The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

@Chad, we've known for a long time that obesity is correlated with cognitive decline. What's new in this study is that the obesity related cognitive decline has shown (for rats at least) an epigenetic component which can be passed to offspring. Tinkering with the regulation of gene expression in the brain is a pretty big deal.

We knew that a junk food diet slowly causes a diminished ability to create new memories. For instance, being obese in mid-life doubles the risk of developing dementia in old age. Now imagine a world where kids are starting life with the epigenetic factors of an obese adult. The protein-encoding of their neuronal growth spurts will be out of wack. The variety and complexity of the neurodegenerative diseases will be astounding.

Dementia at thirty? We are already beginning to see just that...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932340/

Chad
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Chad »

@Ego

But, it is it dementia at thirty because of epigentics? Or, is it because the parents force the kids to eat a worse diet their entire lives because of socio/economic issues? They just don't know and can't afford a good diet. I know all my relatives are still stuck on the "fat is always bad" meme from the 80's, which takes a bad diet from the first half of the century and makes it worse by over compensating with really bad carbs (processed carbs).

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

Chad wrote:@Ego

But, it is it dementia at thirty because of epigentics?
Remarkably, however, there is also an increasing list of monogenic ‘chromatin’ disorders defined by adult-onset neurological and neurodegenerative disease. Thus, some cases of hereditary sensory and autonomy neuropathy type 1 (HSAN1) (a rare neurodegenerative condition characterized by various neuropathies and early onset dementia in the 3rd or 4th decade) were linked to mutations in the protein coding sequence of the gene encoding DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) gene.
In other words, yes.

Edit to add... it just occurred to me that I spent Saturday night reading those two research papers. If I need evidence of my own pathetic-ness, there it is...

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Sclass
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Sclass »

jennypenny wrote:
edited to add: I agree that the tobacco industry is similar to the junk food industry, but you're arguing that this problem is an individual problem, right? If so, on an individual level, IMO they aren't as similar.)
I've spent the last few days tracing some sources of certificated shares I own. ( :? How did i get these shares?) Your comment reminded me of this. there is commonality between big tobacco and big processed food. (I think Kraft is one of the biggest).

https://seenprint.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/kraft.jpg

Edit-I own the shares but I avoid the products. Yuck, who eats this stuff anyway. Everyone I guess.

Chad-thank you for the scientific American article. Really interesting.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

But, how do you reconcile this with the fact that mammalian breast milk is naturally sweet in direct correlation with intelligence of species? Also, the sort of obesity achieved by a breast-fed infant by age 2 or so, is directly correlated with a healthy weight and high IQ in adulthood. My DS27 is 6'3" and a natural ecto/meso like his father (broad shoulders, muscular, but borderline underweight, could make the big money as suit model) and goes about quoting ancient philosophers and statistics about world geography, but he was a total ball of chub as a baby. I remember a neighbor who had recently immigrated from Africa saying to me "Healthy baby, just like Mama." and becoming distressed about the fact that I obviously still hadn't taken off my pregnancy lbs. -lol My DD24 was similarly proportioned as a toddler, and now she is built sort of like Princess Di and received full academic scholarship to elite school.

Also, bi-polar disease is correlated with both high IQ and intense sugar cravings. Sugars and Omega fats can cross the brain barrier. My mother suffers from bi-polar 2, so my sisters and I are all at least mildly cyclothymic and high IQ, and you can not or should not leave the 4 of us alone in a room with a pot of coffee and a bowl of jelly beans, unless you wish to witness conversation conducted at a speed approaching gibberish. Of course, besides intense sugar cravings, the other well documented symptom of cyclothymia is hyper-sexuality (not to be confused with nymphomania) I used to think that mildly manic people crave sugar because it feeds the over-active brain and hormonal system, but it might be that the sugar slows down the brain and makes you more stupid and frigid, or less labile. Dunno. Seems to me that it is a very complex, not yet well understood matter.

JamesR
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by JamesR »

I guess the main ideas to solve this problem are:

1) Bring back home economics class, (or cooking class) and make it mandatory for grades 9 to 12.
2) Phys Ed probably should be mandatory also (for all years).

Any other suggestions in this thread that I missed?

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

JamesR wrote:I guess the main ideas to solve this problem are:

1) Bring back home economics class, (or cooking class) and make it mandatory for grades 9 to 12.
2) Phys Ed probably should be mandatory also (for all years).

Any other suggestions in this thread that I missed?

Someone I know :D has been teaching these classes in Spanish and English. Enlightening experience. Both the kids and their parents know EXACTLY what they should be doing and what they should avoid. They have access to FREE healthy foods. They know how to read labels. They understand why sugar is the devil and how sugar is in supposedly healthy juices. They know why whole grains are optimal and which products sneak in processed grains. In fact, they knew it all coming into the class.

1. They can't not eat the bad stuff.
2. Obesity is outward social proof of a willingness to sacrifice all for the family. It has become evidence of virtuous living.
3. There are no bike racks at the schools. They only know exercise as a chore rather than a pleasure.
4. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a weird threat. There is something wrong with people who are fit.

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Jean
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Jean »

JamesR wrote:I guess the main ideas to solve this problem are:

1) Bring back home economics class, (or cooking class) and make it mandatory for grades 9 to 12.
2) Phys Ed probably should be mandatory also (for all years).

Any other suggestions in this thread that I missed?
Home economics have alway been compulsory in school for one year (around 12yo) and phys ed for every year until the end of high school in switzerland.

https://www.oecd.org/switzerland/Obesit ... ERLAND.pdf

It probably helps.

Toska2
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Toska2 »

Have Phys Ed more educational and less "us vs them"?

I'm not advocating " everybody gets a trophy". I'm more "improving is the goal". Also in the long run, the best athletes are the ones who mitigrate getting hurt.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

Ego wrote: 3. There are no bike racks at the schools. They only know exercise as a chore rather than a pleasure.
+1 for the last sentence.

The PhysEd classes during my time (1982-1991 or so) consisted almost exclusively of "playing" various team sports. We'd do basketball for a month. Then soccer. Then volleyball. Then floorball. And in December, the dreaded folk dancing! Then repeat the entire cycle. Younger grades would also play things like tag or dodgeball. In terms of exceptions, we spent a couple of months doing track and field in the 7th grade as in "here's a spear, here's how you throw it, lets do that five times, record the result, and then move onto the shot put".

There was practically nothing whatever in terms of conditioning exercises. There were no strength workouts. Warm up consisted of running in circles for 5 minutes. There was absolutely no plan whatsoever for getting people in better shape than they already were. You're not going to make a difference with 2x45 weekly minutes of light team sports.---I suspect that the teachers gravitated towards this solution because it was the easiest possible one. Give the kids a ball and just referee the game instead of building up training plans and keeping track of the performance of a wide range of students.

Real sports was always done outside of school. About 1/2 of the kids did that. Most played soccer. Handball was also popular. I was a swimmer. These activities had real programs completely with peaks and periodization cycles and sportsball activities taught real tactics (beyond running around randomly hogging the ball or showboating).

The "sports kids" considered PhysEd to be a complete waste of time. The "soft kids" considered it a chore where "icky sweating" was to be avoided. When we had the annual 5km run, the former group would finish in under half an hour. The latter group would walk all the way stopping to buy candy in the kiosk.

Nobody ever learned much of anything from PhysEd beyond simple facts like how to hit a volleyball or shoot a basketball.

The result for the sedentary group is that there's almost complete ignorance across the board---there has never been any "physical" education. They are physically illiterate. They are not only unaware of what physical exercise should feel like, they are unaware of their own limits because they never pushed them before. Contrast a former athlete with a lifetime couch potato who both want to get into shape. The ex-athlete has been there already once upon a time. They know what they're once capable of; they know what it took; they will have a good idea of how to get there again; they are able to push themselves. In contrast, the sedentary group will think that walking 2 miles in half an hour twice a week means that they are now exercising regularly. There's very little willpower in terms of doing an extra rep or an extra minute. Breathing hard is uncomfortable. And in 95%+ of attempts to get started result in failure.

Now, the approach for HomeEc was similar. Lets cook this meal, now lets cook that meal, ... but in contrast to PhysEd, I think the Dreyfus level 1-2 level of instruction was actually useful here. People did pick up enough cooking skills to follow a recipe later on. Also, in the case that all they ate at home was hot dogs and potato chips, HomeEc would have given them some idea of what real food looked like.

PhysEd should have been/be structured a lot more along the lines of an actual conditioning program (base building) if it is going to make a difference in terms of solving the obesity problem. Students need to have a physical/visceral idea of what being in a good shape feels like.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by enigmaT120 »

Jacob wrote: "They are not only unaware of what physical exercise should feel like, they are unaware of their own limits because they never pushed them before."

I just grabbed that one line out of there, because lately I've started wondering if different people experience exercise differently. It seems like other people experience as pain what I experience as a form of pleasure -- exertion, and being tired afterward. Even some soreness the next day seems nice to me. I presume at least part of it is the first group not knowing how to moderate the exertion level to one that is sustainable and avoids injury.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

@enigmaT120 - Based on personal observations, chronically sedentary people are more likely to under-exercise and do less than what they could/should than to overexert themselves. Being unaware of what soreness is, they confuse it with injury. (The opposite happens too but it is rare in the sedentary group although much more common in ex-athletes who go too far too fast.) They will give an elaborate argument of how their perceived level of exertion is currently at 8 or 9 and how it's impossible to go any further even the amount of talking/complaining suggests they're working at level 5.

The endorphine response is surely different in different people, but so is the talent for math. My posit is that there's a widespread physical equivalent to illiteracy and that some people just never learned how to do 10 pull-ups or run a sub 8 minute mile just as some never learned the multiplication table or the difference between then and than.

I consider this an educational failure. I don't know where to put the blame for such an educational failure: The individual, their parents, "society", or the school system? In terms of my personal experience, PhysEd was a joke. If math had been taught in the same way, we would have spent 12 years playing Yatzie for a couple of 45 minute sessions per week.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Ego said:

1. They can't not eat the bad stuff.
2. Obesity is outward social proof of a willingness to sacrifice all for the family. It has become evidence of virtuous living.
3. There are no bike racks at the schools. They only know exercise as a chore rather than a pleasure.
4. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a weird threat. There is something wrong with people who are fit.
All very good insights, but as somebody who might be assigned the center-triangle-position between you and those you are attempting to educate, I have to tell you I don't think you are taking the most likely to succeed approach. Inappropriate carrots. Counter-productive sticks. What you have to understand is that your lifestyle likely does not seem either virtuous OR enjoyable from their perspective.

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

7Wannabe5 wrote:What you have to understand is that your lifestyle likely does not seem either virtuous OR enjoyable from their perspective.
Yes, you've made that opinion abundantly and redundantly clear. What you are not understanding is that nobody is selling a lifestyle. What was incorrectly being sold, if anything, was the belief that underprivileged obese people don't know how to not be obese. They know. Obesity is one among a myriad of choices. It does not appear to be the result of ignorance.

Laura Ingalls
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Laura Ingalls »

I get that exercise is viewed as a chore. That was really my stance until adulthood when I started walking and exploring on foot in the city I lived in at the time.

And we all know how to eat better than we actually do.

I really don't get that being fat is something you do for your family. I am no help to my children or parents if I am dead. I try to stay at a healthy weight for lots of reasons but this is one of the biggest. Ego could you elaborate?

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

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Laura Ingalls wrote:Ego could you elaborate?
Yeah, we talked about this after one of the adult classes. It is a phenomenon I once saw in the fitness class I teach as well (opposite socioeconomic background) so we found the commonalities interesting.

One of the alpha-moms said something about how she was too busy taking care of her kids and her parents to find the time and energy to exercise and cook complicated healthy meals. She encouraged the other participants to agree with her.

There was an unspoken implication that those who exercised and ate healthy - there are a handful in the class who do both - were too self-absorbed. It is a strange paradox where a person's fitness becomes outward evidence to others of their unwillingness to sacrifice for the well-being of their family. Obesity becomes a badge of honor.

When you think about it, it makes sense. We are constantly surrounded by messages that the hero's journey is one where the hero is willing to sacrifice for others. It is only natural that people would want to signal that willingness.

Just my crazy theory. I could be wrong.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by enigmaT120 »

I think what ego wrote is accurate in my case. I don't stay fit to do stuff for other people, I stay fit because the things I like to do are so hard that if I didn't stay fit I couldn't do them. I pulled a hamstring muscle on Monday running and I'm all bent out of shape that I couldn't bicycle today, as it's a nice day and I'm working in Salem and could have a long ride home. At least I'll still be able to cut down trees Sunday and peel off the bark for a project later this summer. So yeah, self-absorbed.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

@Ego - That's similar to the suntan theory of the leisure class. When most people worked outside and only rich people worked inside, being pale was a status symbol. When most people become office drones and only rich people could afford to travel and spend weeks under sun, tan became a status symbol. I can certainly see why being fit in the current culture is a status symbol: It implies that you have hours of spare time to spend on exercise and diet (because most people are otherwise sedentary, driving, and eating junk). Conversely, the sour grapes response and similar can be equally large.

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

@Jacob, yeah, kind of like taking pride in being bad at math.

Different cultures have different stereotypes for fat and skinny people. Some cultures judge overweight people to be giving, nice, and passive while thin people are seen as mean, conceited and superficial.

It's no surprise that some people would want to project or signal those qualities and might become overweight for that reason. After all, people are willing to go to great lengths to convey certain signals.

This may explain why obesity seems to be contagious.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by George the original one »

I can understand the argument that one is too busy to exercise, but it makes no sense for not cooking healthy meals. Bag of prewashed healthy greens dumped into a bowl is about as easy to cook as anything!

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