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until I read Good Calories, Bad Calories (GCBC) by Gary Taubes I still thought that food was just fuel and obesity was always due to bad genes, or overeating, or lack of exercise - the usual suspects

Some diseases that are very common today, which we call Diseases of Civilization or DOCs, do not occur with any frequency in native or hunter-gatherer populations until western foods are introduced

The background assumption was that cancer, heart disease and obesity are only issues because we live long enough to get them now, and aren’t we lucky for modern medicine?

“Virgin coconut oil, which has not been chemically treated, is a different thing in terms of a health risk perspective. And maybe it isn’t so bad for you after all.”

And while it’s true that most of the fats in virgin coconut oil are saturated, opinions are changing on whether saturated fats are the arterial villains they were made out to be. “I think we in the nutrition field are beginning to say that saturated fats are not so bad, and the evidence that said they were is not so strong,” Dr. Brenna said.

Lauric acid increases levels of good HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, and bad LDL, or low-density lipoprotein, in the blood, but is not thought to negatively affect the overall ratio of the two

Babies and Beverages – “A study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that reduction in sugar-sweetened beverages (regular soda, fruit drinks and fruit punch) had a significant effect on weight change at 6 months and 18 months, even more of an impact than solid- calorie reduction.”

Liquid caloric consumption can be quite a significant contribution to weight gain so this is a tremendous effort to educate the public,” said Dr. Bartfield

Bernard Gesch is probably the most important scientist in world studying effects of nutrition and behaviour right now

Aylesbury Young Offenders Institute, where half the prisoners got a food supplement, the other half a placebo. Result? The ones receiving a real supplement committed 37% fewer violent offences. Placebos – no change. Stunning

Sugar + processed food = increases in violence.

In many cases the surfactants added to foods are exactly the same as the ones used in pharmaceutics as absorption enhancers. Numerous synthetic surfactant food additives have been shown to increase the intestinal permeability through paracellular and/or transcellular mechanisms and some of them were also shown to inhibit P-glycoprotein

A big factor in determining this is that there is little evidence of hominin plant consumption during the Acheulean (~1.6 m – 100,000 years ago) period of the paleolithic. Admittedly, part of this is because plant evidence doesn’t fossilize as well as bones, but it’s interesting that the plant eating assumption persists on such small amounts of evidence. As usual, this refutes the vegetarian position in terms of evolutionary biology

Humans specialize in nutrient dense, hard to extract sources, while chimpanzees specialize in ripe fruits and plants that have low nutrient density which are also easily collected

necessity of tool use and social organization to sustain expanding populations

CONCLUSIONS: The results of this large observational study indicate a strong inverse association between levels of pre-diagnostic 25-(OH)D concentration and risk of colorectal cancer in western European populations. Further randomised trials are needed to assess whether increases in circulating 25-(OH)D concentration can effectively decrease the risk of colorectal cancer

Conclusions Physical inactivity appears to be the result of fatness rather than its cause. This reverse causality may explain why attempts to tackle childhood obesity by promoting PA have been largely unsuccessful

For the last 60 years, physicians and public-health authorities have been giving that exact same advice to obese people—children and adults—with little or no success

The subjects experience modest weight loss (maybe nine or 10 pounds in the first six months), and then they gain the weight right back. Weight loss doesn't last

The researchers enrolled nearly 50,000 mostly overweight or obese women into the trial, chose roughly 20,000 of them at random, and instructed that group to eat a low-fat diet, rich in fruits, vegetables, and fiber. These women were given regular counseling to motivate them to stay on the diet. If we believe what these women said they were eating, they also cut their average energy intake by well more than 300 calories a day

HFCS has been shown to interfere with a key enzyme in the body that delivers copper to your vital organs. This effectively results in copper deficiency for many, adversely impacting a wide range of organ systems including the heart, testes, pancreas, and damaging the liver-generating inflammation and cirrhosis. It has been strongly linked to the sharp rise in both obesity and diabetes. Furthermore, fructose is 20-30 times more gylcating than glucose. It turns anyone into a raging AGE-producing factory. Animals fed a high-fructose diet in laboratory studies developed livers that looked a lot like those of hardcore, aging alcoholics-inflamed and shot through with dead cells and scar tissue-the condition known as “cirrhosis.”

The low-fat trend finally appears to be on its way out. The notion that saturated fats are detrimental to our health is deeply embedded in our Zeitgeist--but shockingly, the opposite just might be true