.

I've seen some near miracles in guys who have biked for 4 or 5 years.
One friend, dropped from 240 to 155. I used to kick his b-tt up all
the climbs and now at 115 pounds and 20 years younger he kicks my
rear. I'm still lighter but I can't make up for 20 years.

Are you a girl or a guy? Some people are just better climbers than others,
though, so don't feel badly.


Back to Asia. OK.........I'll still stick with the Asian diet model
as one of the very best,

For what? If our only measure is weight - that's not good enough. I don't
see how all that white rice you mention is helping with overall health.
It's not known as a source of good nutrition.

however I will concede if you look at total
calories from carbs rather than "percent of calories as carbs" or
"percent of food volume as carbs", then some of your questioning is
valid.
But anyone, even in America, can essentially follow the Asian model
and probably benefit, in spite of eating a large "percent of calories"
from carbs such as white rice.
It would however call for the rest of their diet to follow the Asian
model.
And that would entail less, but not zero, meat, dairy yada yada.
Essentially copying the Asian model.
Heres the thing. The people I observe aren't counting calories. They
are just eating until they've had enough. They're eating lots of
white rice. They may not be consuming lots of calories but guess
what, they are even thinking about it. They eat till they are
satisfied and they aren't going to bed hungry. Tomorrow, next week,
next month and 10 years from now, they'll be doing the same thing.
They just eat the way they do, they don't diet or think about it.
If most obese and overweight Americans ate the same diet, a large
percentage of them would find their weight much lower 60 months later
and they'd have not experienced hunger in the 60 month journey.
Its not a fad, its not a diet, its not all about calculations or
studies. Its just about hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

Well, if hundreds of millions of people in US at a typical diet low in carbs
(compared to the standard American diet), they'd achieve exacly the same
benefits and probably more, as meat and non-starchy veggies are healthier
than rice and veggies.
The removal of all of those carbs would naturally curb appetite, as insulin
swings would disappear.


Do I expect millions of overweight Americans to suddenly eat like
Asians? NO... But if they gradually over a couple years adapted to
that way of eating and then gave it another 5 years to work, then
those who did so would naturally drop much of their excess weight.
Not everyone and not all their weight, but a vast improvement
compared to any of the current diet fads we see in practice.

As Hollywood points out, that low-fat, high-carb, low-protein diet fails in
populations where people have choices. I think your Asian diet is basically
one of limited options.


Oh well, I'm off topic. Carbs. OK make em bad, but keep in mind,
that carbs are what most slender folks in Asian are getting most of
their calories from.

I didn't say they were bad per se...I claim that overcomsumption of them vs
activity level is the problem.

Perhaps their total caloric intake is still
low, but it ain't white rice thats ruining their diet. They don't
have to resort to some weird Atkins thing to stay slender.

Please don't post ignorance notions about Atkins. The only thing that could
possibly be considered weird with Atkins is he first two-week induction
period. After that, it's non-starchy veggies, low-sugar fruits, and meat,
fish, and fowl. Basically, a whole foods, eat-of-the-land kind of diet.
Few Americans today do this because of technology and mankinds very poor
understanding of nutrition over the past 50 years or so. Plain and simple,
what wrong witht the American diet is just too many carbs. Remove that, keep
the meat, fish, and fowl, and the veggies, and westerners would get slim.


I wish it weren't so far away(Asia). I'd just say, go there. Look
at them, eat like them, then come home and repeat the process for 60
months. See what happens.

No.

Chances are huge you'll find more success in that, than from anything
else being presented to the legions of obese Americans.
Instead of doing the kind of traveling I suggest, we see just the
opposite.
Crusise lines offering NON-STOP gourging for 7 days/6 nights...
Endless food...
Or going to other countries but staying in the same hotels that are
found in every city of the world...offering the same foods.

And what you are criticizing here is more or less a high-carb diet. It's
what causes people to gorge.

Goodness I was so lucky to have seen the world initially with a small
backpack... eventually ending up with a even smaller bag in one hand.
Streets, small roads, villages, paths, remote islands and mountain
villages, and farms. Seeing how people really live and why they
don't get fat. Eating in a pre-McDonalds era and staying healthy.
Interestingly I was in Singapore in October, 1979 when they opened the
first McDonalds. Prior to that Hong Kong had some and of course
Japan, but the rest of Asia was virgin territory. Now they're
everywhere. Since that first one opened up, Singapore alone has
added 121 more. My goodness, and if you know Singapore you know its
not very big either in population or size.

Now, in contrast, when in those days in Singapore back in 1979, I
used to wake up from my nice but very inexpensive room (I dare not
call it a hotel so as not to confuse what is most people's ideas about
what a hotel is)....anyways I would get up...go down to the street,
and for breakfast, I'd get chicken with rice and veggi. Very
simple, boiled chicken. small portion ( no bones) and some rice with a
few veggies on top. Loved it and it was very cheap......I'm thinking
about a dollar to $1.50 back then. Very low fat, fairly high carb,
white rice you know.

Oh well, I'm way off the subject now and into nostalgia. Seems the
room was $11 dollars per night (singapore dollars, then about 60
cents to the USD) so about $6.60 per night and very nice except the
shower was down the hall and only a fan in the room, no aircond.....
All the better for drying your t-shirts and underware....dry by the
next morning with the overhead fan on... Then out for the day and
walk walk walk....People eating everywhere in the open market
stalls.... You could see what and how much everyone was eating as you
wandered from stall area to stall area. Or over to the Indian
restaurant where you had to eat with your hands from a banana leaf.
Carbs......? who knows, it was all manner of mushy veggies on that
leaf.
All I know is there wasn't any meat at that place.
And so it went from city-states like Singapore accross the straits to
Sumatra or down to Jakarta and seeing more people eating in the
stalls, tiny restaurants and in the stores buying their daily foods.
You wander the streets, food markets, stalls, and allys. You see what
they eat aside from the Western Hotels, and you see what their bodies
look like. NO one counting carbs down there.
Heck they didn't even know what a carb was. But somehow they manage
to stay slender, even if they had enough money to eat to excess.

I don't think the masses you're referring to have the money to eat to
excess.

So I don't know, perhaps I just got crazy ideas about their diet over
several decades, but I'm pretty confident about what I saw. No study
in the New England Journal of Medicine, but a good sense of why they
remained thin.

How wonderful it would be if obese Americans really knew and
experienced seeing vast populations of humans living in harmony with
their food and bodies.
There is another way to live folks.

That's true. It's called low carb!

It is possible to do it even in
America.

That's right. Low carb has much more to offer than bland white rice, boiled
skinless chicken.

Its not some myth or secret. Its real, its still present in much of
the world, and its there for the taking.

It's the eating habits of the poor.

How strange it is to be telling people about something that is so real
and yet they find it impossible to believe or believe while it works
for "those" people it couldn't possibly work for me (obese American).

You really are making this all up in your head, you know!


You know what would be fun. Instead of booking folks for 12 day
cruises costing $3,000 you could fly them to smaller Asian towns and
let them tour a region, eating at the local stalls etc.
A culinary tour of regions where the population mostly stays slender.
And for that same $3,000 they could easily get the airfare roundtrip
plus a month or more of food and small hotels.
Gosh, why in the world go on a boring cruise when you could really see
the world and learn so much about eating properly.

White rice is eating properly? Please explain.


OK.......I'm done.....off on a tangent that I'm sure few will
appreciate or accept.
Just the deranged rantings of some quirky traveler :-)


Yeah, "quirky" would seem to apply!

In my next installment I'll discuss goat ribs vs dog ribs and how you
can't ever be sure which is which by measurement alone. Oh my! Well,
there is always plenty of (white) rice if you don't want to test the
ribs. Hey, where did Sparky go?


haha.

Roger Zoul wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
On Oct 23, 1:37 pm, "Roger Zoul" wrote:
wrote



I'm also a huge advocate of the "one ounce per day plan".... That
being that losing just one ounce per day is a tremendous success.
Even further I am for doing that half from intake and half from
output. 100 to 125 calories less from food substitution rather than
denial or less volume.
And 110 to 125 more calories burned. ON the assumption most are doing
little currently, that only adding in a minor amount of extra
walking. Other than for those who are disabled, that calls for very
little effort.
That one ounce per day is about 22 pounds per year. Oh I know, its
easy to do it on a calculator but in REAL life it don't work... I
say, give it a 5 year trial then tell me it doesn't work.

Well, the concept is great, but the practical implementation doesn't work so
well with human beings, especially in the US as we have far too many
inticing foods to enjoy. Losing at a snails pace would drive many mad (we
get that here a lot even for a reasonable 1 lb a week loss) and they simply
would not follow it for any where near 5 years.

I agree with them. I wouldn't do a diet for 5 years. Thats why I
advocate gradually changing a persons way of eating over months and
years, gradually. In other words, making the different way of
eating something that you will do well into the future while never
being on a diet.
That also is why you don't worry about the pace of loss. People will
only continue eating a diet they make part of their life. Any "diet"
whether short term or long term (5 years) will fail if you don't
intend to keep eating that way for life.
I think we all know that by now. I mean really.......We do all know
that, don' t we?

To me, it like bike riding. You make it your activity and you
gradually get into shape and then you stay there with perhaps a few
peaks for a special event..
I'm over the
opinion that lifting (some form of resistance training, actually)) should be
combined with at least one "fun" exercise activity. All of this helps keep
the focus alive on maintaining weight loss, IMO.

I know, I've got to do a bit more with weights, but then you have to
pull those muscles up the hills.

I've seen some near miracles in guys who have biked for 4 or 5 years.
One friend, dropped from 240 to 155. I used to kick his b-tt up all
the climbs and now at 155 pounds and 20 years younger he kicks my
rear. I'm still lighter but I can't make up for 20 years.

Are you a girl or a guy? Some people are just better climbers than others,
though, so don't feel badly.

Male and for my age a uber climber... I live in the bike intensive SF
Bay Area where we are surrounded by hills. I took years to get very
good, and as my weight dropped I became one of the very best in my age
group. But I can't make up for 20 years of age.
And recently I make a decision to cut back to 2 days a week....down
from 3 and down from 4 a few years ago. I know I'll slow down and
I've already gained a few pounds (2 to 3) after years in a tight
range. Goodness, I may have to cut out some carbs.....Oh my!

For what? If our only measure is weight - that's not good enough. I don't
see how all that white rice you mention is helping with overall health.
It's not known as a source of good nutrition.

Oh I never said it was the best for nutrition, but only that those
folks in Asia eat it almost exclusively. Brown rice is very rare on
the tables of the rich and poor.


Well, if hundreds of millions of people in US at a typical diet low in carbs
(compared to the standard American diet), they'd achieve exacly the same
benefits and probably more, as meat and non-starchy veggies are healthier
than rice and veggies.
The removal of all of those carbs would naturally curb appetite, as insulin
swings would disappear.

I don't agree that rice and veggies, along with small amounts of meat,
eggs, poultry are less healthy than just meat + non-starchy veggies.


As Hollywood points out, that low-fat, high-carb, low-protein diet fails in
populations where people have choices. I think your Asian diet is basically
one of limited options.

Hollywood pointed out the 12 month Stanford study of Atkins, vs
Ornish, etc....

Thats not what hundreds of millions of people in Asia are eating.
Go there........try to find vegans or even vegetarians as found in the
main Ornish "low fat" diet.
No, instead you'll find small amounts of meat, fish, poultry, and
oils. All of which are excluded in the standard Ornish plan.
And to try to do something new over 12 months is insanity. It will
fail in 85% of the people who use it. Just as in the various
studies, the Atkins version reverses over a 12 or 24 month attempt.
NO, not for everyone.

LOOK.......an important point of mine is as follows. Look around
the world.... Humans living all over the place. What do they eat in
areas where the people stay relatively slender.
Not those places where everyone is poor, but where even the middle
class easily stay at a good weight. And not some obscure place like
North of the Artic Circle.......but places where tens and hundreds of
millions of people eat year in and year out, decade after decade and
remind in harmony with their bodies....ie....most don't get fat.

I look at those places and say.......thats the natural way humans are
designed to eat.
Not some diet that contorts the food intake because the people are TV
slugs, or because they are all weirded out on monster amounts of sugar
or massive amounts snack carbs.
NO, where do normal populations eat normally and have their bodies
end up "normal" as God or who ever designed.
I don't think Ornish is that nor do I think Atkins is that. In their
own way they are both trying to overcome some unnatural situation.
I think both Ornish and Atkins are a bit like taking pills for a
disease.


Oh well, I'm off topic. Carbs. OK make em bad, but keep in mind,
that carbs are what most slender folks in Asian are getting most of
their calories from.

I didn't say they were bad per se...I claim that overcomsumption of them vs
activity level is the problem.

Well OK......but it seems like you are trying to counteract something
by cutting them down below where others have them and seem to maintain
perfect weight as seen in the populations I cite.

Perhaps their total caloric intake is still
low, but it ain't white rice thats ruining their diet. They don't
have to resort to some weird Atkins thing to stay slender.

Please don't post ignorance notions about Atkins. The only thing that could
possibly be considered weird with Atkins is he first two-week induction
period. After that, it's non-starchy veggies, low-sugar fruits, and meat,
fish, and fowl. Basically, a whole foods, eat-off-the-land kind of diet.
Few Americans today do this because of technology and mankinds very poor
understanding of nutrition over the past 50 years or so. Plain and simple,
what wrong witht the American diet is just too many carbs. Remove that, keep
the meat, fish, and fowl, and the veggies, and westerners would get slim.

I refer to my "natural" eating as described earlier in this post.
Weird may be a poor choice of words, but could you give me any areas
of the world where tens of millions of people eat this way. I mean,
I'm sure there are some nomadic tribes like those raising herds of
animals who take them from grazing land to grazing land but thats not
how 99% of the worlds population live. People, modern people are
not going to live a lifestyle that is similar to what people do when
"eating off the land" so why twist the concept of what is a natural
diet for normal populations.....

Heck they didn't even know what a carb was. But somehow they manage
to stay slender, even if they had enough money to eat to excess.

I don't think the masses you're referring to have the money to eat to
excess.

You need to travel the world. Most of those people are not going to
bed hungry. Most of them certainly could afford more rice if they
desired it.

How wonderful it would be if obese Americans really knew and
experienced seeing vast populations of humans living in harmony with
their food and bodies.
There is another way to live folks.

That's true. It's called low carb!

The way Americans eat.....lots of carbs, lots of fat, lots of dairy
minor amounts of veggies is not a natural diet according to how
people have eaten over thousands of years. Thats why it fails. Low
carb is another version of a diet that is not what people have been
eating for thousands of years.. ( oh sure, there were small groups
eating like that but not tens of millions of people) One is a
reaction to the excesses of the other.

It is possible to do it even in
America.

That's right. Low carb has much more to offer than bland white rice, boiled
skinless chicken.

Goodness.... Go to Asia..... Try to find people eating eating "bland"
white rice and boiled "skinless" chicken. They'd turn their noses
up on that just as fast as those who follow the extreme low fat diets
do. Their diets are nothing like that. They aren't nuts. They
like their food and spices. They never throw away the skin. What a
distorted vision of Asian eating.

Its not some myth or secret. Its real, its still present in much of
the world, and its there for the taking.

It's the eating habits of the poor.

And most of the non-poor middle class. If only our poor ate like
them. Our poor have the worst diets. The most fat, combined with the
cheapest processed carb and sugars and minimal veggies. A witches
brew of ill health.



White rice is eating properly? Please explain.

White rice as eating inside the typical Asian diet is a wonderful
food.
Go there, look at their bodies. Look at their rate of diabetes, heart
disease etc.


OK.......I'm done.....off on a tangent that I'm sure few will
appreciate or accept.
Just the deranged rantings of some quirky traveler :-)


Yeah, "quirky" would seem to apply!

Quirky here......mainstream in most of the world.

I have no illusions that Americans will give up their excessive meat
or their excessive process carbs......nor their excessive sugars. Nor
that they will begin riding their bike even 30 miles per week.
Nope, they want something that will allow them to eat lots of the
stuff they like to eat and to still end up not gaining weight.
They want a trick.
For most, low carb has ended up being such a trick.
Its not the worst. If done correctly I'm sure some can take it off
and keep it off, perhaps even for decades. But I don't see it ever
being the healthy natural answer our society needs.
Its a answer for twisted way of eating. I don't see it as something
natural to the human population on a massive scale. Otherwise I think
we'd have seen large populations following it for decades.

But hey, perhaps you have examples where tens of millions have
followed the low carb diet and remained thin and healthy? Not some
tiny populations but masses of humans with long track records.

I'm open to examples...

I will give you this. A low-carb diet followed with care.....and
maintained over decades......will be superior to what millions of
Americans are currently eating. I just don't see millions doing it
properly for decades, and long after their weight is lower.
In the short term it is indeed a proven way to lose pounds.
Of course, I think short term diets.....even 12 to 24 months are
fairly useless for people who expect to live 20, 30, 40 and 50 more
years.
Long gradual slow weight reduction is not popular even though most
other methods seem to have limited success.

On Oct 24, 4:43 am, Hollywood wrote:
On Oct 24, 3:13 am, wrote:

On Oct 23, 1:37 pm, "Roger Zoul" wrote:

wrote

Too many repeated issues to respond to each.

So, to boil it down to the core, your argument is essentially
this.

1- Asians were universally slim, rurally, back in the 60's and 70's.
2- They eat until sated, not stuffed
2a- They do so out of natural habit, not economic status.
3- These slim Asians walk everywhere.
3a- The urban slim ones bike everywhere (not mentioned but hard
to ignore considering the flocks of bikes in urban China)
4- They eat a lot of white rice and a lot of veggies.
4a- They don't eat much meat.
4a1- The meat they eat is generally fish or fowl.
5- Americans can drop 22 lbs a year by adopting this style of eating.
5a- To summarize, we're talking lower calories, low fat, lowish
protein
and therefore high carbs as a percentage of the diet.

Hey, thats not a bad summary. I'd change a few things but what you
wrote is not too far from the mark.

If we want to extreme it, fat wise,
it's
Dean Ornish - whole grains - car use.

Yes, if you "extreme it".......you end up with Ornish and the
problems you get with that.
BTW, you won't find anyone eating Ornish in those tens, and hundreds
of millions of Asians I am referring to.


I don't want to suggest that you're wrong, because whatever it is, it
works for most of 2.5 billion Asians (never mind the diabetic Indians
of northern India where they shun meat entirely). But in studies, on
Westerners, it's darned hard to follow, and generally doesn't work for
a
lot of them.

Simply put......Ornish does not work for many Westerners. You have
that correctly stated.
It did work for some folks who were on the verge of death and
attempting to avoid their next massive heart attack. However I don't
think we can count on that type of motivation in the general public.
Nor would you find it much better going in Asia.

Look at the Stamford Study in JAMA. And that's looking at people who
need to lose weight, not who are trying to maintain slim physiques.
The
diet most similar to the Asian diet was the worst failure in terms of
compliance and results.

You caused me a lot of problems... Its Stanford.....not Stamford...
(there is a Stamford, Conn.)
OK.....after 20 minutes of looking for the Stamford Study, whew! I
did find the Stanford study which I remember having read some time
ago.. Ornish, Atkins and the rest.
Now, I have not re-read the entire study but from what I remember at
12 months Atkins was superior for weight loss at the end.
I've always thought, give 50 people a Ornish book.......as they
did........and give 50 people a Atkins book.......and at the 6 months
or 12 months the Atkins people will have lost more.
Either in this study, but I think in another longer study, things had
begun to turn either after 6 months or was it 18 months......and then
the Atkins folks began to come back to the same place where the Ornish
people were, which BTW wasn't great.
In the end, what I got was that neither plan did very well. As
expected.
Atkins didn't lie, he just never took a large group out 3, 4 , and 5
years.
Ornish isn't wrong, if just people would be willing to adapt to his
plan for years and years.
From what I know, about 90% don't. Very low compliance.

Just like in the massive "nurses study" (not for weight loss)....where
one group was supposed to aim for no more than 20% of calories from
fat but who in reality began about 35% and soon ended up at about
29%........hardly what you could call "low fat".... yet the headlines
were that lower fat eating makes no difference in whatever cancer they
were studying.... breast or whatever it was.


Or that they can eat more and still lose. And still maintain. It's
possible
to have two separate models for weight loss that work differently for
various
people, with varying levels of efficiency and compliance ability.

yes, you could have two models. I just haven't seen large
populations where the other model has been shown to work for most of
the people. I like to see large populations doing things that are
natural for decades. Then I say, what are they doing, it appears
to work.

That's something that Taubes talks
about at length in the book and it's one of the big problems in the
science
of obesity and diet for the last 40 years.

Taubes is promoting a book. Boring success about millions of people
who eat in a different manner than his target audience is not going to
get the books flying off the shelves.
Taubes offers a "nice" way......that people will like to agree with.
He isn't dumb. The publisher wanted a version of his orginal message
which is very popular.


Hey, I'll even give you GCBC's ideas are a good way to drop pounds.
I just trust people. I trust history and the human model to show us
what works for large populations with millions of examples.
I'd feel better if you could show me a nation or a region where
millions of people were doing Taubes type eating and staying healthy
for decades.
Or is Taubes new book a new idea, that has never been practiced by
tens of millions.

Or do we need a new model...since we no longer are active like we were
for hundreds of years.
Or do we use a model we see working already.
I see a model in Asia, as one example. It works for then and happens
to include white rice as their main source of calories. So I say,
hmmmm what are they doing naturally and with ease for decades. I
place more trust in that model than in some new idea cooked up in the
latest book.
More than anything Taubes book will do well because it more closely
matches what people want to hear.
Thats why Atkins was so popular.

I stand back in America and see the huge problem getting worse and
worse. The books roll off the printing presses and the people just
keep getting fatter. Hope springs eternal in this search for some
thing that works.
Then I travel to places like those in Asia and I see hundreds of
millions not having a problem with there weight.
Is it a stretch to think their diet might have something to do with
it? It smacks you in the face when you wander around.

But alas, its not a popular message. We construct every possible
reason why its not right for Americans. Then we throw in "extreme"
versions like the Ornish plan and prove it won't work.
I guess its just those Asian genes.... You know, they're a different
species.

So on one hand we have a few...what? thousand or perhaps a hundred
thousand people who've had decades long success with Atkins and low
carbing?
And on the other hand we have what? a billion people who've had
centuries of success doing what people here label non-low-carb eating.
Hmmm.......billions and centuries....versus......less than a millon
and 10 or 20 years.
Yes, it looks like a toss up in terms of evidence.

But lastly, I'd just say this. If you have a unusual condition or if
you simply know you'd never ever be able to eat in the direction of
Asians, then by all means go the low-carb route for your health.
I'm just putting forth the idea that billions of people eat most of
their calories from white rice and noodles and seem to do very well on
it.

On Oct 24, 9:54 am, "Roger Zoul" wrote:
"Hollywood" wrote

about the value of GCBC and recommending it to students and
practitioners)

GCBC? Don't recognize that.

Good Calories Bad Calories.

On Oct 25, 12:47 am, wrote:
On Oct 24, 4:43 am, Hollywood wrote:





On Oct 24, 3:13 am, wrote:

On Oct 23, 1:37 pm, "Roger Zoul" wrote:

wrote

Too many repeated issues to respond to each.

So, to boil it down to the core, your argument is essentially
this.

1- Asians were universally slim, rurally, back in the 60's and 70's.
2- They eat until sated, not stuffed
2a- They do so out of natural habit, not economic status.
3- These slim Asians walk everywhere.
3a- The urban slim ones bike everywhere (not mentioned but hard
to ignore considering the flocks of bikes in urban China)
4- They eat a lot of white rice and a lot of veggies.
4a- They don't eat much meat.
4a1- The meat they eat is generally fish or fowl.
5- Americans can drop 22 lbs a year by adopting this style of eating.
5a- To summarize, we're talking lower calories, low fat, lowish
protein
and therefore high carbs as a percentage of the diet.

Hey, thats not a bad summary. I'd change a few things but what you
wrote is not too far from the mark.

If we want to extreme it, fat wise,

it's
Dean Ornish - whole grains - car use.

Yes, if you "extreme it".......you end up with Ornish and the
problems you get with that.
BTW, you won't find anyone eating Ornish in those tens, and hundreds
of millions of Asians I am referring to.



I don't want to suggest that you're wrong, because whatever it is, it
works for most of 2.5 billion Asians (never mind the diabetic Indians
of northern India where they shun meat entirely). But in studies, on
Westerners, it's darned hard to follow, and generally doesn't work for
a
lot of them.

Simply put......Ornish does not work for many Westerners. You have
that correctly stated.
It did work for some folks who were on the verge of death and
attempting to avoid their next massive heart attack. However I don't
think we can count on that type of motivation in the general public.
Nor would you find it much better going in Asia.



Look at the Stamford Study in JAMA. And that's looking at people who
need to lose weight, not who are trying to maintain slim physiques.
The
diet most similar to the Asian diet was the worst failure in terms of
compliance and results.

You caused me a lot of problems... Its Stanford.....not Stamford...
(there is a Stamford, Conn.)
OK.....after 20 minutes of looking for the Stamford Study, whew! I
did find the Stanford study which I remember having read some time
ago.. Ornish, Atkins and the rest.
Now, I have not re-read the entire study but from what I remember at
12 months Atkins was superior for weight loss at the end.
I've always thought, give 50 people a Ornish book.......as they
did........and give 50 people a Atkins book.......and at the 6 months
or 12 months the Atkins people will have lost more.
Either in this study, but I think in another longer study, things had
begun to turn either after 6 months or was it 18 months......and then
the Atkins folks began to come back to the same place where the Ornish
people were, which BTW wasn't great.
In the end, what I got was that neither plan did very well. As
expected.
Atkins didn't lie, he just never took a large group out 3, 4 , and 5
years.
Ornish isn't wrong, if just people would be willing to adapt to his
plan for years and years.

From what I know, about 90% don't. Very low compliance.

Just like in the massive "nurses study" (not for weight loss)....where
one group was supposed to aim for no more than 20% of calories from
fat but who in reality began about 35% and soon ended up at about
29%........hardly what you could call "low fat".... yet the headlines
were that lower fat eating makes no difference in whatever cancer they
were studying.... breast or whatever it was.

Or that they can eat more and still lose. And still maintain. It's
possible
to have two separate models for weight loss that work differently for
various
people, with varying levels of efficiency and compliance ability.

yes, you could have two models. I just haven't seen large
populations where the other model has been shown to work for most of
the people. I like to see large populations doing things that are
natural for decades. Then I say, what are they doing, it appears
to work.

That's something that Taubes talks

about at length in the book and it's one of the big problems in the
science
of obesity and diet for the last 40 years.

Taubes is promoting a book. Boring success about millions of people
who eat in a different manner than his target audience is not going to
get the books flying off the shelves.
Taubes offers a "nice" way......that people will like to agree with.
He isn't dumb. The publisher wanted a version of his orginal message
which is very popular.



Hey, I'll even give you GCBC's ideas are a good way to drop pounds.
I just trust people. I trust history and the human model to show us
what works for large populations with millions of examples.
I'd feel better if you could show me a nation or a region where
millions of people were doing Taubes type eating and staying healthy
for decades.
Or is Taubes new book a new idea, that has never been practiced by
tens of millions.

Or do we need a new model...since we no longer are active like we were
for hundreds of years.
Or do we use a model we see working already.
I see a model in Asia, as one example. It works for then and happens
to include white rice as their main source of calories. So I say,
hmmmm what are they doing naturally and with ease for decades. I
place more trust in that model than in some new idea cooked up in the
latest book.
More than anything Taubes book will do well because it more closely
matches what people want to hear.
Thats why Atkins was so popular.

I stand back in America and see the huge problem getting worse and
worse. The books roll off the printing presses and the people just
keep getting fatter. Hope springs eternal in this search for some
thing that works.
Then I travel to places like those in Asia and I see hundreds of
millions not having a problem with there weight.
Is it a stretch to think their diet might have something to do with
it? It smacks you in the face when you wander around.

But alas, its not a popular message. We construct every possible
reason why its not right for Americans. Then we throw in "extreme"
versions like the Ornish plan and prove it won't work.
I guess its just those Asian genes.... You know, they're a different
species.

So on one hand we have a few...what? thousand or perhaps a hundred
thousand people who've had decades long success with Atkins and low
carbing?
And on the other hand we have what? a billion people who've had
centuries of success doing what people here label non-low-carb eating.
Hmmm.......billions and centuries....versus......less than a millon
and 10 or 20 years.
Yes, it looks like a toss up in terms of evidence.

But lastly, I'd just say this. If you have a unusual condition or if
you simply know you'd never ever be able to eat in the direction of
Asians, then by all means go the low-carb route for your health.
I'm just putting forth the idea that billions of people eat most of
their calories from white rice and noodles and seem to do very well on
it

So, again, we conclude with what people in Asia do vs. life in the
Western World.

I got sidetracked with Ornish. This Asian Diet you speak of is really
not terribly different from the food pyramid. And that's been a
disaster,
really.

Couple quick points: There's no real scientific link between meat
consumption/fat consumption and cancer. Sugar on the other hand,
well, we can see how that metabolism would work if we understood
how cancer feeds. So, it shouldn't have been a surprise that any study
fails to find a link between breast cancer and meat/fat consumption.
As
far as we know, there's no link whatsoever.

Taubes: Since one of us has read the book and one of us attacks the
unlying morals of the author, we can't really have a good conversation
about what's in the book and what's not. When you actually read it,
front cover to the begining of the notes section, then we can talk
intelligently about the work. Till then, you can snipe at Taubes
credibility
(it's not a diet book, it's a review of the science of diet, diseases
of
civilization and obesity), and I can be dismissive. When you're armed
with actual experience, we can talk honestly about the points. Attack
the science or the interpretation, not the motive. It's weak.

Rural Asians: Let's be very clear on something. We don't know what it
is that keeps Asians, eating copious rice and veggies and little meat,
lean. It might be diet. It might be exercise. It might be caloric
intake. It
might be economics. It might be the high level of confucian dynamism.
It
might be the weather. The studies that call it diet don't look at
anything but
diet. The ones that call it exercise, don't look beyond exercise. I'm
an
amateur economist. I think it's all about economies. I'm a
professional
organizational consultant, so I think it's economies and something in
the
psychology/zeitgeist of being Asian like some combination of confucian
dynamism, polychronism, and collectivism. And if you want support,
the Asian countries you've mentioned are among the highest in CD,
generally
pretty skewed away from monochronism (Japan and Singapore are
exceptions)
and generally collectivists. Americans, on the other hand, rate low on
CD,
very high in monochronism (Japan and England, then USA), and highest
in
the world in individuality. So, using China study techniques, or 6and
7 country
techniques, I could prove that monochronicism is what makes people
heart
sick. And, given the research on cortisol and stress, I might be
right. But
correlation != causation.

Further, given the potential for broad environmental factors that
could not
be replicated in the US, it just doesn't seem feasible.

That said, controlled carbs is how Homo has eaten for most of Homo
history.
Eat meat, find fruit and veggies, maybe some grasses in places, but no
farming.
So, if you want a large population, how about the 6 billion of us on
the earth
wouldn't have evolved to the point where we could cultivate rice
without eating
low carb, well enough to reproduce and pass on our selfish genes.
Maybe they
were all fat and unmotivated, but that doesn't seem highly correlated
with evolutionary
adaptability. If things in nature are naturally lean, trim and
muscular, isn't that our
birthright as well? And to get there, wouldn't you go with a roots
move, one that
takes you closest to what they did before they had car payments,
diabetes and
large reserves of adipose tissue? That's all anyone going LC is
doing.