Asymmetrical Information

Vegetarian n. Derived from an old Indian word meaning 'lousy hunter' =);}

Doesn't white rice -- the Japanese staple food -- have a high glycemic index? That is, the stomach breaks down white rice quickly, just like it does to potatoes, bread, and cane sugar. Blood sugar goes up quickly, then down quickly. This leaves the eater hungry again.

More to the point, there is no correlation between BMI (per se) and health. Read the excellent article by Paul Campos in the New Republic, http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030113&s=campos011303.

Outside of..Eggs, Bread, rice, corn, and potatoes, the rest of my diet consists entirely on meat. I like, refuse to eat dinner without some sort of meat in it, even if it is just meat sauce. Give me Meat, or give me Death!

I'm sorry but a strict vegetarian diet would not work for me. I'd stick with it for a while and then go crazy and eat a huge pepperoni pizza and fall totally off the wagon and gain more than I ever had lost.

My ancestors did not spend 20 million years clawing their way to the top of the food chain so I could eat like a rabbit.

Vegetarians don't live longer...it just SEEMS longer.

"But most of the Plains tribes lived exclusively on meat, and so except for two or three weeks a year did the mountain men."

"Eight pounds [of buffalo meat] a day was standard ration for Hudson's Bay Company employees, but when meat was plentiful a man might eat eight pounds for dinner, then wake a few hours later, build up the fire, and eat as much more." "... melted fat ... was gulped by the pint."

"...the delight of an Indian gourmet was to eat his way down a ten-foot length of raw, warm, perhaps still quivering gut ... [while he] squeezes out the gut's contents just ahead of his teeth."

From "Across the Wide Missouri" by Bernard DeVoto, 1947, pp41-3, a history of the fur trade in Wyoming and Montana in the 1830's. Look at the included illustrations made by Miller, Bodmer, and Catlin, who accompanied the expeditions and did them from life. The Indians and mountain men are all skinny little guys.

Paul says: The Indians and mountain men are all skinny little guys.

Well, of course they were; they're all on the Atkins diet!

Seriously, they'd be little guys because they were malnourished in childhood. And they were getting a lot of exercise in the field (and probably ate a lot less when they were back in town). And I don't think (Amer)Indians, mountain men, or Hudson Bay employees were noted for their longevity.

Not that I see myself going vegetarian, either. One of Larry Niven's Kzin characters says, "How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?" Clearly our evoutionary duty is to continue to test ourselves by sneaking up on, uh, contented cows. Or lamb chops.

Any diet justification for the average SUV-driving, once-weekly-exercising American based on the diet of men engaged in back-breaking, soul-killing labor is unreliable. Really, Americans need to start looking at food intake and lifestyle choices as being interrelated with health and body shape.

It's not the Japanese diet. Japanese cuisine has lots of fattening deep fried food, and alcohol intake is also much higher over there. When I moved to the US from Japan I found there were two factors that contributed to my immediate 30-lb. weight gain: the size of the servings at restaurants and in homes (there seem to be two sizes: huge and super-duper), and the fact that to get anywhere in NJ you have to get into a car (no walking).

I was diagnosed diabetic a year ago and also was very overweight. My extensive readings since and personal experience before and since shows IMHO

1). Type of diet is not that important. Atkins and related diets work
2). vegetarian high carb diets work too.

Starches, sugars, fats are not the cause of the obesity epidemic. Eating too much refined foods, too many total calories and getting too little exercise is the problem. Bring them into balance by whatever means is comfortable for you weill work.

Everything I have read says a high fat and meat diet will work and is healthy enough, provided you get some vegetable / fruit as well. So will a high (non refined) carb diet. So will the mediterranean diet. I believe it ultimately comes down to balance in diet and behavior.

There is no magic about it, no one 'right' or 'wrong' way, no simplistic cause.

however, you sell more books by being simple and controversial about things.

I have to wonder if the Japanese eat that way of necessity. We have an exchange student from Japan this year, and she dropped their diet like a live hand grenade. This is a pasta and hamburger girl.

I only ate sushi once, so I'm not too reliable here, but I felt incredibly full after around 3 (I think it was eel) rolls. Ball of rice surrounded by seaweed with a slice of eel on top. Felt really really full--- for about 45 minutes. Then I was hungry again. Of course, I could have just been slightly put off by eating eel.

Jane,
Did you see Jim Henley's post right above his original link? Kinda funny, looks like some sort of old fashioned google bomb.

http://www.highclearing.com/uoarchives/week_2003_01_05.html#004137

I've read that meat should be used as a condiment, but only if the main dishes are ketchup, mustard, and sauerkraut.

Mark S: ...and the fact that to get anywhere in NJ you have to get into a car (no walking).

Hmm, has anyone done a study looking at the distance the average New Yorker (or maybe I should say Manhattanite) walks, and their average BMI?

Come to think of it, most of those chic Upper East Side restaurants can't offer huge servings, because the tables themselves are only 9" in diameter...

Lauren: I have to wonder if the Japanese eat that way of necessity.

I know rice farming is subsidized in Japan, and meat is very expensive (high import tariffs?). And the Japanese spend a higher percentage of their income on food than we do.

My impression is that the taxes and other policies which cause this were instituted to subsidize Japanese farmers, not to control consumers' diets. But please don't mention these taxes to Tom Daschle, because the logical conclusion is to tax meat heavily and use the money to buy prescription drugs for seniors! Augh!

I think the issue isn't so much that food is the problem, it's the fat and the general other health prblems with obesity. Figure out a way to get rid of fat; cheap and easy liposuction? Small nano-bots that pulsate and get you all buffed up no matter what you eat? Yeah, that'd be nice.

I have a cousin whose husband became diabetic. Both his parents ended up as type II(adult-onset) diabetics who ended up having to take insulin anyway, so he was motivated to change. He lost weight, became more active, and was able to reverse his condition. He was very motivated, as one of his first symptoms was problems with his eyesight. He thought one factor leading to his diabetes was going to bed every night with a very full stomach, which gave him a comfortable feeling before going to sleep. It may be possible that this was a survival trait in prehistoric times, as this meant our ancestors who went to sleep after a meal at night had the energy reserves to go out and catch another bison/ibex/deer/etc. for the next day's meal.

If I understand correctly primates brains did not really develop until they became carnivores, and then it happened relatively rapidly, in less than a million years.

So although vegetarians can more or less get away with it, they owe any brains they have to slobbering fat devouring ape-men. Thus looking down one's nose at meat eating is truly hypocritical.

Through a friend, I once got invited to a fancy English country home, where the owner kept 5000 acres for "shooting," and of course wouldn't even let his gamekeeper hunt. He asked me how the "shooting" was in New Mexico and when I told him it was mainly done by poor people for food (maybe a slight exaggeration), he nearly tossed his cookies.

Les

"I remember watching a documentary on a Japanese country in business school ..."

Gotta brush up on my geography. The only Japanese country I know is Japan :-) Onto the subject of diet ... I'm in the best shape I've been in for 20 years. I have a twenty-minute run covering two to three miles almost every day. My waist has shrunk to 32 inches, the same as I was when I graduated high school. However, since I am 5 foot 10 and weigh 190 pounds, the absurd tables distributed to the media by quacks rate me as 30 to 40 pounds overweight. There is a major, major epidemic of junk science that is more worrisome than any epidemic of obesity.

CJ,

Admittedly, BMI tables fall apart for those with above average muscularity and below average body fat. But you are at the extreme GOOD end of the scale.

The vast majority of us do not fall in that range so BMI tables are a good measure.

Bob

Les Hale writes: "If I understand correctly primates brains did not really develop until they became carnivores, and then it happened relatively rapidly, in less than a million years."

That might be true, but according to Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, *civilization* as we know it (for better or for worse) didn't get started until agriculture. With growing crops came sedentary jobs like scholars and priests and government officials. Societies based exclusively on hunting (Native Americans, Australian aborigines) never developed science or advanced technology or written language (or big government or organized religion).

BMI has fascinated me since I've learned of it. It gives a much broader range for "normal" weight, but it still sticks to the lower end of the scale. Compare the "normal" weight ranges for my height with BMI (101-136) to the previous standard normal range (105-115). There's more room for error now, so I guess things are getting better...

BMI is pretty worthless; I know people who would be pretty heavy at "normal" BMI's, and I know that the last time I dropped below a 25 BMI I was told to gain weight because I looked sickly. It's a good way to get people to pay attention when they're really obese, but 25-26 BMI happens to be a good fit for me (never mind that I hover more around 29 post-holiday).

My wife at 170 lbs would be at a MUCH higher body fat (and health risk) than I would at 185, but that's a 25 BMI for both of us. Low BMI's aren't impossible, but they do ignore both frame size and sex.

BMI is a quick-and-dirty first approximation, useful only in a sort of triage. If you find a doctor who says your BMI is high or low, if he then goes straight to diet instructions find another doctor.

"Magic" Johnson had a BMI in the "obese" range, Marilyn Monroe had a BMI in the "needs to put on weight" range.

Diet, weight, obesity, genetics, life history --- all part of complex system not well understood. As with most such subjects (politics and economics are two others), complexity leaves the way open for observers to stir a liberal dose of their own biases into their assertions about the "truth". If I were to do the same, I would conclude that a life-long diet heavy with meat, with many meals of such colossal proportions as to startle onlookers, is a formula for a slim profile. The same would hold true for nearly every member of my father's family. If I were to look about me with a slight bit of objectivity, I would notice that my father's family isn't like other families, and be led to the conclusion that diet has almost nothing to do with body weight and profile - it has to be genetic. Wisely, I discount my personal experience as a single data point, that of my family as too narrow to be instructive.

Turning instead to readily available published information, I learn that obesity has a high correlation with a number of factors other than how much and what one puts in one's mouth, including low birth weight, parental obesity (with no clear evidence linking this exclusively either to genetics or environment), and patterns of eating. "Restrained eating" (which seems a reasonable characterization of Jane's recommendation) is seen as a risk factor for subsequent overeating --- alternating between restrained eating and overeating is less healthy than maintaining a fairly constant level of food intake. In other words, the observation that how much and what one eats has something to do with what one weighs is probably true, in a limited way, complicated by other factors. Try to push beyond such broad notions and you quickly slide into assertions which need the preface of "in the personal opinion of a non-expert".

Now excuse me while I slim down on a porkchop.

I know that BMI doesn't work at the extremes. But here's the thing: less than 1% of the adult population, according to my weight loss expert, has sufficient muscle mass to distort the calculations. It is absolutely true that if you're buff, tall, and have a biggish frame (or some combination thereof), BMI will tell you you're fat. If you're tall and have a small frame, like me, it will tell you you're on the skinny side. But for the majority of the population who is not, physically, a statistical outlier, BMI will tell you you're too fat when -- you're too fat. A lot of men, especially, define the leanness required to have a low BMI as "unreasonable", because unlike women, they tend to think of carrying an extra 10-15 pounds as within normal range, even though it's associated with higher mortality. (Not a lot higher, when you control for confounding variables, but some).

Sorry, but your comments on the Japanese diet are utterly wrong. There aren't as many obese people here (I live in Japan), but there are more all the time.

Japanese people love fried food and beer, and they eat meat at pretty much every meal.

They aren't as fat as Americans, but they're trying real hard.

Another factor to consider is the cost of food. My dad is 70 years old, and his observation is that the cost of food is coming down all the time. The same process is going on in Japan, but at a slower rate.

Daryl McCullogh correctly posts that we are indebted to our agricultural as well as hunting background.

This gives us the marvelous advantage of being able to enjoy both heritages, although sometimes we go astray.

As Wolgang Puck said about getting McDonald's back on track, "better meat and better bread."

Two things:

1. Can extramuscular also be applied when you have broad shoulders ? I have, as I was swimming when I was young ( 5 days a week, every second weekend competitions in east german swimming centers ), but I wouldn´t say I am EXTRA-muscular, just normal given my BROAD shoulders.

2. Dr. Strunz, a german fitness guru ( who started running at the age of 55, and now belongs to the world elite in triathlon at his age group ) says that with a BMI of 25-27 you have the best shot at becoming exceptionally old.

My 2 cents

Pedro

They are getting fatter, but not at the rate Americans are, partly because, as one person pointed out, the cost of food is going down. But while they love fried foods, their portions are smaller, and their diet overall has a much lower fat content, and somewhat lower glycemic index, than ours. (Rice is a staple, but sugar is much less common.)

HHmmm. With Healthier food produced at cheaper costs using bio engineering, will that average weight of a American begin to come down with time?

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