"Simple" Thermodynamics and "Common Sense"

David Berreby – The Obesity Era: (via)

… Moral panic about the depravity of the heavy has seeped into many aspects of life, confusing even the erudite. Earlier this month, for example, the American evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller expressed the zeitgeist in this tweet: ‘Dear obese PhD applicants: if you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.’ Businesses are moving to profit on the supposed weaknesses of their customers. Meanwhile, governments no longer presume that their citizens know what they are doing when they take up a menu or a shopping cart. Yesterday’s fringe notions are becoming today’s rules for living — such as New York City’s recent attempt to ban large-size cups for sugary soft drinks, or Denmark’s short-lived tax surcharge on foods that contain more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat, or Samoa Air’s 2013 ticket policy, in which a passenger’s fare is based on his weight because: ‘You are the master of your air ‘fair’, you decide how much (or how little) your ticket will cost.’

… As the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, recently put it, defending his proposed ban on large cups for sugary drinks: ‘If you want to lose weight, don’t eat. This is not medicine, it’s thermodynamics. If you take in more than you use, you store it.’ (Got that? It’s not complicated medicine, it’s simple physics, the most sciencey science of all.)

Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain. Which means, of course, that they think at least some of the official focus on personal conduct is a waste of time and money. …

It is like the question "Why are some subway cars full of people?" and the answer "Because more people entered the subway cars than left it."

Don't trust any "common sense" explanations with regards to nutrition or health. I now lost 12 kilograms weight in the four month since April 2013. Yes, I eat less – but more importantly I eat no dairy, I eat no cereal grains, I radically reduced the consumption of seed oils and PUFAs (poly unsaturated fatty acids) and I now radically reduced the consumption of sucrose ("sugar") and fructose (to the point that I at the moment even don't eat the supposedly "healthy" fruits). I eat saturated fats from coconut fat, I eat meat, I eat potatoes (preferentially fried) and I eat salad. So fuck you very much Mr. Bloomberg, and fuck you very much Mr. evolutionary psychologist – since when do have animals have to have "willpower" to stay non-obese?

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

I say, it is more and more seed oil (supposedly "healthy"), with its high content of PUFAs (as well supposedly "healthy") that is making animals obese (including the human animals).