It's Not the Donut, It's You!

The Science 2.0 website has an article by Greg Critser about the current war on obesity. It is an interesting approach to a difficult problem. How do we get Americans to stop eating so much sugar and junk food and exercising more? And the answer, according to the researchers that Critser talked to, is, "We don't." Slowly, these heretics in the field of nutritional science are saying that, in spite of the huge push in the last ten years about eating healthy and exercising, we haven't made a significant dent in obesity. Did we really think that outlawing the Big Gulp was going to make us all skinny? That's just stupid (or legislative, but I'm being redundant). These new researchers are "slowly and painstakingly shifting their inquiry to a more basic issue: homeostasis--the body’s innate capacities to recover from any kind of disturbance--and how we can strengthen those balancing mechanisms."  

Theirs is not a difficult premise to understand. Consider: The human phenotype--the body our genes and environment dictate--has been shaped by evolution to adapt, to bend and flex and return to balance when confronted with a challenge, be it a Big Gulp or bad air. You eat a huge hit of sugar, your body pumps out insulin to make it possible for your cells to use it and return to balance. It’s an intricate, elegant system that worked just fine until we engineered an environment that made sugar virtually free and almost everywhere present. Then the system crashed, and we got our intertwined epidemics of obesity and diabetes.     

So, the focus is on strengthening those balancing mechanisms in the body to counteract the bad stuff that comes in.   One such study, by a renowned diabetes researcher in Sweden involved adding a rye grain mix to type 2 diabetic's food in the evening, then having a traditional (non heart healthy) meal the next morning for breakfast (ham, eggs, bacon, etc.). In the study, the group fed the rye mixture handled the breakfast the way any normal non-diabetic would. Those not fed the rye mix beforehand had insulin and blood sugar responses that were impaired and diseased.   

“We don’t know why it works,” Inger Bjorck says. “But we have some idea. We think it involves some kind of gastric memory, maybe driven by fermentation in the gut, that we, as humans, once possessed, but which we lost when we began consuming our modern wheat mono-culture.”   

This approach is not going to sit well with the billion dollar "healthy lifestyle" industry. But in the long run, it may have more impact than telling people to change what they've been doing for forty years.  On the researchers' side is a nearly universally held vision of what health means:  

As articulated by one of its earliest 20th century proponents, the brilliant Johns Hopkins' pioneer Henry Sigerest, health “is not just the absence of disease. It is something positive, a joyful attitude to life, and a cheerful acceptance of the responsibilities that life puts upon the individual... A healthy individual is a man who is well balanced bodily and mentally, and well adjusted to his physical and social environment."   

There aren't a lot of "joyful attitudes to life" that I hear about when I'm preached to about why I'm overweight.  Mostly it's more the "Bad dog!" finger pointing. "Why can't you be more like us - skinny and in shape? What's wrong with you?" 

Gee, I wonder why the "healthy lifestyle" people are not having much success, other than in making money.