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What are your unpopular opinions about health / fitness?

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  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
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    Bry_Lander wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    Bry_Lander wrote: »
    Alatariel75 wrote: »
    My unpopular opinion is that generally, when people bemoan the fact that the world is too politically correct these days and they yearn for the good old days where people could say what they mean and not be taken to task for it, what they're really missing is the "good old days" when people like them were in a position where they could say whatever they pleased, and the people who they said it to were in a position where they were not able to speak up and tell them to *kitten* off.

    So if I’m interpreting this correctly, those who fondly recall the days before political correctness are basically just white males who would routinely say inappropriate racist or sexist remarks to victims who were powerless to respond? Seriously?

    There was never a time in the US when anybody could say what they wanted. People who are nostalgic for the days before "political correctness" may not specifically be white men who would routinely say racist or sexist things, but they're certainly forgetting (or don't know) that black men have been lynched for things they have said and abolitionists and advocates for birth control have gone to jail for certain types of speech. It's nostalgia for a very specific set of speech and it disregards the fact that not everyone had this freedom to say "whatever" in the past.

    My nostalgia goes back to my childhood and early adulthood in the 1970s-80s – I don’t see why anyone would associate my appreciation for the way people communicated during this era of my life with the totality of the free speech violations inflicted upon others throughout American history.

    I'm sorry if you felt singled out by what I said, it wasn't my intention. I don't associate your preferences with anything in particular.

    Maybe some people who dislike political correctness do want a return to the atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s (where there were still positions that couldn't be stated without social/legal repercussions) and aren't thinking of an earlier time.

    Would you say you believe that for most of US history all people couldn't communicate as they wished (as in the examples from American history I stated above) and then a brief window of a couple of decades when they could and now we're swinging back, but with different guidelines/restrictions?
  • theresejesu
    theresejesu Posts: 120 Member
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    WinoGelato wrote: »
    theresejesu wrote: »
    CSARdiver wrote: »
    theresejesu wrote: »
    WinoGelato wrote: »
    theresejesu wrote: »
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    Bry_Lander wrote: »
    JerSchmare wrote: »
    My unpopular opinion is that being fat has nothing to do with sugar.

    Not even proximately? Doesn't sugar tend to make food more delicious, increasing the tendency to consume greater quantities of it, and potentially resulting in consuming more calories than one burns?

    Sure, if you interpret it that way then being fat is also related to dietary fat, salt, spices, herbs, aromatics, maillard reaction, yeast, flavorings, packaging, coloring agents, texture agents, strategic shelf placement, peer pressure, and more. All of these make food more appealing, so singling out sugar makes no sense.

    So you're saying sugar DOES contribute to making one fat?

    There is only one thing that definitively causes someone to be overweight/obese/morbidly obese. Eating too many calories for their individual energy balance (CI > CO). These excess calories can come from foods which contain sugar (rarely do people eat straight table sugar but some insist it happens), but more often than not, the foods contain myriad other ingredients so the point is, why single out sugar? Still others have pointed out that they gained weight eating a lot of non-sugary foods, I myself am one of those. I got fat from eating a little too much, of a lot of different foods, and becoming much more sedentary, but don't have a particularly strong sweet tooth.

    Because sugar, and foods that easily convert to glucose are the main culprit in a western diet, not only in regards to caloric intake, but also how the body handles glucose, and that's part if why this can never be a simple calories in, calories out equation.

    The CICO method mechanizes our bodies. But our bodies aren't machines, not in such a simplistic sense. Thoughts, emotions, activities, hormonal profile, circadian rhythm, food choices (which can even switch on and off genes - epigenetics), the bacteria in our guts which affect our immune system and brain influencing how we feel and perceive and react to our world: all these affect our energy requirements, and thus our caloric needs.

    We are much more complicated than a simple CICO can account for. For some, it works great. For others, though, it doesn't, because it simply can't account for all those variables.

    What you choose to eat can affect how hard it is to keep to such a diet. Fructose, for instance, doesn't do a great job lowering the hormone ghrelin, which triggers feelings if hunger. So if you're eating a lot of fruit, you're probably going to still feel hungry, and so the cost in will power for you would be greater than someone who's ghrelin production turns off more easily.

    People look at what happens to them and then try to use their personal experience as a plumbline for everyone else without considering their individual experience is governed by a variety of factors they aren't even aware of, factors which vary from individual to individual. We are all subject to falling into this trap, and we probably all do from time to time. The danger is first to ourselves when we allow ourselves to become judgemental of others instead of understanding, and second, this can become damaging to the other.

    This is true, but people get mired in the irrelevant details as I suspect you are doing now.

    Pareto these variables: CI, CO, thoughts, emotions, activities, hormones, cricadian rhythm, macros, micros, epigenetics, microbiome, etc.

    CI and CO combined amount to >80% of impact.

    Hormones 5-10%

    The rest ~1%

    What variables are you going to prioritize?

    I have to disagree, I don't believe I'm getting mired in irrelevant details at all. How are these factors irrelevant?

    If these factors, which are constantly in flux, affect metabolism (which they do), then how does one know how many calories they are actually burning on any particular day or group of days? You would need to do lab tests and calculations. The best we can do is to approximate.

    For instance,

    "..a greater intake of sugar calories stimulates more insulin resistance and more fat storage than other types of calories do, even when the total calorie intake remains the same."

    The Salt Fix
    Author referencing study of which he was a co-author:
    Added Fructose: a principle driver of type 2 diabetes mellitus and it's consequences
    Mayo Clin. Proc 90 (3): 372-381.

    There is much more going on in our bodies than simple CICO can account for.

    Do you know what a Pareto analysis is?

    As has been discussed many times on these boards, the fact that CO cannot be measured to the decimal point does not invalidate CICO. Knowing an approximate amount of how many calories an individual burns and being able to influence the energy balance by consuming the proper amount of calories in, on a consistent basis, is sufficient. Are there some variables that affect that energy balance? Yes. But those variables are not statistically significant to negate the overwhelming influence of having a balanced CICO relationship. That's what the Pareto comment was directed at. If you were to plot the actual amount of impact on a graph that each of those factors had on weight, the parts you are fixated on account for an extremely small percentage of the total. In other words, don't major in the minors, which is what people often tend to do when they've been unsuccessful at using the basic principle of CICO. They start looking for bogeymen to invalidate CICO, or to suggest it doesn't work for everyone, or that it isn't the "whole story".

    And what criteria do you use to plot each factor on such a graph? How do you know your graph of such factors is indeed correct?
  • OregonMother
    OregonMother Posts: 1,559 Member
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    HeliumIsNoble wrote: »
    Okay...
    *rolls up sleeves*


    Some people have time constraints that mean they don't have time for sit-down meals, whether that's working two jobs or a work-out plan that incorporates meal-timing. Some people have true clinical grade food aversions and sensory issues that make many vegetables and fruits terribly unpleasant to eat. Some people have teeth that can't handle crunchy apples.

    But let's not kid ourselves that any of those are the main drivers behind the success of Nutri-bullet this and Nutri-bullet that.

    Yep. I agree mostly. I fall into the bolded category above. Most mornings it's easier for me to drink my yogurt and fruit on the way to work than to sit down at the table and eat it. A time management issue, admittedly. Other times, I make a dinner for the fam that I can't eat (because I'm Celiac), so rather than make a second meal or adapt the meal for me, I just make a smoothie.

    I just use the frappe setting on my ancient blender, and it works just fine for the most part. No Nutri-bullet here.

    And, no, except for some kale that some company put into their frozen fruit (why??), I do not put veggies in my smoothie. <shivers with revulsion>

    Yes, I need to be more adult about veg.

  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
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    On the low fat vs low carb, this is interesting -- from a low carb friendly blog:

    http://caloriesproper.com/insulin-resistance-is-a-spectrum/

    The discussion is about a group of overweight/obese study participants, who were divided into categories based on IR vs. IS (the most and least IR halves of the group, whatever their relative IR-ness compared with the population as a whole).

    The relatively IR half lost about 20% more if assigned to low carb (LC) than if they were assigned to low fat (LF); and the relatively IS half lost about 20% more if assigned to LF than LC.

    "However, some markers of health significantly improved in people assigned to their insulin-appropriate diet (LC for IR, LF for IS). And a bigger, more statistically-powered follow-up study is underway, so we’ll have a clearer picture how this particular intervention pans out on a larger scale in the not-too-distant future."

    The study was ad lib -- no calorie restrictions (which are tough to do in a study unless the people are kept on site and fed their meals). So quite likely the difference had to do with what was more satiating. I think the reason low carb works for IR people in general is often because they struggle with hunger when eating carbs -- at least some of them.

    I also think there's a confounding variable which is that a HUGE number of people switching to low carb weren't eating a diet that anyone would consider satiating when eating high carb (you see this when people talk about "carbs" and list foods that are actually half fat and not what you'd consider the base of a balanced meal -- cookies, cake, chips, so on).
  • HeliumIsNoble
    HeliumIsNoble Posts: 1,213 Member
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    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    HeliumIsNoble wrote: »
    Okay...
    *rolls up sleeves*

    I've got one that will go down like a lead balloon. MFP will have to introduce a "Hate" reaction just for this.

    I don't totally agree, but I don't totally disagree. (So no hate from me! And I sometimes enjoy a smoothie.)
    Smoothies. Shakes. Juices. The whole kerboodle that has turned eating a reasonably healthy diet that includes the recommended servings of fruit and veg each day into an aspirational lifestyle activity, requiring an ultra-expensive 1000W food processor or the frequenting of a "Juice Bar". Duration of activity? Oh, most commonly from January 1st to mid-February. Then people go back to their normal salad-dodging habits.

    Where I disagree is that while people DO often buy expensive equipment to do this, you don't need anything more than a standard blender for a smoothie or, of course, shake), and of course there are reasons to have nice blenders or food processors that don't require that one make smoothies with them.

    I do agree that just consuming vegetables (including greens) with your meal is a good thing, but one doesn't have to be opposed to that to enjoy an occasional smoothie as a snack or breakfast. (Shakes I don't think of as about vegetables, particularly, but more about protein power or post workout or some such, which I also don't think it necessary, but if one likes them why not.)
    Just get a grip and learn to eat lettuce leaves with an ordinary dinner all year round without needing them pureed into smithereens and disguised by agave syrup. If you stopped trying to put Kale into everything, you wouldn't even need the agave syrup.

    I've never owned or tasted agave syrup, and put kale in smoothies when I make them about 50% of the time. I don't find that it ruins the taste -- I like the taste of kale fine, it's the texture that bothers me in a salad and I'm too lazy to massage it. My reasoning is that I prefer spinach in a salad, so why waste it in a smoothie, and I get lots of kale in my CSA box and although I cook it too, if I make a smoothie it works there too.

    If I don't have a smoothie (which is mostly an occasional summer thing for me), I have vegetables in my breakfast anyway. Kale also goes well in an omelet, with some asparagus, mushrooms, and feta, for example.
    However, what annoys me most, the absolute tree-topper to it all, is the amount of poor saps I see here, and elsewhere, who think they can only successfully lose weight/start having a healthy diet if they start drinking fricking smoothies.

    Now, this, this, I 100% agree with, although I don't see that so much with smoothies (I do think smoothies are more about people finding that they taste good and often that people want to try eating breakfast -- which I'd agree is not necessary -- and don't feel like eating in the morning or, as you mentioned, are on the run). I mostly notice how popular green smoothies are because I see people consuming them on the L, or today in the elevator in my office building.

    But the green smoothie cleanse detox nonsense, blah, ugh. And I HAVE asked people why and gotten basically the admission that it's the only way they can imagine consuming veg (and they assume people not doing a smoothie cleanse don't consume veg), so like I said, I get where you are coming from to some degree, definitely.

    But I still enjoy an occasional smoothie breakfast and making up new combinations.
    I think you've just encapsulated several paragraphs of my RAAAAAAAGE in one paragraph. ;)

    It's like people are unaware you can eat vegetables without a blender... How did we get to this? Is it the next step up from people who are scared of eating handpicked wild blackberries and insist on buying them at the supermarket?

    Or do people now feel they only have nutritional value puréed?
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