Fat as disease?

A recent article from Dr. Mercola poses a very vexed question. It’s one we might all well ask ... Cui bono? Who benefits? In categorizing obesity as a disease it opens the door for drug treatment and even, potentially, for vaccination - but as Mercola states so plainly - “obesity is no more a disease than smoking!”

The factors that have brought us to the worldwide obesity crisis are many in number, they may not yet be fully elucidated, but certainly include the following:

• epigenetic changes (trans-generational fatties)
• unhealthy gut microbiota courtesy of Caesarean sections
• unhealthy gut microbiota courtesy of formula feeding
• hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalance
• processed food
• refined food
• food containing high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
• over supply-under nutrition
• inappropriate advertising of unhealthy foods
• sedentary lifestyle
• loss of muscle mass
• chronic toxic burden
• unresolved stress

and on and on the list goes. The issues are many and varied and each individual will be affected by a different combination of them, so clearly the solution can’t be found in a drug or a vaccine, yet that’s the way the medical profession (in the US at least) is headed. In the same way, the mental health issues, with a similar long list of 21st century contributing factors as their root cause, are now categorised, medicalised and treated with expensive pharmaceuticals.

But back to the fat burden ... having recently seen an acquaintance who has lost 50Kg thanks to lap-banding surgery, I can tell you that nothing at all in her life has been solved. She looks terrible, feels nauseous all the time, and has not changed a single solitary one of the factors that have contributed to her lifetime of obesity and now to her long list of co-morbidities.

When will common sense prevail and true health promotion measures be applied by those who take the Hippocratic Oath?

Calorie counting? Then get the sums right ...

More news on the “when is a calorie not a calorie” story. After 100 years, the nutritionists, dieticians, weight loss consultants and food regulators are now told by evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University that ''our current system for assessing calories is surely wrong.''

I’ve been saying for a long time that calorie counting is for dummies and that the “energy in = energy out” equation is simplistic in the extreme and as far as weight management is concerned, not really helpful. 

Now the researchers can give us some of the other factors that make isocaloric foods not “iso” at all. Start for example with the energy required to digest raw food, add the bite that the oral and gut bacteria take out of some foods, and the properties of the foods themselves which speed up or slow down their journey through the gut. Issues here include the indigestibility of some food components and whether the food has been cooked or is eaten raw. Cooked or raw in turn impacts the type of gut bacteria that thrive and the energetics of digestion ... and so the cycle goes round.

In addition, and this is where the particular research team at Harvard don’t appear to venture, there's the different metabolic effect of foods which for all intents and purposes are equal in calories. Case in point, sucrose and high fructose corn syrup, both officially sugars, “isocaloric” in our original understanding of the word, but responsible for entirely different metabolic responses.

What does all this mean in practice? Healthy food, grown on healthy soil, as much as possible unprocessed, unrefined and eaten raw where possible, will promote beneficial gut bacteria and stimulate healthy metabolic pathways! Avoid any products that contain HFCS - soft drinks are particular offenders. And can the calorie counter!