A month or so ago, the 'chair was wondering why Americans tend to be overweight, particularly because of the commonly rumored "fat tax" on foods like McDonalds' stuff. Someone linked to a Landsburg article (http://slate.msn.com/?id=105306) discussing reasons for the aggregate weight gain. A nutritionist I spoke with last week shared something interesting -- maybe some Americans just don't have _enough_ fat.
According to this nutritionist, low-fat diets will work for a while, but after a while, they'll snap, leading to weight gain. Basically, take a person who, instead of cutting calories, cuts fat out of their diet. They'll lose weight for a while, but their metabolism doesn't realize that's what going on. It'll slow down, expecting less food because of the low amounts of fat. (In a sense, it starts storing up for the winter.) The weight loss stops, so the incentive to stay low-fat goes away. But the metabolism doesn't bounce back up, so weight is gained. Which leads to more low-fat diets. Repeat. (See http://my.webmd.com/content/article/3079.275) This probably is more a symptom than the real disease, which is basically nutritional ignorance. Most people couldn't guess how much fat they had in a day, whether or not they've actually cut calories from week to week, or what the hell dietary fiber is even good for. And that too much sodium is bad. Which leads me to the other point I wanted to make -- microwaves probably add to the problem. The feed-me-now mentality which can only exist in affluent nations isn't necessarily bad, but frozen foods are usually high in sodium. Theoretically, the sodium intake should be matched by extra water intake. Or something like that. But the advent of the microwave has certainly upped the amount of preservatives/sodium in diets over the last two decades, which would at least correspond to a lot of the weight gain times. Dan Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED]
