John Berry <[email protected]> wrote:
> Huge issues regarding weight gain are probiotics, these can be responsible > for obesity or weight loss. > Many experiments with mice have proven this out. > The most effective way to make mice and other mammals fat is to feed them cooked food, instead of raw food. See Wrangham's book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" for details. Incidentally, mice and most other animals prefer cooked food. They will eat it instead of raw food, when given a choice. Cooked food is more readily digested, and it supplies more nutrients per gram. Some plant foods, eaten raw, take more energy to digest than they supply. You starve to death eating them uncooked. This happened to some European explorers in Australia who were cut off from supplies. They ate native food but neglected to cook it. (People in Australia during droughts also starved to death eating only extremely lean kangaroo meat, with no fat, in an extreme Atkins diet. See the book "Good to Eat.") This is also why humans have smaller guts and teeth than other primates, and they spend many fewer hours per day chewing and eating. People probably began cooking food hundreds of thousands of years ago. It has already had a profound effect on our body shape and biology in a remarkably short amount of time by evolutionary standards. We could not survive without cooked food. There is modern fad to eat only raw food. The people who do that, and stick to it for a while, are severely undernourished and suffer from many health problems, according to Wrangham. > Another significant issue seems to be food intolerances and leaky gut, > which results in weight gain and a myriad of problems. > As far as I know, intolerances cause only weight loss. You excrete undigested food, such as milk products if you are lactose intolerant. Diseases that cause persistent diarrhea can also cause extreme weight loss, enough to kill a patient without modern IVs and other intervention. A "leaky gut" that puts water in the tissue around the stomach is what causes people dying from starvation to have a bloated gut. It is a horrible sight. Some ignorant fools have pointed to photos of this and said "those people must be getting something to eat." There are some medical conditions with water retention that look like obesity to an untrained observer. They are rare. I knew a woman who had that problem when she was dying from cancer, caused by the drugs used in the 1960s. In the U.S. there has been a tremendous increase in obesity since the 1970s. All of the experts I have read agree this is caused by changes in diet and in what anthropologists called "foodways" or customs related to eating, such as when, where and how much you eat. (See again "Good to Eat," and "Prescription for a Healthy Nation.") Many of the foods now sold in grocery stores did not exist before 1970, or they were rare. People who eat traditional pre-1970s era diets, such as me, are no fatter than our fathers or grandfathers were at our age. There has not been a significant decrease in exercise by people over 21 in the U.S. in the last 50 years, so that is not the primary cause of the problem. Lack of exercise in children might be a major contributing factor. Experts disagree about that. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation about diet and obesity in the U.S. Up until they 1960s, they used to teach primary public school students about these subjects, which I think reduced obesity and other problems. They still do teach these subjects in Italy, France and Japan, which have far less of an obesity problem, and much better, healthier food than the U.S. The food served in their public schools is also tastier and more healthy than U.S. school lunches or U.S. fast food restaurants. The problem cannot be caused by lack of exercise in adults or by drugs known to cause obesity in some patients, such as some contraceptives. We know this because genetically similar populations of adults in Europe, in France and Italy, get about the same amount of exercise and they consume similar levels of the drugs, but obesity has not increased much. The only major difference is how much food they eat, and the type of food. In the U.K. the population eats similar amounts and types of food as in the U.S. and they have the same level of obesity. Contraceptives and most other drugs that are known to cause a weight gain only have that effect on a few patients, and the gains are only a few pounds. Any obese person who stops eating or loses the ability to digest will get thin, very quickly. This happens to people who suffer from stomach cancer, for example. - Jed
