Weighty Issues

[wshaffer]

I've just started listening to the audiobook of Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata. It looks at the science (or lack thereof) behind various diets, and why it is so hard for so many people to lose weight. I think later in the book it also tackles the question of whether so many people should be trying so hard to lose weight. (A very complicated question. Personally, I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last couple of years, and I think it's made a measurable difference to my health. However, it really looks to me like the healthier habits of diet and exercise that I adopted in order to achieve the weight loss made an even bigger difference than the weight loss per se.)

The early parts of the book really provide some historical perspective on our diet-obsessed culture. I thought that the tabloid fascination with celebrities' weight fluctuations was a modern phenomenon, but according to Kolata, Lord Byron's battle with the bulge got plenty of attention in the popular press. Byron apparently even helped to popularize one of the first fad diets: losing weight by drinking vinegar. I was also rather astonished to learn that the first popularizer of the low-carbohydrate diet was the French gastronome and food writer, Brillat-Savarin.

I've long thought that one of the reasons why standard diet advice fails for so many people (besides the simple fact that changing any habit is hard) is that it doesn't take into account that people's metabolisms differ. I came across a study today that actually manages to correlate success or failure on a particular diet regimen with a measurable metabolic trait. Basically, the researchers were comparing a typical low-fat diet with a low-glycemic-index diet. They found that there was a group of dieters with a distinct metabolic trait - fast insulin response after meals - who lost significantly more weight on the low-glycemic-index diet than on the low fat diet. Pretty interesting stuff. The low-glycemic-index diet is a close approximation to the way I eat most of the time these days, and I've certainly found it more sustainable than trying to adhere to an ultra low-fat diet.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering how much more of the identification of sub-populations we're going to see now that we have better data processing and, frankly, a lot larger population to begin with. I was glad to see that study, too, that they were looking for that kind of grouping, that the answer wasn't, "Everybody should do this one or the other one!"

[sbuchler.livejournal.com]

hum, interesting!