Everyone Seems Surprised at New Finding About Obesity

A new study from Johns Hopkins is being trumpeted everywhere today: Today's teens are much more likely to be overweight or obese than earlier generations.  Everyone thought this was because kids sit all day playing video games and chatting on MySpace.  But it turns out that kids today are just about as active as their elders were.  So what explains the weight increase?  The researchers in this study seemed a bit confused themselves.  Might it be the teens' diet?

Several posts on this blog talk about the fact that our bodies are biochemical factories, and that they will make products according to the materials they are given.  The materials we are advised to eat (12 servings of grains per day/increased intake of "heart-healthy" polyunsaturated fat) push our bodies to inflammation and energy storage.  The materials we are advised to avoid (saturated fats) are much more stable, and therefore less likely to cause oxidative stress than the (supposedly more benign) fats and carbs that we generally replace them with.

Have you ever tried to lose weight by increasing activity, but without also modifying your diet?  If you have, you know it does not work. Yes, you'll lose fat, gain muscle and feel a lot better, but unless you work like a draft mule ten hours a day, you will not lose much weight.  Once you alter your diet, change will come pretty quickly.  Everyone professionally involved in fitness will tell you that's how it works.

If there's one thing people know today with absolute, complete and unending certainty, it's that animal fat will clog your arteries and kill you.  They therefore go to great lengths to replace sat-fats with poly-unsat-fats and carbs.  The problem is that what they "know" is just plain wrong.  Your liver makes most of the cholesterol in your body, and the fat you eat has little to do with your serum cholesterol.  And serum cholesterol does not clog your arteries.  The cholesterol in atherosclerotic plaques was originally contained in immune cells, that congregated between layers of your arteries  because they were attracted by inflammation occurring there!   Lots of that inflammation is caused by the "heart-healthy" carbs and polyunsaturated oils you loaded up on to protect your heart.

This is not new stuff.  I've linked several times to Dr. David Seaman's writings on this subject. (He's got a new good website: deflame.com.)  On a culture-wide basis, who hasn't heard of the "Zone Diet" championed by Dr. Barry Sears?  His numerous books meticulously explain the hormonal disaster spawned by a high-carb diet, and his newest one spells out why you need to balance (not curtail) your intake of various fats.

None of this is to say that more physical activity isn't important.  Activity and motion are indispensable to good health.  I'm not going to bore you with all the diet and exercise nagging you've heard forever. But I will say this: Exercise and diet are different aspects of health.  You shouldn't concentrate on one, thinking that you can then ignore the other.