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NYT article about obesity stating it's genetic, not lack of willpower
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crzycatlady1 wrote: »
So how do you explain all the people who eat GMO foods and aren't overweight or obese, and are in good health?
Also, can you post links to the studies you're referring to so we can take a look at them thanks!
I don't believe it affects everyone, as I do believe genetics are involved as well. Here are some articles on the studies if you want to read up on it:
prevention.com/food/healthy-eating-tips/gmo-foods-linked-weight-gain
naturalsociety.com/how-gmo-foods-feed-junk-food-profits-not-the-world/
sciencenordic.com/growing-fatter-gm-diet
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3133759/
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this idea-my family tree is full of overweight /obese/disease, especially type 2 diabetes, but I'm sitting at a bmi of around 21, no longer a prediabetic, am in excellent health and I eat GMO foods daily. So I just can't understand the idea of GMOs causing someone to gain weight, as long as they're eating at the correct calorie intake to maintain a healthy weight. Thanks for the links, I'll take a look at them2 -
crzycatlady1 wrote: »
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this idea-my family tree is full of overweight /obese/disease, especially type 2 diabetes, but I'm sitting at a bmi of around 21, no longer a prediabetic, am in excellent health and I eat GMO foods daily. So I just can't understand the idea of GMOs causing someone to gain weight, as long as they're eating at the correct calorie intake to maintain a healthy weight. Thanks for the links, I'll take a look at them
It's something I believe in, but see what you think for yourself. I don't believe that GMO's cause ALL cases of obesity, but that it is a contributing factor in many cases.2 -
I think the biggest factor in obesity is the GMO's in our food, honestly. Countries without GMO's don't have these large-scale obesity problems. That being said, modern humans eat way too much food and don't get enough exercise. I'm not talking about going to the gym, I'm talking about just walking more daily. When I lived in Europe or even in NYC for that matter, I walked everywhere - to the corner store, to the train, to the bus, to the grocery store. And in those kinds of neighborhoods, you don't see the same obesity rates you see elsewhere.
Here are all the countries that have banned cultivation AND importing of GMO products, so they're GMO-free:
Algeria - 49.9% overweight or obese
Bhutan - 35.3% overweight or obese
Kyrgyzstan - 50.8% overweight or obese
Madagascar - 11.1% overweight or obese
Peru - 56.2% overweight or obese
Russia - 57.1% overweight or obese
Venezuela - 53.7% overweight or obese
This data is from a review published in 2015: http://publichealthintelligence.org/content/prevalence-overweight-and-obesity-worldwide
Another review about European countries was published in 2014 that had estimates for Kyrgyzstan and Russia even higher.
IDK about you, but seems to me that a lot of those GMO-free countries have obesity problems. Note that Algeria has had GMOs banned in entirety since 2000 - in 2000, the obesity rate in Algeria was 43.8%. Since the banning of GMOs, Algeria's obesity levels have continued to increase.12 -
The study you are referring to is the infamous Seralini study and is pure garbage. This was retracted by Food and Chemical Toxicology although there are a few anti-GMO journals now republishing this.
Anytime you see a study with no links to the raw data - dismiss this. Any reputable scientist will provide the raw data, instrument calibration, degree of error estimation, etc. to attempt to remove as much bias as possible. This was nothing more than an anti-GMO hit piece and destroyed any credibility of this movement.9 -
amusedmonkey wrote: »
GMO food has more calories than regular food?
No, they don't contain more calories. There has been research on rats fed GMO's and rats not fed GMO's. The rats who were fed the GMO's consumed more calories than the ones not fed them. Their appetites were larger and so they ate more than their counterparts not fed any food containing GMO's. They also were not able to digest the GMO food as well as the non-GMO food, further causing weight gain than just the additional calories craved. I don't really buy ANY of the statements from the FDA that say that GMO's are perfectly safe. Countries all over the world are doing research that states otherwise. Obesity rates started rising quickly as soon as GMO's were introduced to our food. It's not a coincidence. And I believe the US wants us to be overweight, honestly. Obesity is big business and great for the economy.
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The_Enginerd wrote: »amusedmonkey wrote: »
GMO food has more calories than regular food?
No, they don't contain more calories. There has been research on rats fed GMO's and rats not fed GMO's. The rats who were fed the GMO's consumed more calories than the ones not fed them. Their appetites were larger and so they ate more than their counterparts not fed any food containing GMO's. They also were not able to digest the GMO food as well as the non-GMO food, further causing weight gain than just the additional calories craved. I don't really buy ANY of the statements from the FDA that say that GMO's are perfectly safe. Countries all over the world are doing research that states otherwise. Obesity rates started rising quickly as soon as GMO's were introduced to our food. It's not a coincidence. And I believe the US wants us to be overweight, honestly. Obesity is big business and great for the economy.
So you don't have little bits of undigested gmo corn in your hips?5 -
stevencloser wrote: »The_Enginerd wrote: »amusedmonkey wrote: »
GMO food has more calories than regular food?
No, they don't contain more calories. There has been research on rats fed GMO's and rats not fed GMO's. The rats who were fed the GMO's consumed more calories than the ones not fed them. Their appetites were larger and so they ate more than their counterparts not fed any food containing GMO's. They also were not able to digest the GMO food as well as the non-GMO food, further causing weight gain than just the additional calories craved. I don't really buy ANY of the statements from the FDA that say that GMO's are perfectly safe. Countries all over the world are doing research that states otherwise. Obesity rates started rising quickly as soon as GMO's were introduced to our food. It's not a coincidence. And I believe the US wants us to be overweight, honestly. Obesity is big business and great for the economy.
So you don't have little bits of undigested gmo corn in your hips?
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I was obese with a BMI of 35 more than 20 years ago. When I was 22, I weighed in at 236 pounds (I'm 5'9"). When I was 23, I lost 100 pounds. I managed to keep it off for a couple years before I started gaining again. While I did gain weight, I never became obese again - just 'overweight'. In 2011, I decided I was not ready to be fat at 40. I lost about 60 pounds using a very small calorie cut of -250/day. After 14 months, I was back at 135 and have been there ever since May of 2012. This time, maintaining my ideal weight has been pretty easy. I still do have to log every day, but that's a small price to pay for maintenance. Genetics may be stacked against us folks with weight battles, but they DO NOT CONTROL US.
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The_Enginerd wrote: »amusedmonkey wrote: »
GMO food has more calories than regular food?
No, they don't contain more calories. There has been research on rats fed GMO's and rats not fed GMO's. The rats who were fed the GMO's consumed more calories than the ones not fed them. Their appetites were larger and so they ate more than their counterparts not fed any food containing GMO's. They also were not able to digest the GMO food as well as the non-GMO food, further causing weight gain than just the additional calories craved. I don't really buy ANY of the statements from the FDA that say that GMO's are perfectly safe. Countries all over the world are doing research that states otherwise. Obesity rates started rising quickly as soon as GMO's were introduced to our food. It's not a coincidence. And I believe the US wants us to be overweight, honestly. Obesity is big business and great for the economy.
Very true, but one can't let logic and facts stand in the way of an agenda!6 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »GaleHawkins wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »During war, obese people didn't exist. it all the convenient prepackaged and cheap food ready available, we eat too much and the wrong food too....and we don't move walk eccetera......in the 50 they were all slim.....so what happen ? Do the genetic changed ? I don't think so.......
The prevalence of food and variety of food choices as well as the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of individuals has been discussed in this thread as likely being a large contributor to obesity. What are the "wrong foods" you refer to?
Personally in my case "wrong foods" are Processed Carbs. With effort I can gain weight eating No processed foods but my total carbs have to be > 50 grams daily.
So you believe that in many or most traditional cultures, eating traditional foods (or how we did in the US in the 1940s or 1950s) you would have been obese? Even if you had to be active in your daily life, etc.
Hmm.
Then you would have been an outlier and apparently the argument that we wouldn't have been fat in the '40s and '50s isn't accurate.
I really have no beliefs about food and histories.
All that I know factually in a medical sense at this point in my life is what I posted above based on lab results plus live results.0 -
I think some people are more genetically predisposed, but that doesn't mean that they can never lose weight ever. Just means they have to work a little harder than the rest is all. Kind of like me, for instance. Sub-clinical hypothyroidism (basically like a pre-cursor), I can obviously lose weight, but I work at it a lot more than others.2
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chocolate_owl wrote: »[
Here are all the countries that have banned cultivation AND importing of GMO products, so they're GMO-free:
Algeria - 49.9% overweight or obese
Bhutan - 35.3% overweight or obese
Kyrgyzstan - 50.8% overweight or obese
Madagascar - 11.1% overweight or obese
Peru - 56.2% overweight or obese
Russia - 57.1% overweight or obese
Venezuela - 53.7% overweight or obese
This data is from a review published in 2015: http://publichealthintelligence.org/content/prevalence-overweight-and-obesity-worldwide
Another review about European countries was published in 2014 that had estimates for Kyrgyzstan and Russia even higher.
IDK about you, but seems to me that a lot of those GMO-free countries have obesity problems. Note that Algeria has had GMOs banned in entirety since 2000 - in 2000, the obesity rate in Algeria was 43.8%. Since the banning of GMOs, Algeria's obesity levels have continued to increase.
That's not all the countries that have banned GMOs to date. Some other countries that have banned most GMOs are: Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland (there are more, but I want to focus on these). These countries all range from 15-25% obese. The ones you listed are all impoverished countries so of course they aren't going to be the model of health, despite not producing GMO foods.
There's way more to obesity than GMOs, and I never claimed that was the only cause. I think it's a contributing factor for many people, again not all people. Genetics play into this too. But it's also about the lifestyle of the people. For example, Kyrgyzstan is 50.8% overweight but they also have less access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Algeria is the largest consumer of bread in the world, consuming 50-70 million loaves of bread PER DAY. They also have less access to fresh fruit and vegetables. So even though GMOs are banned there, their lifestyles still contribute to their obesity. Alcohol, salts, and sugars are common in foods in those places. That's why we should look to countries such as Norway, Denmark, and France since they live healthier lives overall. They eat fresh food, lots of produce, seafood, and not a lot of processed foods or things with preservatives.0 -
To pick just one, Scotland's overweight or obese number is about 65%. It also banned GMOs in 2015. Maybe comparing the numbers in Scotland vs. some other country going forward from 2015 would be informative, but GMOs certainly can't be relevant to current numbers (which obviously aren't great).
US numbers, btw, from another chart is 22nd in the world in most overweight and obese and a total of 67.3% overweight/obese (interestingly, in the US according to this chart men to worse than women). UK numbers (it doesn't seem to have Scotland on its own) are 32nd and 63.4%. Not a huge difference (men do worse in the UK too).
US does have more obese than the UK (including Scotland -- I don't see the numbers for it alone, but I expect it's not wildly different), but that difference was created BEFORE the change in the law about GMOs some places, and the likelihood is that it will decrease going forward, as it is likely to keep increasing to a point in other countries whereas it may have (based on some recent numbers) hit a cap in the US -- there may be genetic limits on how much of the population is likely to become obese, despite environment. Also, if Scotland and Wales banned it and England does not (as this seems to indicate is likely: http://www.scotsman.com/future-scotland/tech/was-the-scottish-government-right-to-ban-gm-crops-1-3902781), then I suppose comparing the two going forward would be interesting or, well, could be if it meant that people in Scotland consumed significantly less GMO crops, which I suspect would not be the case anyway, as it's about growing them, not being able to buy products with them in it, I think, and you'd assume English products in particular would be available.
But I'm no expert on the UK, so someone can jump in.
Anyway, I see no evidence indicating that GMOs have a thing to do with it. Seems like an argument intended to deny personal responsibility (the GMOs made us fat). If you want to look at differences, you can also see differences between US states.
Oh, and I've never eaten lots of pre-packaged stuff -- "processed" is the wrong word, as many of those countries are big on dairy and of course dairy is "processed" as is anything smoked, pickled, etc. -- and yet I got fat. How? I ate too much.
Interestingly, I checked the WF list of common GMO products since I wondered if I was wrong to think I didn't consume much that was likely GMO, and found that non organic zucchini and summer squash were the main things I'm likely to have consumed (I get corn only locally in season and the farms I usually buy from are organic, even though I don't personally care about organics, and I probably get some GMO soy, but really didn't before losing weight as all the stuff that might contain it (maybe protein bars which I eat occasionally) are things I started eating then). Hmm.3 -
chocolate_owl wrote: »[
Here are all the countries that have banned cultivation AND importing of GMO products, so they're GMO-free:
Algeria - 49.9% overweight or obese
Bhutan - 35.3% overweight or obese
Kyrgyzstan - 50.8% overweight or obese
Madagascar - 11.1% overweight or obese
Peru - 56.2% overweight or obese
Russia - 57.1% overweight or obese
Venezuela - 53.7% overweight or obese
This data is from a review published in 2015: http://publichealthintelligence.org/content/prevalence-overweight-and-obesity-worldwide
Another review about European countries was published in 2014 that had estimates for Kyrgyzstan and Russia even higher.
IDK about you, but seems to me that a lot of those GMO-free countries have obesity problems. Note that Algeria has had GMOs banned in entirety since 2000 - in 2000, the obesity rate in Algeria was 43.8%. Since the banning of GMOs, Algeria's obesity levels have continued to increase.
That's not all the countries that have banned GMOs to date. Some other countries that have banned most GMOs are: Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland (there are more, but I want to focus on these). These countries all range from 15-25% obese. The ones you listed are all impoverished countries so of course they aren't going to be the model of health, despite not producing GMO foods.
There's way more to obesity than GMOs, and I never claimed that was the only cause. I think it's a contributing factor for many people, again not all people. Genetics play into this too. But it's also about the lifestyle of the people. For example, Kyrgyzstan is 50.8% overweight but they also have less access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Algeria is the largest consumer of bread in the world, consuming 50-70 million loaves of bread PER DAY. They also have less access to fresh fruit and vegetables. So even though GMOs are banned there, their lifestyles still contribute to their obesity. Alcohol, salts, and sugars are common in foods in those places. That's why we should look to countries such as Norway, Denmark, and France since they live healthier lives overall. They eat fresh food, lots of produce, seafood, and not a lot of processed foods or things with preservatives.
The other countries that have banned GMOs have banned cultivation, but not all imports are banned. I chose the countries I did because they have bans on GMOs across the board, and some of them have the longest standing bans on GMOs.
If you want to look at the obesity stats on the other countries that have banned GMOs, click on the link I posted. The countries you're referencing have the following rates of overweight + obese prevalance:
UK (Scotland, Wales) - 61.8%
Germany - 56.7%
France - 49.2%
The Netherlands - 49.0%
Denmark - 51.9%
Norway - 52.9%
Switzerland - 48.2%
NONE of them are in the 15-25% range you claim, unless you specifically mean OBESE and exclude overweight. Then yes, 15-25% is about right. Most Western countries, regardless of their position of GMOs, fall in between 15-25% of BMI>30.
Also, in your original post, you stated the biggest factor contributing to obesity was GMOs. Apart from that being completely unsupported by science, the epidemiological data we have available to us indicates that's not the case at all. Obesity rates are not low/have not decreased in countries that have banned GMOs. Countries in East Asia and Africa that have no regulations on GMOs have some of the lowest obesity rates worldwide.
Blaming GMOs over things like food availability, activity levels, and cultural norms is one of the strangest things I've read on this forum, TBH.7 -
The whole concept doesn't make sense to me. GMO is not an ingredient that you can pinpoint. Not all genetic modifications modify the same genes or use the same genetic engineering method. You can't pool them all under one big umbrella saying they cause weight gain without specifying the exact GMO crop and the exact modification that would potentially cause the correlation, plus a potential theory about the mechanism or how that would work (assuming the study has merit, which apparently it doesn't since it was pulled). That's like saying "a study found that a certain medication is associated with increased appetite" means "all medications cause obesity, and we started gaining weight when regulated pharmaceuticals were introduced".11
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amusedmonkey wrote: »The whole concept doesn't make sense to me.
That's because it doesn't make sense...at all...
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I live in France. Of the 6 countries I have lived in for significant years at a time, France is at the top of my list for amazement at the food they eat and no consequent prevelant obesity. The others are US, Canada, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. None of those countries eat the type of foods we eat here all the time. Its an interesting question, what causes obesity? My answer is that it happens from regularly eating too much.3
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amusedmonkey wrote: »The whole concept doesn't make sense to me. GMO is not an ingredient that you can pinpoint. Not all genetic modifications modify the same genes or use the same genetic engineering method. You can't pool them all under one big umbrella saying they cause weight gain without specifying the exact GMO crop and the exact modification that would potentially cause the correlation, plus a potential theory about the mechanism or how that would work (assuming the study has merit, which apparently it doesn't since it was pulled). That's like saying "a study found that a certain medication is associated with increased appetite" means "all medications cause obesity, and we started gaining weight when regulated pharmaceuticals were introduced".
Yeah, great points.1 -
The study was conducted by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. You do know how these people make their money, right?3
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Perhaps a family history of being overweight is largely due to bad eating habits that have been passed on from one generation to another as opposed to being "genetically" predisposed. Not saying that genes don't play a role, but the amount of obese & morbidly obese people today is likely the result of countless advertisements showing food, food, food....innumerable fast food outlets, high calorie, supersized portions & our preoccupation with food, food, food is a societal ill....The bottom line: someone, somewhere is raking in a gazillion bucks at the expense of making many people very unhealthy. But as a previous commenter said, no one can stuff the food down our gullet except ourselves. SO, we may not have any control over any of the other stuff, but we can take control of what we put in our mouth & whether we move our body enough to burn off some of what we put in our mouth. Just sayin'0
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