The Georgia Children’s Health Alliance is running an ad campaign against childhood obesity called Strong4Life, which recently ignited a firestorm of controversy.
The print ads depict glum-looking overweight kids with captions like "He has his father's eyes, his laugh, and maybe even his diabetes," "Fat kids become fat adults," and "Fat prevention begins at home. And the buffet line."
And the videos in the ad campaign are equally stark and in-your-face, like this one:
"Horrible! As a 42 year old woman who struggled with anorexia as a teen and now a mother of a 6 year old girl who is taller and thicker than the average children her age and gets picked on by all ages including adults with inappropriate comments you have no idea obviously of the damage this will do with the ad. You will hurt more than you help. Self esteem is built with smiles and no pointing."
Others say that the ad campaign fails to offer any solutions -- other than to shame kids into losing weight.
But the Strong4Life campaign has responded with cold, hard statistics. Children are getting fatter -- and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of American kids today are overweight or obese. Georgia ranks second in the U.S. for childhood obesity, with over 1 million overweight kids.
The organization’s research found that 50 percent of people surveyed didn’t recognize childhood obesity as a problem. What’s more, 75 percent of parents with overweight kids didn’t acknowledge their child as having a weight issue.
I agree that an awareness campaign isn't enough -- pointing out a problem does no good without offering concrete solutions. But as a first step, perhaps a cold splash of water in the face is exactly what's needed here. After all, the whole "self esteem is built with smiles" thing clearly isn't working.
Then again, without parents injecting their kids with mega-doses of self-esteem, we'd be bereft of awesome reality shows that feature pint-sized beauty queens from Georgia:
The video above is kind of scary-awesome. (Emphasis on "scary.") My favorite line: "A dolla makes me holla, honey-boo-boo!"
What say you? Are these ads unduly harsh and cruel? Or just what the doctor ordered?
Perforated-burger enthusiast Martin Kessman is suing his local White Castle because the fast food joint has allegedly failed to provide seats large enough to accommodate his girth.
Is it just me, or is he slouching?
“As I looked around the restaurant, I saw that there were no tables and chairs that could accommodate a person that merely wanted to sit down and eat his meal,” Kessman wrote [to White Castle's corporate headquarters]...
White Castle replied with three “very condescending letters” -- and an offer that added insult to injury. “In each letter was a coupon for three free hamburgers -- but the cheese was extra!” according to a lawsuit Kessman filed last week in Manhattan federal court.
This made me want to reach into the Internet and throttle the writer for: (1) poor reading comprehension skills, (2) sloppy reporting, and (3) irresponsibly handing people a "science-based" excuse for ignoring a potentially life-threatening health problem.
Let's be perfectly clear: The study referenced in the tweet DOES NOT SAY THAT BEING FAT IS HEALTHY.
The real story? Canadian researchers looked at whether people with high Body Mass Index (BMI) scores are uniformly at high risk for an early death. To test this, they looked at a bunch of people they classified as "obese" BASED ON THE SUBJECTS' BMI SCORES, ranked their health according to the Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS), and compared mortality rates. A subject with an EOSS score of 0 was one who showed no problematic symptoms, while a person with a score of 4 (the highest possible score) was one with severe chronic diseases and disabilities.
This is not rocket science, folks. A high BMI tells you absolutely nothing about the state of a person's body composition or health. A muscle-bound person with little body fat might have a very high BMI and a flabby "skinny fat" smoker might have a "normal" one, but it doesn't mean that the former is obese any more than it means that Michael Jackson was a super-healthy fella. Body mass should not be mistaken for body fat. And while the researchers (unfortunately) used "high BMI" interchangeably with "obesity," let's be real: When most people think about obesity, the dictionary definition comes to mind -- and it's all about "excessive accumulation and storage of fat in the body."
Take elite CrossFit firebreather Rob Orlando. His BMI is above 29, which puts him in borderline "obese" territory. But does he look fat to you? Would you use the word "obese" to describe him?
Let's face it: BMIs are completely useless as an indicator of health. And in fact, this is precisely what the Canadian researchers were seeking to show. As a recent CNN article pointed out, "[t]he main question was whether BMI alone could determine who dies early, said Dr. Arya Sharma, the lead author [of the study]." Unsurprisingly, the answer was "no." (Duh.)
You wouldn't know it from the articles written about the study, though. SF Weekly's article, for example, looks like this:
That's right: "[Y]ou can have your cake, eat it, and, um, have some more."
And this wasn't an outlier. Other "respectable" publications wrote headlines like:
Similarly, Facebook and Twitter lit up with further distortions of the study's conclusions:
No one's going to spend even a minute on Google to track down the original study. They're not going to hear that BMIs are bunk. But they will take away the message that "being fat can be GOOD for you" -- so why worry?
McDonald's announced today that it's making changes to Happy Meals by: (1) adding a serving of fruit or vegetables, and (2) subtracting 1.3 ounces of French fries from the existing portion size. By next spring, all 14,000 McDonald's restaurants in the U.S. will feature the new "healthier" Happy Meals.
The fast food chain will continue to serve apple slices (minus the caramel sauce that currently accompanies them in Happy Meals), but plans to include carrots, raisins, pineapple slices and mandarin oranges in the rotation.
As for the fries, why not cut them out entirely? Because "children and parents rebelled."
"People come to McDonald's and, first of all, they want the choice and the control to be theirs, but their expectation of a Happy Meal does include a fry," said Jan Fields, president of McDonald's USA. "When we did it without fries, there was a huge disappointment factor."
"Experts" have declared that McDonald's is moving in the right direction:
Geeta Maker-Clark, a family physician at NorthShore University HealthSystem, described the changes as "really good steps."
"I applaud any move toward including more whole food into a heavily processed meal," she said. "Bringing a whole food into it shifts the pendulum toward something more healthy, and I applaud the decreased portion sizes."
My prediction? These changes won't make a dent in childhood obesity.
Kids'll continue to gobble up the McNuggets they fish out of their Happy Meals. They won't miss the 1.3 ounces of fries that McDonald's is taking out 'cause they'll just grab more from their parents' large order of fries. Then, they'll suck down the Coke that came with their Happy Meal, play with the crappy little toy that came with their food, and THROW AWAY THE TINY PACKET OF CARROTS.
Let's get real: People who regularly feed their kids at McDonald's aren't the type of parents who are super-concerned about making sure their offspring finish a few carrot sticks. Don't believe me? McDonald's has been offering apple slices with their Happy Meals since 2006, but "only 11% of kids meals are ordered with apples." And of those 11 percent, I wonder how many packages of apple slices are left untouched.
If fighting childhood obesity was truly McDonald's aim, it'd get rid of the sodas. But that's not what the chain is after. As the L.A. Times put it, "[t]he business strategy for McDonald's is to make parents feel less guilty about feeding fast food to their children, so they'll become more frequent customers." And viewed through that lens, this move is likely to be a rousing success -- for McDonald's.
Tired of my harangues about the importance of sleep? Too bad. Suck it up.
Tonight, let’s look at what happens once you drift off into slumberland, and dive in a little deeper into why it’s so damaging to your health (and fitness goals) when you don’t get enough shut-eye.
Typically, over the course of a night, your body and brain goes through a series of anywhere from four to seven sleep cycles. If uninterrupted, each cycle takes about 90 to 110 minutes, and consists of several distinct stages:
Stage 1: This initial stage of light sleep (which occurs only when you go from a conscious state to an unconscious one) lasts about 5 or 10 minutes, during which you drift in and out of sleep. Your muscles relax (except when your whole body twitches and you get that sudden “OH CRAP, I’M FALLING!” sensation -- it's called hypnic myclonia, by the way) and your eye movements slow down. You can be awakened pretty easily during Stage 1 sleep; when that occurs, you usually don’t recognize that you fell asleep at all.
Stage 2: In this second stage of the sleep cycle, which lasts for a half-hour or so, you’re still in light sleep, but your body temperature drops a bit. Also, your eye movements, respiration, heart rate and brain waves slow considerably – interrupted by just a few occasional bursts of rapid brain waves. Fully half of your total sleep time is spent in Stage 2 sleep, which is also called “spindle sleep” because of the spikes (or spindles) in brain activity. These spindles, incidentally, are critical to the brain’s ability to process information.
Stage 3: When you enter Stage 3 (some experts separate this into two stages – 3 and 4 – but for our purposes, let’s just lump ‘em together), you’re in deep sleep. Your brain begins producing much slower, high-amplitude “delta” waves. When you’re in deep sleep, there’s basically no eye movement or muscle activity. (This is also the time when some kids experience sleepwalking or bedwetting.) It’s very difficult to be awakened from deep sleep – but if you manage to be roused, you’ll likely feel disoriented and out-of-sorts for a while.
REM Sleep: Rapid eye movement distinguishes REM sleep from the other stages. But it’s not just your eyes that move faster -- during this period, your heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, and breathing becomes rapid, irregular and shallow. Brain waves during REM sleep increase to levels similar to those during regular waking hours, and most of your dreaming occurs during this stage.
Now: What happens if your sleep is interrupted, or you don’t get enough sleep?
If you’re awakened -- by noise, light, your own snoring, your alarm clock -- and you go back to sleep, you actually start over again at square one: Stage 1 sleep. If this happens within the first few minutes of sleeping, no harm, no foul; after all, your head just hit the pillow a few minutes ago. But if some disturbance awakens you while you’re in Stage 2 sleep or beyond, you’ve just deprived yourself of some valuable Stage 3 and REM sleep.
The same goes for inadequate sleep. Go to sleep too late or wake up too early, and you’re missing out on the full benefits of a full night’s rest -- and exposing your mind and body to a host of risks.
What risks, you ask?
First and foremost, lack of sleep can lead to obesity, diabetes and premature aging.
In laboratory studies of healthy young adults submitted to recurrent partial sleep restriction, marked alterations in glucose metabolism including decreased glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity have been demonstrated. The neuroendocrine regulation of appetite was also affected as the levels of the anorexigenic hormone leptin were decreased, whereas the levels of the orexigenic factor ghrelin were increased. Importantly, these neuroendocrine abnormalities were correlated with increased hunger and appetite, which may lead to overeating and weight gain. Consistent with these laboratory findings, a growing body of epidemiological evidence supports an association between short sleep duration and the risk for obesity and diabetes.
In other words, your metabolism is wrecked and your appetite goes haywire.
Sleep deprivation mimics many elements of the aging process. One could make the argument that how you feel when you are sleep deprived is likely how you will feel if you are both diabetic and old (sleep deprivation dramatically impacts insulin sensitivity). Improved sleep time and quality will help you: Lean out, avoid depression, autoimmunity, heart disease... It might even help you be a better athlete.
Besides making us miserable, lack of sleep appears to predispose to obesity and diabetes, and probably sets us up for the Big Sleep down the line. I can't say I'm surprised, given how awful I feel after even one night of six hour sleep. I feel best after 9 hours, and I probably average about 8.5. Does it cut into my free time? Sure. But it's worth it to me, because it allows me to enjoy my day much more.
Sleep deprivation also impairs your body’s ability to recover from your crazy metcon beatdowns. According to U.C. San Diego study, lack of sleep results in reduced levels of Interleukin-6 (IL-6) -- a cytokine that triggers an immune response to trauma -- including normal microtraumas from exercise.
Even if you like to pride yourself on being a lunkhead who cares not a whit about your brainpower or emotional well-being, think about this: REM sleep is the period when your brain transfers the muscle movements you learn from your short-term memory into your long-term memory. Your hippocampus downloads information to your neo-cortex so that you can recall -- among other things -- how to perform physical skills. In other words, don’t waste your time trying to perfect your snatch technique if you’re not going to get enough sleep.
Check out this handy infographic for more about the risks of sleep interruption and deprivation:
(Click the image above for the full picture.)
The upshot? Go to bed early. Try to wake up without using your alarm clock, or use an alarm that'll gently rouse you rather than jolting you awake. (Gadget hounds: Try the Lark or Zeo.) Worried you won't wake up in time for your early morning meeting or workout? THEN GO TO BED EARLIER. Make sure you keep your room pitch-black -- no nightlights, no glowing LCD displays on your cell phone, clock, DVD player. Cover 'em up if that's what it takes. Get blackout curtains. The light's bad for you and contributes to you getting fatter. And no, I’m not kidding.
I know I’m guilty of not always often practicing what I preach. (I'm still awake right now, after all.) I recognize that I'm skating on the edge of being chronically sleep deprived. But I want to turn that around. Part of why I wrote this post was to convince myself to get my butt into bed earlier.
It may surprise you to learn that PepsiCo, the largest food-and-beverage company in the U.S., doesn’t just make cola. Eighteen of its brands, including Tropicana, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, are billion-dollar businesses. And collectively, these brands are responsible for many of the ultra-processed, insanely-sugary snack foods that are killing us. Plainly put, PepsiCo is making people fat and sick.
But according to this week's New Yorker, PepsiCo’s CEO, Indra Nooyi, wants the company to help battle the obesity epidemic, and to “lead the fight in the public health realm.” How? By selling "healthy," “scientifically advantaged” snacks that are “good for you."
“It’s not a question of selling less,” Nooyi has said. “It’s a question of selling the right stuff.”
Argument No. 1:"We will note that Fred Flintstone, patriarch of the modern stone age family, wasn't exactly trim."
Wait -- what? That's a joke? Aren't jokes supposed to be funny? Besides, the Flintstones ate like crap. Hit me with the real stuff.
Argument No. 2:"Forsaking all dairy and bread for nuts and berries to recreate a body that flourished when middle age meant 15 years old just doesn't make sense to us."
That hoary myth again? Read this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. What else have you got?
Argument No. 3:"While we may not have biologically evolved all that much, our intellectual development has brought us a greater scientific understanding of the nutrients our bodies need to be healthy."
Oh, good. Although I kind of wish you'd actually clued us in on the "greater scientific understanding" that's led to significantly better health outcomes across Western civilization, perhaps I'm quibbling. I'm SO glad that Type II diabetes, autoimmune disorders and metabolic syndrome are a thing of the past, and that obesity rates have plummeted worldwide. Wait -- what? They haven't? We're fatter and sicker than ever? Hmm. That's weird -- especially with all that mysteriously unspecified "scientific understanding" and all.
Argument No. 4:"10,000 years ago, food was pure nourishment, a necessity and nothing more. We now have advanced to a place where eating is more than just consumption: food is culture, history, art, and science, all on one plate. Pomegranates are Pom Wonderful!"
WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Are you saying that avoiding processed breakfast cereals, Pop-Tarts and Pizza Hut's Stuffed Crust Pizza in favor of real, whole foods is an affront to art and history, and threatens our very cultural fabric? Because if so, I'm pretty sure you're the bullshit artist.
Also? What you said about Pom Wonderful MAKES NO SENSE. Did anyone even proofread this thing? How did a piece that says absolutely nothing -- other than "the Paleo Diet is clearly bullshit because, well...it sounds kinda weird to me" -- get published by a prominent food periodical?
My wife then interjected with an even better question -- this one, posed to me:
The results of the study were published today in Pediatrics, and in addition to other stats, researchers found that mothers with children under 5 years old on average consume 368 more calories per day than women who don't have kids.
The researchers are laser-focused on "calories and saturated fat" as the major drivers of obesity. I think they're wrong, but that's besides the point.
What really dismays me is the widespread acceptance of parenthood as a valid excuse to be unhealthy.
Sheri Lee Schearer, 34, says the results reflect her life with a 5-month-old son. Before, when she worked as a paralegal, she had time to make a spinach salad or go out for one. Now, as a stay-at-home mom in southern New Jersey, she grabs whatever is easiest and quickest.
"I often find that his needs come before mine," she said. "Do I get to the gym? No. Do I eat always healthy? No."
(Wha--? Did I miss something? When did making a FRIGGIN' SPINACH SALAD become a complex and time-consuming task?)
“I think parents make sacrifices to their own detriment for their kids,” says Lori Francis, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of Biobehavioral Health at The Pennsylvania State University.
As a nutrition researcher and the mother of a 2-year-old, Francis says she felt her own life echoed in the study’s results. “I have a very picky eater, so I go through all kinds of acrobatics just to get him to eat, and what he doesn’t eat, I’m eating, or my husband’s eating,” she says.
Put another way, these folks claim they're getting fat because their schedules make it impossible for them to exercise or prepare halfway-healthy meals. And there's no way they can stop themselves from devouring the highly-processed leftover crap that their kids refuse to eat. Also? They're doing this as a "sacrifice" for their children. Such martyrs!
I call bullshit. I just don't buy the argument that becoming a parent means you get a free pass to Baskin Robbins and a permanent spot on the couch.
Patterson points out that "Type 2 diabetes historically didn't exist." It popped onto the medical scene "only 70 or 80 years ago," driven by the explosive rise of obesity and accumulation of abdominal fat in "Westernized" populations. "That fat induces changes in our receptors that cells have for insulin. Basically, it makes them numb to the effect of insulin."
While working at the Canadian Combat Surgical Hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Patterson noticed that "[t]he Afghan soldiers, police and civilians he treated in Kandahar had radically different bodies from those of the Canadians he took care of back home."
"Typical Afghan civilians and soldiers would have been 140 pounds or so as adults. And when we operated on them, what we were aware of was the absence of any fat or any adipose tissue underneath the skin," Patterson says. "Of course, when we operated on Canadians or Americans or Europeans, what was normal was to have most of the organs encased in fat. It had a visceral potency to it when you could see it directly there."
But while Afghans aren't (yet) as prone to suffering the diseases of Western civilization, another traditional hunter-gatherer society is quickly joining the ranks of the metabolically deranged:
Patterson explains that in his Canadian practice, where he takes care of indigenous populations near the Arctic Circle, there is a marked increase in the number of diabetic patients he sees.
"The traditional Inuit culture of relentless motion and a traditional diet consisting mainly of caribou, Arctic char, whale and seal has been abandoned over this period of time for Kentucky Fried Chicken and processed food and living a life very similar to ours," he says. "[They're] spending a lot of time in front of a glowing screen."
In 1977, Senator George McGovern's Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs issued its "Dietary Goals for the United States" -- the country's first set of government-issued nutritional guidelines. The report recommended that Americans drastically cut their intake of fat -- and especially saturated fat. And guess what? We complied.
As this infographic shows, Americans' consumption of red meat -- beef, specifically -- has gone way, way down since the mid-1970s. In its place, we've increasingly turned to the "healthy" white meat of chickens. Also? Tons and tons of "heart-healthy" low-fat, low-calorie food products.
In a 1997 report entitled "Divergent Trends in Obesity and Fat Intake Patterns: The American Paradox," researchers noted that "[i]t appears that efforts to promote the low-calorie and low-fat food products have been highly successful," but this decrease in dietary fat consumption did "not appear to have prevented the progression of obesity in the population."
For the past decade, public-health authorities have tried to explain the obesity epidemic in the United States and elsewhere. In 1960, government researchers began surveying Americans about their health and nutrition status... According to these surveys, through the 1960s and early 1970s, 12-14 percent of Americans were obese. This figure rose by 8 percent in the 1980s and early 1990s, and another 10 percent by the turn of this century.
Who says all the nutrition information in glossy magazines is total bullshit? (Okay, besides me.)
Fine. I'll concede that occasionally, the popular press hits the nail on the head. And maybe -- just maybe -- they're getting it right a little more often these days. The latest issue of Men's Journal features an article entitled "Everything You Know About Nutrition Is Wrong," and discusses Gary Taubes' well-supported argument that it's our intake of carbs, not calories, that makes us fat:
During the past several years, conventional dietary wisdom — skimp on fat, count calories — has started to crumble, thanks largely to a one-man wrecking crew named Gary Taubes. In his latest book, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, Taubes argues that calories and fat aren’t to blame for the world’s increasing girth and high incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. He contends that exercise, while a healthy habit, won’t help with weight loss, and that most Americans would benefit from eating more red meat and eggs because animal proteins and saturated fat don’t cause cardiovascular disease and weight gain: Simple sugars and carbohydrates do.
More women are binge drinking, saying they downed five or more drinks at a single occasion in the past month, and fewer are being screened for cervical cancer. Over all, more women are obese, diabetic and hypertensive than just a few years ago, and more are testing positive for chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease linked to infertility.
In other words, women are getting to be just as drunk, fat, and STD-ridden as men.
Taubes' inaugural post is devoted to debunking the conventional "wisdom" (quotation marks = irony) on why people get fat. Little in the post is new to careful readers of "Good Calories, Bad Calories," but it's great to see that Taubes'll be penning short(er) pieces focusing on particular subtopics in the area of nutrition.
Taubes' first blog entry is well worth reading -- especially if you're still convinced that obesity is caused by overeating and under-exercising. He tears down this particular argument, but his larger point is this: The conventional wisdom is wrong -- but why aren't more people questioning it?
What’s been needed (and still is) was for someone (a reasonably smart 14-year-old would suffice) to ask the obvious questions and then insist on intelligent answers. Here’s how such a dialog might go:
The experts: Obesity is caused by over-eating, by consuming more calories than are expended. There’s no getting around the first law of thermodynamics.
Us: But all that law says is that if somebody gets fat, they have to consume more calories then they expend. So why do they do that?
The experts: Because they do.
Us: That’s not a good enough answer.
The experts: Well, maybe they can’t help themselves.
Us: Why can’t they help themselves?
The experts: Because they can’t.
Us: That’s not a good enough answer either.
The experts: Because the food industry makes them do it. There’s so much good food around and it’s so tasty, they can’t help but eat it.
Us: But obviously some of us can, because we don’t all get fat. Why is it only some people can’t help themselves?
The experts: Because they can’t.
Us: Try again.
The experts: Well, it’s complicated.
Us: What do you mean complicated? We thought it was easy. Just this eating-too-much, exercising-too-little, calories-in-calories-out, thermodynamics thing.
The experts: Okay, how about this? [Now quoting from an NIH report published in 2000.] “Obesity is a complex, multifactorial chronic disease that develops from an interaction of genotype and the environment. Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete, but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors.”
Us: So what do all those have to do with eating too much and the laws of thermodynamics?
Experts: They contribute to making fat people overeat.
Us: How do they do that?
The experts: We don’t know. It’s complicated.
Us: Then maybe there’s another way to look at it. Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear -- to you anyway -- to be kind of lazy. We’re compensating for the loss of calories into our fat.
The experts: Yeah, well, maybe. Your guess is as good as ours.
I enjoyed this essay by Kevin Patterson in Maisonneuve, which lends support to Paleo/Primal approaches to nutrition, and also echoes points raised in Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories." (Taubes, by the way, has a new book out next month -- "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" -- his long-awaited follow-up for laymen that focuses less on the science of metabolic pathways and more on practical approaches to weight maintenance.)
The gist of Taubes' argument, which Patterson reinforces: Pre-agricultural societies -- even those that subsisted primarily on dietary fat -- didn't develop diseases of metabolic derangement like diabetes, obesity and cancer until they were introduced to all the crap (read: sugar, refined carbohydrates, etc.) offered by Western civilization.
[W]e talked about diabetes among the Pacific Islanders. I told him that the world’s highest prevalence was in Nauru, west of Samoa. Essentially one huge guano deposit, the island has been strip-mined until every vestige of the traditional fishing and taro economy vanished beneath seacans full of Spam, pornography, beer and television sets. Fifty percent of adults have frank diabetes. Among the oldest, an incredible 78 percent. This in a people who, prior to World War II, were lithe fishermen and farmers among whom the disease was unknown. Rule number one: don’t sell your island out from underneath your own feet.
The same process is underway across the Pacific, where the most acculturated islands have the highest rates of obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes. In 2001 I worked in Saipan, which is American soil in the Northern Marianas. The indigenous Chamorro, numbering just over sixty-two thousand, were in an awful state. The dialysis population, all of whose kidneys had failed due to diabetes, was growing at 18 percent per year—doubling every three and half years. The miracle of compound interest would have half the population on dialysis within a generation or two. (The other half, presumably, would find thriving careers as nephrologists.)
These are the same people Spaniards described as swimming through the ocean like seals to meet their ships, climbing aboard glistening and smiling. Here, and in narratives by other European Pacific explorers, we see a people defined by their incredible capacity for movement—in this instance, through the sea.
Sleep debt has a harmful impact on carbohydrate metabolism and endocrine function. The effects are similar to those seen in normal ageing and, therefore, sleep debt may increase the severity of age-related chronic disorders.
, Taubes argues that calories and fat aren’t to blame for the world’s increasing girth and high incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. He contends that exercise, while a healthy habit, won’t help with weight loss, and that most Americans would benefit from eating more red meat and eggs because animal proteins and saturated fat don’t cause cardiovascular disease and weight gain: Simple sugars and carbohydrates do.
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