Fat Chance

I've been reading Robert Lustig's book, "Fat Chance." Lustig has worked in a clinic that treats obesity in young people. He writes with years of research and experience supporting his presentation. If you've watched him on the YouTube video, "Sugar, the Bitter Truth," you know that he has been able to turn around many cases of youthful obesity with just two directives: drink only water or regular milk, and exercise for the same number of minutes as you give to screen time. Hmm...could work on me, too...

"Fat Chance" is not the everyday diet book! Lustig goes into great detail on many complex topics. He will be a breath of fresh air to many dieters, indeed especially to those of us who are obese. He explains that it is almost impossible for a lot of people to lose weight and then to keep it off. His host of reasons rings very true. One of the most appalling pieces of that explanation for me is that obese women can literally pass obesity to their newborns.

Another interesting moment is that weight alone doesn't tell the story. Lustig says that overweight people tend to have healthier bones, and subcutaneous fat is actually a supportive mechanism to for survival during illness. It is the visceral fat that is the culprit, and interestingly enough, African Americans can handle a greater percent of that kind of fat (35%), while Asian Americans suffer when they get to the 25% level. BMI, as many on this site have suggested, is not a very good measurement of visceral fat. Only an MRI (or sonogram? can't remember) can tell for sure. We can get a rough measure by comparing waist to hip measurements. Fascinating.

I can't give a digest of the entire book here, and I don't understand enough of it well enough to argue, so what I recommend is that you read it if you have questions. It's extraordinarily well written, though at points above my non-scientific head. (Check your library; we were 17th on the lending list and finally got it.) Translation: don't flame anything I say here!

I'll go on with some of the other pieces that resonated with me. One of those is that there are only four diets that have actually dependably worked for dieters, including the South Beach diet and the Atkins diet. Lustig explains the negative sides of each diet, but then tells us that each of the four diets works better for a different group of people, depending on their response to insulin!

Lustig eventually points out that the common points of the diets that work are that they focus on increasing fiber and eliminating sugar. He says that a calorie is NOT a calorie after all, especially because of how different kinds of calories affect our bodies. I've been cutting processed foods out of my diet for a while now, and after reading that processed foods have to cut out the fiber to be able to retain texture for freezing, I understand why that's a good idea. Most bread cuts out fiber, because if it has fiber in it, it won't stay fresh for days! In fact, anything that doesn't spoil is probably not very good for us.

Lustig shares some solid reasons for opposition to diet drinks. I had never been one to really understand that opposition, but I do admit that I was fattest in the days that I was drinking diet drinks regularly. He said that a body can't recognize that the sweet taste is not sugar, so it prepares to deal with the sugar and then, because it doesn't get any, creates the urge to go indulge the next meal or the next day. I know for sure that used to happen to me, and I always thought it was great justification: I didn't drink a sugary drink, so I can have this muffin...

Proceeding with discussing drinks, Lustig casts a pall over fruit juices. Because the juicing process removes the fiber, he says that the body deals with fruit juices in the same way that it deals with a glass of Coke. We would be very unlikely to eat the same number of oranges at one sitting as are found in a glass of juice, because the fiber would fill us up too fast. It's far better to drink water and eat the real fruits.

The food industry is counting on us to use prepared foods, and these foods are everywhere in our environment. Lustig points out that there are no advertisements out there for real food (apples, oats) but only for what is prepared for us. And worse yet, eating in a healthy way (buying only "real" food that we have to prepare for ourselves) is much more expensive than eating packaged food. The poorer a person is, the more likely he or she is to have to buy the worst kind of food, leading to greater obesity in our public and a parallel set of health problems.

I'm still reading this book, a little piece at a time. Lustig's evidence supports what I know about myself and have seen in those around me. It lets me be much more forgiving of lapses, while giving me the knowledge that I am on the right track, as hard as it is to cut out these packages. I drink soy milk with cane sugar in it every day because it's almost impossible to get soy milk without sweeteners (but after reading about estrogens, I will argue that my daughters don't). I use some packaged breads. I think we'll try to go more with home-made bread. I love my sweet-potato fries and a few other things in the freezer, but I'm going to be much more careful at the store from now on.

Watch the video! You'll need to set aside an hour when you can do it while you prep food or something. And check out this book. I think it could start a revolution, if enough people who cared about our country's health would read it.